Leadership Development: 5 Tips For Maintaining Your Vision

By Larry Boyer, Career Coach & Personal Branding Strategist

In order to be an effective leader you must have a vision that will motivate others to follow you. As you already know, great leaders have and understand their Vision, Mission and Purpose. Your vision is what will motivate you and your team to continue working through any hardship. Your vision is how you see the world will look as a result of the benefits that result from the goods and services that you and your team bring to the world. Your vision is bigger than yourself and often requires the help of others (friends and staff, for instance). As part of your leadership development you need to go beyond just creating your vision and learn how to maintain that vision for yourself and others.

Having a vision is important because it is what keeps everyone moving, hopefully in the same direction with a similar purpose in mind. The challenge that most leaders face is that they forget that everyone needs ongoing feedback about progress. Often sharing the vision will help motivate people to be excited and provide the initial buy-in to supporting the vision. However, often a short time later that motivation gets lost as the day-to-day distractions and difficulties take place.

As a leader you too can lose focus on your vision. Therefore, your first responsibility is to keep your vision in view at all times. You can do this mentally, but you can also do this physically by having your vision statement easily seen at all times or even having a picture or vision board.

There are lots of examples of this struggle to maintain your vision for yourself and others. To illustrate the challenge though consider the epic struggle of the Israelites following Moses around the desert for 40 years. Moses had a vision of a "Land of Milk and Honey" for the Israelites to settle in. Can you imagine the challenge of holding that vision for all to follow as they wandered the desert for 40 years? Somehow he did manage to maintain the vision for himself and convey that vision to the others to continue following him. We see this struggle to maintain vision all the time in our work and the world around us. Often companies that are struggle have lost sight of their vision, focusing instead on short term profits that lead to brand erosion and long-term lost sales. Political leaders too struggle from being able to maintain their visions that got them elected and then they lose the next election. Whether you like their visions or not it is important to realize that 2-term U.S. Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Bush have all maintained a vision.  

Five Tips for Maintaining Vision

1. Ongoing Clarification of Your Vision: Review your vision regularly. Explore it more deeply. What additional detail and clarifications can you add to your vision?
2. Post Your Vision Statement: Develop a 1-3 sentence Vision Statement that captures the essence of your vision. Write it down. Keep a copy in a place, or multiple places, where you will see it and be reminded of it daily. Post it near your computer monitor, on your bathroom mirror, make a wallet card, or whatever else works for you.
3. Create a Vision Board: Create a real or abstract representation of your vision by drawing or using cut outs of pictures to create a collage of what your vision looks like when it has been achieved. Get a piece of poster paper and draw on it or cut out pictures that can be put together to give you a visual representation of your vision. Hang it where you can look at it regularly.
4. Regularly Share Your Vision with Others: In order to bring your vision to life you need the help and support of others, especially your employees or team members. Keep the vision they are working toward visible to them as well. Talk about the vision regularly at meetings or include it in emails. Perhaps you could hang artwork that reflects the vision.
5. Line of Sight: Share with those helping you how their specific contribution is helping to create the vision. It is easy to either lose sight or never have made the connection of how their day-to-day work contributes. Help them feel like they are making a contribution!

Now, think about your vision. How is your progress toward implementing your vision? Have you kept your eye on achieving that vision? What challenges have you personal faced in keeping focused on your vision, that distant goal? Are you working with others to realize that vision? Are you keeping them motivated or are they losing focus? What can you do to help hold the vision for everyone to follow?