Why Leaders Should Learn to Communicate Vision
Vision.
It’s a word often connected to business leaders, luminaries, and community change agents. The ability to develop, and more importantly to project vision, underpins the success of leaders at all levels and across all sectors. Given its importance, it’s a skill we provide intentional effort to in all of the communication coaching work we do with leaders.
But what does it mean to communicate or to project vision? Is it to be a visionary like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos? Or is it to solely have a vision for the future?
What Does It Mean to Communicate Vision
From a leadership communication perspective, communicating vision is the ability to paint a vivid and inspirational picture of a future state of the team or organization that rallies individual and collective support to take action.
In working with executives to help improve their leadership communication skills, we always start by explaining the “what” and “why” before delving into the “how to.” Starting with the “what” helps executives understand the end state (or “next state”) we are aiming for while the “why” provides the impetus to put in the hard work to change. The “how to”, which is the payoff, then focuses on how leaders can develop a given mindset, skill, or new behavior – in this case, the ability to communicate vision.
As a first step, let’s start by better understanding why leaders should learn to communicate vision.
Why Leaders Should Learn to Communicate Vision
There are many reasons for leaders to invest time and effort to learn to more effectively communicate vision. Below are several of them.
1. Vision Provides Direction
At its most fundamental level, communicating vision provides direction for your team and organization overall. It provides a North Star that aligns your strategy (how you’ll get there) and people related efforts (who will get you there) in a cohesive manner. The ability to convey a clear vision will help the entire organization understand where it is going. Doing so also ensures individuals and teams stay on track and avoid chasing opportunities and kicking-off projects that are not aligned with the vision.
2. Vision Creates Structure
Communicating vision also allows leaders to provide structure in their communications to their teams and organization overall. Great communicators use vision as an anchor point to show how a particular new initiative or strategy fits within the context of the vision. Vision has the opportunity to create a frame for your communication by showing how each part connects back to the vision and highlights how it will help achieve it. Doing so makes it easy for the team to understand both the vision and how the specific parts enable the team to achieve it.
3. Vision Provides Context
The ability to communicate vision can also help provide context to individuals and teams as to how their efforts support the vision. It can help people to understand how all of their hard work ladders up to help achieve the vision. This is the opportunity that we have as leaders to engage our teams and help them connect how their sometimes narrow roles help you to succeed as an organization. Regularly connecting tasks, projects, and roles to the vision helps keep team members engaged and focused on achieving the longer-term vision.
4. Vision Sparks Motivation
The ability to inspire and motivate is a critical leadership skill. Projecting vision and what you aim to achieve provides motivation to the team, especially when mired in the day-to-grind and oftentimes minutiae of their roles. This is especially true if your vision shows how you’ll achieve an inspirational and aspirational mission. Use your vision to fire up your team and rally the troops. Take a step back with your team and remind them of the vision of the organization as that can be a motivator, especially if they are in the middle of an arduous project or challenging economic cycle.
5. Vision Demonstrates Executive Presence
Another benefit of projecting vision is that it demonstrates your executive presence. Consider for a moment two leaders. One struts to the front of the room and immediately provides a rapid-fire project update to the team in the room. The other walks up, pauses for a moment, and reminds the team of the vision of the organization and explains how the project will help achieve the vision. Sure, project details are a part of the presentation, but they are layered beneath the vision. Doing so provides structure as noted above, but it also shows off executive presence – a key skill if you are looking to get promoted or to engage your team more effectively.
Developing and projecting vision is both a strategic and communications-related exercise. Learning to project vision will support your ability to communicate like a leader and help to drive your team and organization forward.
Are You Ready to Improve Your Communication Skills?
If you are ready to take the next step to improve your communication skills, schedule time to discuss our one-on-one communications coaching or consider enrolling in our Communicate Like a Leader online course. If you are looking to improve the communications of your entire team or organization, take a look at our Results through Relationships training course.