How to create a shared company vision

In fact, a Harvard Business Review (HBR) study found that leaders who consistently look to the future are more well-respected by 72 percent of employees as opposed to those who do not.

Unfortunately, that same study found that most leaders spend only about three percent of their company time envisioning the future of their organization — an imbalance that can lead to sagging profits, a loss of employee faith in the company, greater employee turnover and, ultimately, un-competitiveness in the larger business market.

Simply put, an organization without a shared company vision is a business that is flying blind. At MentorCruise, we have developed a set of practical tools below to create a shared company vision that will cement your place as a leader and ensure your company seizes on future opportunities.

Creating a Shared Vision at a Glance

The most important aspects of creating a shared company vision that employees will rally behind and executives will believe in can be broken down into two parts: steps and tools.

Having a shared vision consists of three important steps:

• Step 1: Collaboratively creating the shared vision.
• Step 2: Maintaining this vision.
• Step 3: Expanding upon the vision.

Creating a shared vision also requires the following tools:

• A vision, mission and values document
• A single source of truth
• A knowledge base to develop cross-team insights
• Updated employee handbooks
• A vision repository

Step 1: Collaboratively Creating a Shared Vision

This is the most straightforward — but also the most crucial — aspect of developing a business vision, as it will impact everything that comes after.

First: Set Aside Time to Plan

A company cannot create a shared vision if time is not allocated toward creating one. Much like employee time dedicated to meetings, client requests and individual work, leaders should create time dedicated to developing a shared vision.

This may involve making sacrifices in other areas. Perhaps you will need to cancel mandatory morning check-in meetings while the executive team deliberates over your vision. Or you may have to use the last hour of the workday as a vision workshop instead of winding down with low-priority tasks.

Either way, one thing remains true: a shared vision is only as important as the time you give it — do not devalue it by refusing to allocate time toward creating one.

If you feel confused by the initial step, you can consult our mentors who have founded companies and understand what it takes to create a shared company or team vision.

Next: Ask Yourself Framework-Based Questions

Search engine giant Google has good reason to believe that a shared company vision consists of five key components: the core values, purpose, mission, strategy and goals of an organization.

These five key components are the basis for a shared vision framework that will help your company continue to thrive. When developing your vision, ask yourself the following questions to start priming goal-oriented thinking among your executive leadership team:

The Five Key Components of a Shared Vision

• What are the Core Values of our organization? Core values are already present in most companies: they are the rules everyone lives by when leadership is not present to reinforce them.

  Understanding what your core values _are _and what they should _be _will help you create the groundwork for an organization that runs on its own. Key questions to prime your Core Values discussion include:

  • Why do we want to do things better than we have before?
  • What are my cultural beliefs and deeply held values outside of work?
  • Which way is the moral compass of our organization pointing?
  • What do employees say and think about our organization when managers are not around?

  • What is the Purpose of our organization? Employees want to know why they are doing what they are doing. They want a connection to their work and their workplace. Developing a company purpose is an integral part of creating a shared vision that results in less conflict and higher work-life satisfaction. Key questions to prime your Purpose discussion include:

  • What are the goals and aspirations of my employees?

  • Where do my colleagues fit into our vision of the future?
  • What is the Mission of our organization? A mission creates a compelling vision of the future of the company and leads employees toward a guiding principle. It should be elevator-pitch length and general enough to apply to every employee. Key questions to prime your Mission discussion include:
  • What new, exciting possibilities are within our reach?
  • Does our company spend enough time looking forward?
  • How do we make our shared vision as important as our profits?
  • What is the “bigger picture” of our organization?

  • What is the Strategy our organization will implement? Strategy is how a company achieves its mission. What are the overarching methods your company will use to realize its shared vision and meet its purpose? Key questions to prime your Strategy discussion include:

  • What should our approach to organizational change be?

  • What can we accomplish in the longer term?

  • What are the Goals of our organization? Unlike a mission or purpose, think of company goals as short-term sprints toward accomplishing smaller tasks. What are the goals of creating a shared vision in your organization, and how will you achieve them? Key questions to prime your Goals discussion include:

  • What comes next for our organization?

  • How do we accomplish tasks in the short term?

Additional Questions for Remote-First Companies

If you are a remote organization leader in charge of creating a shared company vision while being miles apart from your colleagues, you may want to ask yourself an additional set of digital-first questions, including:

• What can we do remotely that other businesses similar to ours cannot? 
• What are the costs we do not have to account for as a remote business, and how can those costs help us plan for our shared vision?
• What are unique remote-cultural aspects of our business that should be factored into our vision?
• How can we create a vision that keeps us connected despite our digital-first business model?

Develop A Vision… Together

A shared vision is shared for a reason: no one leader is prescient. A single company head is not a bellwether for an entire industry, nor should they be expected to create a company playbook by themselves. The following are tools and tactics you can use to ensure your company vision is built from the ground up, instead of from the top down.

• Use a vision, mission and values document to keep your shared vision accessible in one place. If you’ve worked in a corporate setting for any amount of time, you know that siloed work leads to errors and issues.
• Using a single source of truth will help you share your vision organically without distorting or changing its message.
• Poll workers and employees for input using company polling tools. Employees know much about a company that employers do not. Involve them at the ground floor to account for otherwise unseen variables. There are myriad polling tools available for your use when you need to get employees involved — which should be early, and often. After all, including employees early will make for a simpler introduction process when your shared vision is brought before the entire company for review.
• Share your planning document and poll results with employees. A single planning document shared together with poll data will help employees understand your vision, which is crucial if you want their support. Helping employees understand how you arrived at your company vision will increase trust between executives and workers.

In other words: a crew should know how its captain steers the ship, and the captain should be familiar with how their crew likes to work.

Beta-Test Your Vision to an Internal Audience First

Once your shared vision is developed, it needs to be stress-tested. Failing to rigorously test your concepts will only cause you pain down the road when employees disagree with the vision you have laid out for them — so be sure to test it early _and _often.

The very first test of your vision should ideally be to a small audience. Before you share it company-wide, beta-test it among executives and employees who did not have a direct hand in crafting it. This will be a good soft launch for your vision that will help point out any blind spots before it moves onto a greater audience.

Step 2: Maintaining the Shared Vision

Congratulations! Your vision has been crafted and tested. Now comes the hard part: developing and maintaining that vision before an even larger audience. This next step involves hard work, determination and an unfailing belief in what you have created.

Are you ready? Here’s how to keep the fire of your vision alive well after its inception:

Present Your Vision to the Larger Organization

Once your soft launch is complete, share your vision with the entire company. Note that this does not mean the shared vision is necessarily finished: ask for feedback and reviews from employees after presenting your vision to them. Once you have accounted for the best and most relevant feedback, you can begin to implement your vision.  

• Consider the tools you will use to bring your vision to the company. Zoom may feel impersonal if your company is large — 100 or more employees may have a hard time feeling positive or connected to your vision if they must sit through a 2-hour digital call to understand it.

One way to circumvent this is to send your vision document ahead of your launch meeting so that employees can digest its contents on their own time. This way, the meeting itself can focus on only the major aspects of your vision, and you can reserve time for questions, thoughts and feedback.

• Use feedback tools to allow employees to anonymously provide feedback without the pressure to compliment your vision. The truth is that most employees will not openly criticize your plan in a large business meeting setting.

It is your job as the founder of your shared vision to provide employees with tools to provide anonymous feedback so that you can rigorously adapt and evolve your vision.

Share Your Vision with the Community for Accountability

Organizations do not exist in a vacuum. Similar to the Open Startup movement, sharing your company pillars with the larger community builds trust and ensures your business is transparent about its values and goals. While this is by no means easy work, it can go a long way toward increasing how your community perceives you from a corporate social responsibility standpoint.

• Consider who your “community” is. Think on which geographic location or specific audience is most appropriate to share your vision with. Perhaps these are the people in your daily community — or maybe it is an international audience that will respond with excitement to your message.
• Again, take advantage of any digital tools you have to send your vision to the larger community. Now is the time to polish your presentation method: take the best elements of your internal and company-wide presentations and incorporate them into a PR-conscious effort that makes your organization look buttoned-up to the community.

Document Your Processes for Future Reference

Maintaining your vision means protecting the integrity of its contents. This can only be achieved by holding sacred the way it is stored, shared, accessed and updated. The following tools will help you protect the intellectual integrity of your shared vision as it makes its way through your company and beyond.

• Rely on a single source of truth: You do not want your vision to morph and grow without direction, which will happen if employees are not presented with a single source of truth.

• Create a knowledge base to develop cross-team insights: Different teams provide different insights. A shared knowledge base helps bring them together and allows them to discover new aspects of your vision together.

• Update and revitalize employee handbooks: Old handbooks are confusing and will not serve employees. A digital-first, always-updated handbook is the best way to present and maintain your shared vision. 

• Create a vision repository: This will contain all your projects and files, as well as the revision history of every file. That way there is no confusion about the evolution of your shared vision. 

Take Advantage of Vision Influencers

In addition to digital tools, it helps to have people who can reinforce and promote your vision. For instance, everyone knows what social media influencers are — why not create “vision” influencers?

Vision influencers function much like social media influencers, only they promote and represent your company vision instead of their own brand. Consider promoting several employees and assigning them to spread your message throughout your organization. Here are some tips when considering who to entrust with your vision and how they should operate:

• Pick employees who are already popular among their peers. A vision is best shared by a visionary — choose people who resonate with their teammates and can effectively represent your message among others.
• Choose those you trust most who will hold your vision sacred. In addition to popularity, you need those who believe in your vision as much as you do. Choose employees who live and breathe your company culture to represent your message and you will not regret it.
• Use vision influencers to assess pain points. Have boots-on-the-ground influencers assess vision pain points so that you can continuously work to smooth out vision sore spots.
• Allow influencers to use social media to spread the word of your vision. Social is perfect for inspiration — consider giving your vision influencers access to the company social media page for PR-initiatives and other events that will put your vision front and center within and outside the company.

Step 3: Expanding Upon Your Vision

Your vision has been developed and you’re maintaining it smoothly. Now, you need to do what all good leaders do: expand.

Track and Test Your Ideas

Companies track what is important to them. Profits are calculated and shared with shareholders, and time is logged on digital platforms. If your business is truly dedicated to its vision, you will track your progress on it. Here are ways to do so:

• Create a system of checks and balances to ensure the company vision is thriving and growing.

• Provide regular updates on your company vision so that employees remain in the loop and keep looking toward their organizational “North Star.” 

• Test employees against expectations — are your goals, ideals and rules being followed? 

• Continue to hone your vision skills by continuing to consult and utilize resources from MentorCruise.

Failing to track and test your vision is akin to giving a presentation without scheduling a follow-up meeting. You will not know how successful your vision is if you do not monitor how it is implemented. 

A Shared Vision is the Cornerstone of an Effective Organization

Your vision is your company lifeblood. Without it, you may experience sporadic and disorganized profits, but you will not have a strategic goal to work toward. Conversely, creating, maintaining and expanding a brilliant company vision can lead to greater faith in your ability as a leader, improved organizational profit potential, reduced employee turnover rates and more.

At MentorCruise, we think it is absolutely critical that businesses develop shared visions that help their leadership teams thrive. Consult our resources on other business subjects — such as entrepreneurship and reference gathering — to further enhance your organizational potential.

Consider creating a shared company vision today — and start reaping the benefits of a goal that keeps on giving.