A vision needs to shine especially in the dark days of winter!

As the Northern hemisphere moves from summer to the darker, colder days of winter, and people return to work after a hard earned break. We all need a little boost, a reconnect to our organisation's vision and values. One of the greatest challenges we face in our organisations is keeping our #vision burning bright, especially in challenging times... over the last couple of months, I have been working on a few thoughts that I'd like to share.

It is vital that in order to disseminate the value of your vision, you must work hard to provoke people’s thinking; #communicating a vision must not start with your response but the catalyst that led you to go on the journey you did, you must provoke emotive responses in others. I remember starting one of my first meetings as a Headteacher, by telling the team that we were failing our children, not because they weren’t getting the exam results they wanted, but because the children saw school as a form of purgatory not pleasure and that to spend the best part of your waking life in that kind of atmosphere, was only going to develop resentment and failure. I certainly struck a chord and the debate that followed both formal and outside of my earshot, began to stir people, not necessarily positively, but it stirred them and that meant that they were, willingly, or otherwise, active participants in the journey to follow.

Our culture too often demands that the workplace needs to be coldly logical and not somewhere where emotion has a place, which is counter intuitive to the branding philosophy of modern times; the holy grail for a brand strategy, is to provoke feelings in people; one only has to watch an episode of a TV talent show to know that its success lies in the fact that every episode will try to make to cry, smile, laugh and rant. This means that the language we use and the images we may team it with, are so vital when communicating your vision to others. How are you going to evoke the right emotional responses that mean people become hooked on the vision because they can feel it too? I have always been struck by something once said by the American priest and theologian, Matthew Fox, who said of storytelling and education:

One lesson we can learn from pre-industrial peoples is the power of storytelling. I am struck by how important storytelling is among tribal peoples; it forms the basis of their educational systems. The Celtic peoples, for example, insisted that only the poets could be teachers. Why? I think it is because knowledge that is not passed through the heart is dangerous: it may lack wisdom; it may be a power trip; it may squelch life out of the learners. What if our educational systems were to insist that teachers be poets and storytellers and artists? What transformations would follow?

Great transformational leadership requires the ability to tell stories and to work through narratives, it is often the trait of the greatest speakers and a technique I use as a speaker, whenever I can. It is of course, not new and ties in to the first of the original three principles of persuasion first defined by Aristotle:

Pathos

Ethos

Logos (logic)

In order to achieve real pathos, you need to understand your audience and their levers, so spending time really understanding your team’s contexts and personal positions is vital. This cannot be done if you see your people as one strategic mass; a single body to be convinced. This means that whilst presenting a vision to a group can be a start, the real impact can only happen through one to one conversations, personal contact and the individual nurturing of each person’s situation.

Perception of your vision by others is often hampered by the perception of the motivation for communicating it now. A vision cannot be reactive it must be proactive. Because of the challenges we have been facing economically and the radical rethinking and restructuring that that has led to, most of the current agenda around change, has been perceived to have been provoked by matters beyond our control. Reactive responses to change and the defining of a new vision as a result, become rich pickings for the cynics and for the most part, their position is understandable. It is why the investment of time and commitment into the development of an ethos is so important, it is simply not enough to ask people to come together and collaborate in tough times, if when the milk and honey is flowing, they are encouraged to work competitively for example. Developing cultures of empowerment and collaboration are vital for any group of people, if you want a genuine transference of vision into action to occur.

For most of my own life I have found the logical arguments that are necessary to support a vision, the most difficult, as I am an instinctive person, I think from the heart but sometimes that is not enough, particularly if you are operating in a high pressured environment where results rightly matter. A vision must lead to an outcome that can be judged and accountable; that doesn’t mean that they need to end their days on a spread sheet though! I have always used a three stage process to hold my leadership to account and it works well as an easy way to interrogate the impact you are having.

The successful realisation of a vision depends on your ability to #communicate it to others, to do it in such a way, that it not only motivates but actually #empowers them; provoking them to action and giving them the confidence, trust, belief and opportunities to do so and finally that you have clear outcomes that you can use to measure the #impact of your leadership and your thinking.