Creating a collective vision builds successful teams

“Strength is derived from unity. The range of our collective vision is far greater when individual insights become one.”

— Andrew Carnegie

Collective vision is when everyone dreams together. Some examples of collective vision are India getting its freedom, a start-up evolving to become successful, a winning team playing well together. Collective vision is a powerful thing. If only we could be so in sync as a group that we achieve great things together. In fact we can, starting with a clear collective vision.

Collective vision starts from co-creating the vision. It is nothing but a long-term overarching goal that is set together. This is the secret sauce for any successful, high-performing group of people. Unfortunately, very few organisations practice this deliberately.

A well-crafted vision paints a picture of the desired future. It can energise a team to move forward in a unified direction. It excites and inspires the team so that all their actions, decisions and behaviours can support the mutually created vision.

How do you do this?

In my workshops on setting a vision, by the end if the participants can emotionally describe the feelings and the scenario of achieving the vision in detail, not how to get there, I know they have been successful in crafting one. An internal transformation takes place. You can sense the energy shift.

One of the things required in this journey is an understanding of values. As a leader, start by understanding each team member’s personal vision and values. Each team member’s self-vision must align with the collective vision. When great teams come together, most of the values tend to overlap. That makes it easier to align towards a collective vision quite naturally. Then, having complementary skills and personalities actually becomes supportive and not conflicting. Most beliefs can overlap too, but the overlap is lesser when compared to the values. The reason being, when some members fall prey to a limiting belief, the others can help debunk it. If the gap is too large, there will be clashes.

It is only through connection and communication that values become more than simply words on paper; so that people clearly understand them and become committed to living them. Some of your personal values must align with that of the organisation, only then can you be happy about working there. Alternately, organisational values need to be more than just a reflection of the collective personal values of its members. Because values guide behaviour and decision-making, it is important to choose the values that are needed to guide the organisation into the future. Simply identifying the values that currently exist is an indicator of where you are. These are not necessarily the values needed to help you get to where you want to go.

Another point to note is that words mean different things to different people. I do this exercise where I ask all the participants in a session to give me their definition of a common word like creativity or integrity. It is amazing how each answer is so different from the other. It is important to provide a clear definition and example of what the behaviours look like for every value. For example, if the value is customer centricity, there should be enough stories relating to this value shared repeatedly in the organisation. For example, for a popular hotel chain all the employees talk about an incident where a family with young children was expected to check in at a particular time but did not show up till much later. The staff called them to check where they were. It turned out; they were stuck due to car trouble on their way. The hotel then sent a car to pick them up.

Vision is not just a statement you put on your office walls. Very few teams consciously activate a collective vision. This leadership skill is fundamental. Good leaders understand the importance of collective vision and know how to execute it.