Find your passion. We have a one-page written vision of what our business will look like five years from now. And it’s that vision that we use to create our strategic plan.
That serves as our road map, and we believe in sharing that. There are a lot of leaders who don’t want to share the numbers. Our philosophy is that our people can’t be fully engaged in the outcome if they don’t have the information and they don’t know why it’s important. We don’t just want them to know what to do. We want them to understand why they are doing it. We also want them to come to us if there is a better way.
What we see is a lot of business owners and leaders aren’t clear about the distinction between vision and mission. The easy way to remember it is vision is your eyes. It’s what you see. Where are you going?
Your mission is your purpose. Why did you start your business? What was that feeling, that picture you had in your head of what you wanted to accomplish? That’s kind of the starting point to building your vision. When you get a year or a couple years into it, and you have some business owners working 16 hours a day and seven days a week, they’ve lost that passion. They’ve completely forgotten about what it felt like when they first started the business. So you have to bring them back to that.
Most of the time, it was that people saw a frustration or a problem that they could solve for someone else. Maybe it was an individual or a consumer or a business. Build on that feeling and vision you had when you first started the business. It probably hasn’t changed; it’s gotten buried. But the essence of it is still within you.
Change your vision, not your values. Our philosophy is that your company values are not going to change a lot unless there is a major shift or a major event. The values are an essence of who you are. Your vision is the reason we have those quarterly meetings and annual meetings.
It’s an opportunity to not just evaluate our progress from the previous year, but also look and say, ‘OK, what has changed? What didn’t we know when we first defined this? And as a result of what we didn’t know, what changes might we have to make?’ Your vision isn’t something that would be set in stone. It needs to be fluid enough that you can adapt to changes in the market, your industry and with your clients and with technology.
How to reach: The Renaissance Group, (813) 636-9181 or www.renaissanceconsultants.com