What are common obstacles to inspiring a shared vision
It has been a year of upheaval, uncertainty, and change. As a leader, it has never been more important than it is now to inspire a shared vision among your followers which is the key to true leadership. Before you can convey a vision, however, you have to develop it. You must be clear in your vision, live it before others can see it, and model it from your behavior. Show Choosing Your Vision Communicating Your Vision Identifying the Benefit for Others Season’s Greetings and all the best wishes for the New Year from the Leaders Excellence team. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Leadership Challenge" by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading. Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here . Does your team share in your vision of your organization’s way forward? What can you do to inspire a common vision in the people you lead? People are naturally drawn to leaders who inspire a shared vision of a better world because they want to feel like they are a part of something important. In their book The Leadership Challenge, bestselling authors and long-time research partners James Kouzes and Barry Posner outline two guidelines for inspiring a shared vision in your team: 1) envision a positive future, and 2) get others on board. Here is how you can inspire a shared vision among your subordinates. Outstanding Leaders Inspire a Shared VisionWhen you inspire a shared vision in your team, you ignite their passion, which motivates and excites them. These two guidelines will help you inspire your team:
1. Envision a Positive FutureEnvisioning a positive future starts by seeing the potential of the future. A specific vision of the future gives you a theme for your career or life: a guiding principle on which you can base your decisions. Often, visionary leaders have difficulty pinpointing where their visionary thinking comes from, chalking it up to intuition or a gut feeling. While these sources of inspiration are vague and hard to quantify, fortunately, there are specific steps you can take to prompt visionary thinking:
2. Get Others on BoardOnce you’ve created a solid, specific, and inspiring vision, inspire your teammates to be equally excited. If you engage team members in your vision, not only will they be more excited, but they’ll also feel more secure in you and your organization, especially during times of change.
To do this, follow these steps:
1. Seek InputTo engage your team in your vision, you need more than your vision: You need to incorporate their visions as well.
By fully listening to others, you can learn what drives them, and what you can incorporate into your shared vision.
2. Be UniqueTo engage your team in your vision, help them to see how their efforts will make a uniquely positive difference in the world. A compelling vision shows people how they can be different from others, which translates into higher levels of commitment and enthusiasm.
3. Emphasize MeaningfulnessPeople want, more than anything else, to feel a sense of purpose and for their lives to have meaning. This is ultimately more important than making money. Therefore, focus others’ attention on the greater cause behind your vision. People commit more readily and wholeheartedly to causes than to strategies. Show your team how their actions in your organization matter outside the organization. For example, emphasize how your company or division helps your customers live their best lives, or solves problems for clients that resonate throughout the industry. 4. Illustrate Your VisionPeople are visual and respond to image-based words more strongly than to abstract concepts. Images evoke feelings, and image-based words inspire. For example, a study found that when researchers described a line of toys with visual descriptions such as, “will make wide-eyed kids laugh,” participants reacted more strongly than to the more abstract “will be enjoyed by all of our customers.” Translate your vision into tangible, actionable, visual, and specific terms that your team members can readily recognize and visually imagine. Use image-based concepts to paint a clear picture of what your vision will look, feel, and sound like. By seeing it in their mind’s eye, your team members will be able to generate their own enthusiasm for your vision, which will mirror yours. For example, when the Australian branch of tool manufacturer Hilti Corporation wanted to excite its workforce, its management came up with a slogan that allowed workers to picture their common purpose: “We’re Painting Australia Red.” This was a simple and effective way to envision every worksite and garage in the country equipped with items in Hilti’s signature color, and it increased employees’ enthusiasm. Use Symbolic WordsAdditionally, to bring your vision to life, use metaphors, symbols, stories, and quotes that allow your team members to hear, see, and recognize what you’re envisioning. Using a metaphor to frame your vision can help others understand it better. People use metaphors all the time in their everyday language—sports metaphors, war metaphors, machine metaphors, and so on. You can use a common metaphor like these to emphasize your point. For instance, you might compare your organization to a farmer’s market, offering fresh items that change according to the seasons or demand, if that fits with the purpose of your organization, even if your organization has nothing to do with food. Avoid Loaded WordsBe aware also of the connotations of your words, in addition to their official definitions. Certain words evoke images that can associate your organization or concept with specific things, whether or not you mean to. For example, in one study, researchers had two groups of people play a game. Both played the same game using the same rules, but one group was told the name of the game was “The Community Game,” while the other group was told the name was “The Wall Street Game.” The results were striking: Of those playing the Community Game, 70% played cooperatively. Of those playing the Wall Street Game, only 30% played cooperatively, and even then, only at first—once they saw others weren’t playing cooperatively, they stopped cooperating as well. This illustrates the power specific words can have over people’s interpretations of their world. 4. Appeal to EmotionsIf you can get other people to feel emotions about your vision, you’ll have much greater success bringing them on board. Emotions inspire excitement and also help with memory. If people connect emotionally with your vision, they’ll remember it in more detail for a longer period of time. You can create an emotional connection in several ways:
5. Be EnergeticPeople won’t follow a leader who’s only mildly enthusiastic about their vision. Leaders need to radiate vast amounts of energy in order to inspire energy in their team. You can portray energy through the way you talk and move. People who are perceived as charismatic behave more animatedly than others. They:
6. Be PositiveYou’ll be more likely to engage others with a positive attitude. As a leader, you’ll need to bring your constituents through difficult times with optimism—to inspire hope when your team faces obstacles or setbacks. A large part of this will come from making it clear you believe in the abilities of others, so that difficulties can make them feel empowered rather than discouraged. All projects and organizations will face challenges, and if you help your people approach these challenges with a confident attitude, they’ll meet them better. If you instead, have a negative attitude or convey anger, disappointment, or exasperation when your team has difficulties, people will be less willing to seek you out in times of trouble. The resulting disconnect between you and your team can allow problems to worsen before they start to be addressed. How does a good leader Inspire a Shared Vision?“Leaders who Inspire a Shared Vision passionately believe that they can make a difference. They envision the future, creating an ideal and unique image of what the organization can become. Through their magnetism and quiet persuasion, leaders enlist others in their dreams.
What is the meaning of Inspire a Shared Vision?To be an exemplary leader, you have to be able to Inspire a Shared Vision. Doing this means you will have to envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities, and enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.
What is an example of shared vision?By contrast, a shared vision refers to an image that a group of people—for example, a project team—hold in common, an image of how the project will look, work, and be received by the customers when it is completed.
What is lack of shared vision?A vision that is not shared is the same as having no vision, or possibly worse as the people in the organisation might be in conflict with the leadership. The impact of a lack of a shared vision is confusion over the direction of the transformation and an inward focus of leadership.
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