Creating a Shared Vision

I was recently in a workshop and we were talking about creating a shared vision.  We know as leaders having a clear vision is important and share that with your team.

From that discussion and collaboration, a couple questions came out of it and I felt they would be helpful as you think about creating your vision, sharing your vision, and carrying out your vision.

• How do you collaborate and build a shared vision?
• What skills and knowledge do you incorporate into your vision and how do you evaluate these skills?

My thoughts are:
One of the ways I like to collaborate is semi-informal sessions where stakeholders can come together to discuss the various topics presented to the team. Then we brainstorm (truly brainstorm) and come up with the main points we agree to and we create a shared vision. Conducting the sessions in this way, we can hear each other’s ideas and goals and come together to incorporate them into a shared and focused vision as well as having buy-in and ownership by all stakeholders. With buy-in and ownership from key leadership, we significantly increase the success of our collaborative vision through our joint and various processes.

As a leader you can provide the foundation to provide a successful building and sharing of a meaningful vision. You can also provide a wide and narrow focused view to help look at topics from different angles and depths to ensure you really explore the team’s thoughts and thought processes to help ensure you come up with the best possible vision and ways to implement it to reach a successful outcome.

I utilize the teams around me for inspiration along with my own skills and knowledge to help me communicate to all stakeholders in a clear and concise manner. I consistently provide updates and feedback to comments to help keep the vision on track as well as any adjustments that might need to be made can be executed in a methodical and precise way. The feedback and comments, coupled with successes and any areas of opportunities from others, helps me keep focus as well as an opportunity to evaluate my own skills to learn and grow from all these experiences.