Envision: Creating a Compelling Strategic Direction

Now, we come to our third foundation, Envision. Many companies have some form of a mission or vision statement, but how effective are they?

Research shows that a well-defined AND well-integrated vision can see up to a 20% increase in employee engagement and a 30% boost in overall performance, particularly when teams need clear direction (Slåtten et al., 2021). Yet, Gallup surveys find that around 60% of employees cannot even tell you what their company is about or what they are unique from their competitors.

People want to know what sets your company apart and how their work contributes to that vision. This is a huge gap and opportunity for you. In other words, this is not a nice to have but a necessary part of leading a high-performing team.

Using Appreciative Inquiry in Strategic Planning

One of my favorite findings in my studies on organizational change is the concept of appreciative inquiry, which focuses less on fixing problems and instead focuses on possibilities. It is a proven method that encourages positivity, engagement, and innovation (He & Oxendine, 2019). Appreciative inquiry means pulling as many stakeholders as possible together using positive questions to get a sense of the company's strengths, aspirations, opportunities, and results you are looking for.

The process pulls out incredible insight and creates buy-in and understanding from everyone in your company to get and own the vision. When I explain appreciative inquiry to others, I usually say, tongue in cheek, “Why I prefer SAOR instead of SWOT.” Let’s explore the SAOR phases and how they create a one-page mission, values, vision statement, and strategic plan. In the following paragraphs, imagine you pulled together your leadership team for a weekend-long strategic planning session. 

Strength: Defining Your Mission and Values

One of the first questions I like to explore with a team is: What are we the best at in the world? Any iterations of this question are intended to draw out the company's unique strength. Is the company best because it can produce better quality? Is it best because of its scale? Is it best because of how intimately it knows its customers? Your team would want to have a record of these conversations so you can draw out themes and come to a consensus on your top three strengths, which together make a company unique.

For example, in my therapy clinic, these are some of the identified strengths: 1) we are located centrally in our city, 2) it is easy to book an appointment, and 3) our therapists are hand-picked because they exude warmth and confidence. Together, they form our mission statement: we seamlessly connect locals to therapists they can trust.

Mission statements, once established, usually stay mostly the same, but it is worth doing this exercise every few years to see if it is still the true north your company is bought into! The mission statement is important because it tells your brand story and focuses all your actions as a team. Every priority ought to return to doing this mission better; otherwise, it is just another shiny object that needs to be cut out.

The second question is different and provides us with our values. It asks: “Who are our best workers who exemplify what we’re looking for in this company?” “What characteristics do they have?” Like the organizational strengths, your team has to come to a consensus on the top 3-7 characteristics, which double up as values.

This process is so important. Many people just make up nice words, like we are caring. But by asking these questions, you are drawing out the actual values of the group. For instance, you are in a high-powered sales group that values fast, persuasive, and humorous workers. C

Creating a caring, listening, and customer-focused list would be incongruent. The importance of having clearly defined values cannot be overstated.

When the crew knows these characteristics, you can set up hiring, selection, training, promotion, and firing policies based on these values. You want your team to be and to surround themselves with these characteristics, which pulls the whole group together and makes your team feel more cohesive.

Let’s take Elon Musk as a case study. According to his biography, he is a workaholic, working insane hours, solution-oriented, and risk-taking. What is interesting is that his leadership teams, and indeed the expectation upfront for anyone joining SpaceX or Tesla, required similar types of characteristics.

Yes, these characteristics have a dark side (like any good thing, there can be too much of it). Whether you like the man or not, it cannot be denied that these companies succeeded in what was considered impossible, partly due to this strong sense of who they are (values) and what they do (mission). 

Aspiration: Crafting an Ambitious and Achievable Vision

For the strengths portion, the questions ask what was or what is. In the aspirations portion, you are now asking what can be. We begin by asking, in the ideal, aspirational statements that describe the best that the company can be.

You can ask questions like:

“What would be the best possible scenario for us in the  next three years?”

“If we can choose, who are the types of customers or clients we would have?” You already have mission and values statements, so use those to craft your forward-facing questions.

Like before, summarize the themes from these discussions. The leadership's job is to hear and understand the stakeholders' views on what can be and come together to a consensus on what should be. To simplify this, you can ask your team to complete the statement, “By [three years from now], we will [result].”

We are looking for powerful, pithy statements that can capture the imagination of your whole team, who are excited to be a part of it. For example, my vision statement is: In the next decade, we aim to create 1,000 transformative leaders whose teams exceed performance benchmarks, making our company a global leader in building high-performing, autonomous teams. 

Opportunities: Setting your Strategic Direction

Now that you have the mission statement, values, and vision, your team can work on the key initiatives for the following year that will move you closer to your vision. I ask my clients, "What are the best opportunities within the next year that will help us move towards our vision?” We would have everyone pair up or in groups to discuss this and tell us their findings. We would list every possibility and comb through them to combine them into categories to reduce redundancy.

After creating the list, the leadership team will jockey and make cases for which ones should make it to the top 3-7. This process may take some time to reach a consensus. It may even take multi-sessions so that some people who are particularly passionate about certain initiatives can create a business case for why they believe an initiative belongs in the strategic plan.

The bottom line is if your company has more than seven priorities, nothing is a priority, but with only a few major priorities, this will focus your collective resources to hit your targets. By now, you have a clear mission statement, values, vision statement, and up to seven major initiatives for the year. All of this should fit on one page to communicate to your group, all your workers, stakeholders, and customers who you are, what you are about, and how you will do it.

Results: Implementing your Strategy

Now that you have your key initiatives for the following year, here is how you can make sure they become a reality. First, you want to set a numerical goal for how you know an initiative was accomplished. Let’s say, for example, your team recognized that employee engagement is a top priority in the company in the following year. You can find a validated scale for employee engagement like Gallup’s Q12, measure your current average, and set a numerical goal to increase engagement by 40%.

Putting numbers to your audacious goals makes it painfully apparent whether you achieved a goal or not. Secondly, you need to assign someone who champions the initiative and makes them accountable, and everyone knows it. Third, as part of the strategic planning session, you would want the champions to craft their plan to achieve the goal, including rough timelines and the resources needed to get there. Can you see how this connects back to the Execution Foundation?

Now that a year-long goal is set, all quarterly and weekly goals are to make this annual goal happen, creating clear expectations for everyone involved. It is important to track progress towards these goals, too, so that your team can monitor and adjust goals if necessary. 

What is the worst thing to do with a strategic plan after making the effort to formulate it? It is to let it sit in the shelf and collect dust. Instead, clear documentation and multi-media efforts should be put into communicating it to your company. Values ought to be celebrated and rewarded when employees demonstrate them. Quarterly, make a company-wide event or communication piece that reminds everyone of your mission, vision, and values, using stories captured in the last quarter. Update everyone on how far along you are getting with your initiatives, and announce any changes. 

By doing this, you now have three foundations of a high-performing team. You have highly engaged leaders who are clear about their roles and why, execute them well week to week, and tangibly move your company towards the vision. At this point, is there anything more needed? What we will look at next is how to turn this into a culture that can sustain itself into the future with or without you.

Implementing the E5 Leadership Framework: Steps to Get Started

This was called a definitive guide, and it can be overwhelming. So, how do you make E5 a reality for your team? I have a diagnostic that has 25 items, 5 for each of the E foundations. I suggest getting an overall score from the diagnostic and seeing how you scored in each of the foundations. When I work with my clients, we start at the beginning and work our way down until each section can be scored at least 80% or above. So the first step is to diagnose, and you can do that right here.

Need help implementing this framework into your team? We have a program just for that, called the Empowered Leadership Intensive.

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