hello members!

So what can a leader do to provide the best direction for his company/dept/team/him self!

VISION STATEMENTS!

So what do we need to consider here:

• Needs to take a look back and into the future to understand what has worked well and where the challenges have been for the company.
• In today's world, one has to get a good view on the marketing opportunities and assess this against the company's strenghts and weaknesses to see if it is a good match.
• When looking further ahead, you are having to rely on your own projections and forecasts from business experts and also government bodies.

Does anyone have any good/bad experience (even better) that they wish to share?!

I've worked in small and large companys and find that the vision statement is a hard concept to sell because it does not inspire action....

why is that - follow through by the leaders to sell these ideas and to make the action plan on the floor real.

Regards

Sarah

Thank you Sarah for your feedback - does anyone else have anything to add on this please

So the key ingredients to a good vision statement is to:

• motivate your staff as the organisaton is moving up a level
• goals need to be achievable but expect them to be tough targets
• needs to focus on the most critical and important areas of the organisaton and business
• aim is to compel staff to act as the task ahead is exciting

Does anyone have any examples from their organisations they can share?

Hello Neville

The critical success factor I see here is for execuitive and/or senior management to meet the teams face-2-face to sell the vision and get feedback to improve these vision statements.

I would also go further and link in these vision statements into staff's performance objectives for the year!

Regards

Matthew

Matthew - excellent point!

So just to wrap this up...

What is the best approach to communicating your direction to staff?

The more methods/approaches you use the better! Some of the most popular are email, staff meetings, web site promotions, online training.

• Email - good choice if you want to alert staff of this.
• Staff meeting - keep your announcement short as it wil be easier for staff to recall. Consider a Q&A session to involve people in the discussions. Pitch the speech around how the staff can contribute.
• Web site - good source to serve reminders to everyone (including customers) as to the company's vision etc.
• Online training - clever idea to involve everyone and also to check that staff have understood the message by asking some multiple questions at the end.