Re-communicate Your Vision to Your Key People
Hello fellow leaders. I’ve been thinking about the disconnect that some of us have with communicating our vision to others in our organizations, and about ways to solve it. It’s no secret that we need to successfully reproduce our personal vision in others if our companies are going to grow. When we do this well, the impact of our organizations goes far beyond what we can build on our own.
I was talking the other day with a minister friend of mine about this. His church has grown from four people (he, his wife and their two toddlers) to over 3,000, most of that occurring in the last five years of his 19 year pastorate. I highly respect the people management skills of ministers, because they have to get phenomenal results out of an all volunteer workforce. My friend told me that when people call him these days to ask how he does things in his organization, he laughs and responds most of the time with “I don’t know. So and so does that for us. I just pointed them after our vision and let them fill in the details.”
Sounds so easy. But I know that in the early years, this leader spent tons of time doing tasks with his key leaders. He had no choice, since the church was so small. He was present at every function, every committee meeting, everything. Instead of groaning about the workload, he turned an old management saying by Ken Blanchard into a new mantra for himself. Remember MBWA (Managing By Walking Around), from the One Minute Manager? Well, my friend turned it into MBTA (Managing By Talking Around). He looked at every shared task with a lay leader in his then little church as a chance to get his hands dirty with someone, and to talk about the vision he had for his church. People ate it up, because most people, especially volunteers, want to know about an important “why” to what they do.
Years later, these same people my pastor friend stacked pancakes with are now running large parts of his multi million dollar operation. They look back with fondness at the early years when they were able to have so much personal time with their leader. They have a baseline relationship with him now that is phenomenal, especially on the trust scale.
If your business is just starting out, this example can be great news for you. Since you have to be everywhere right now, use the conversations to talk vision, meaning, and excellence at every point with the employees you’re with.
If your organization has gotten bigger, you can still adjust your time with people to include some MBTA every time you’re in a team situation. Take a day and work alongside an employee as they do their job, whether at the loading dock or on sales calls. Let them be your boss for a day, and as they teach you some things you never knew about their job, share some things from your personal vision that relate to what they do. I can guarantee they’ll never forget the conversation. My minister friend’s people never did.
Got any stories or questions to share about MBTA?
Joe Pursch
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