Vision Quest™
If You Don't Know Where You Are Going, Then How Will You Know When You Get There?!
In most organizations, people don’t know what they need to do in order to impact the goals of their organization. In a Harris poll a few years ago they discovered that 51% of employees do not understand what they personally need to do to help the organization achieve its goals. Employees also reported that they only spend about 49% of their time working on things that might impact those goals. What is worse is that only 15% of employees could even identify their organization’s top goals. This is usually because organizations don’t have clearly defined goals, or if they do have goals then they aren’t being clearly communicated.
Before any organization can become high-performing, it must first have a clear vision of where it is going. The vision tells everyone what is important and, more importantly, why it is important. It provides the spark that can ignite passion in employees, engaging them through their daily work and connect them to the ongoing success of the organization. The vision also provides stability in an ever-changing world.
It Takes Alignment and Execution
In a 1999 Fortune cover story, it was concluded that emphasis placed on strategy and vision created a mistaken belief that the right strategy was all that was needed to succeed. It was estimated that in 70 percent of cases of failure that the real problem wasn’t necessarily bad strategy, but bad execution. In a separate study it was reported that fewer than 10 percent of effectively developed strategies were successfully implemented. The organizations that do achieve breakthrough results from the use of strategy are those who have created a solid focus and alignment of that strategy and then get it implemented! Strategic Planning is really about creating a compelling Vision: Purpose, Values, and Goals, that are all in alignment with each other, and then insuring that they are lived throughout the entire organization.