Page 44 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

34 HBR Leader’s Handbook

A vision-creating exercise

One way to tap into your team members’ ideas about vision is to ask them
to reinvent their official job titles so that they reflect the kind of value that
they want to create and the impact that they aspire to have on custom-
ers. Professor Dan Cable from the London Business School, in his HBR
article “Creative Job Titles Can Energize Workers,” describes how job
titles improve employee satisfaction and engagement by giving people
a better sense of how their work creates value and impacts customers.
Disney is a prime example of this approach—calling theme park employ-
ees “cast members” and engineers “imagineers.” These titles are consis-
tent with the company’s overall vision, which is “to make people happy.”
Lior Arussy, founder and CEO of the customer experience firm Stra-
tivity, uses this approach to help teams get excited about what they
can potentially accomplish together, which is the essence of a team’s
vision. For example, members of a sales team came up with titles such as
“director of customer first impressions,” “customer dreams fulfillment
manager,” and “red carpet roller.” All these indicate how the team wants
to make customers feel special in their interactions with the company,
which is a great basis for a team vision. (For more, see Arussy’s book
Next Is Now: 5 Steps for Embracing Change―Building a Business That
Thrives into the Future.)

health. Eventually he settled firmly on the elimination of poverty. This was
partly because of what he had heard during his trips to villages and neigh-
borhoods in developing countries about unmet needs and decades of gov-
ernment inaction. But the decision also came from his own deep-seated
conviction that the world could be a better place and the value that he put
on improving individual lives. In other words, his starting point was not
only intellectual, but was also shaped by his personal values.