Page 50 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

40 HBR Leader’s Handbook

beginning. The next and perhaps most crucial step is to make the vision
come alive by helping everyone on your team or in your organization see
how their own work relates to it.
Many leaders assume that if they lead some high-level presentations
and town meetings, hang some posters, and disseminate some videos, their
people will understand the firm’s vision and how their work contributes to
it. While these are necessary vehicles for an intellectual understand- ing of
where the organization is headed, they don’t particularly help staff align
the vision with their day-to-day work or help them tap its emotional
potential.

Make it a conversation
As part of your campaign to share the vision throughout your department
or organization, insist that managers at all levels bring their people to-
gether to actively work through the connections. They should lead these
conversations not just once as you disseminate the new vision, or even just
yearly during the annual planning cycle, but at regular intervals so that
staff can incorporate new projects, initiatives, and issues into the overall
direction and the aspirational and emotional fabric.
You should lead some of these conversations yourself, but you should
also encourage other leaders and managers in your unit to do the same
with their people. In these sessions, ask everyone to think about how they
can connect the dots between the work they’re doing and the vision of the
company. What are the threads that tie together past initiatives and strate-
gic directions with this vision? How have past efforts helped the company
build capability over time and move toward the vision? What gets them
excited about the vision? And if some of their projects or activities don’t
connect to the vision, should they be changed or discontinued?

Tell a story
A key skill as you sell a vision is the ability to tell a good story about it.
Some business schools even include storytelling as part of their core cur-
riculum. A story can connect the company’s vision to real people, real