Page 51 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

Building a Unifying Vision 41

situations, and real emotions so that people feel that their work makes a
difference.
At the World Bank, for example, Wolfensohn and his team made the
vision of poverty elimination come alive by describing particular projects
and villages where the Bank was making a difference in real people’s lives.
Regional and country leaders at the Bank then did the same with their peo-
ple. At ConAgra, Rodkin explained the vision of becoming an integrated
operating company by telling stories about how real people in the company
were working together across product areas and leveraging procurement
scale to get better results.
At Xerox, Anne Mulcahy took the storytelling approach quite deliber-
ately during her turnaround of the company in the late 1990s. In the midst
of an intensive effort to save the company from bankruptcy, Mulcahy re-
alized that her people were yearning for a higher level of purpose beyond
day-to-day problem solving and operations. So she worked with one of her
team members to write a fictional Wall Street Journal story, set several
years in the future, that described how Xerox had pulled itself out of the
crisis and made itself successful. Mulcahy hoped she could create “a story
that people would see themselves in and be able to say, ‘OK, I want to be
part of that.’” It worked so well that for years afterward, she had to keep
reminding people that the piece was fictional.
Another way to tell a story is to visualize it. A tool called a “from-to
chart” can help capture the idea of where you are now versus where you are
going to emphasize the direction that you are setting. (Table 1-5 shows an
example of a from-to chart from Rodkin’s vision at ConAgra.)
Unless you take the time to help your people understand the ways that
the vision connects to their work and to their personal values and emo-
tions, they may experience your new vision as a slogan on the wall or as one
more change in a series of random and arbitrary directives with no rhyme
or reason. By putting the vision into the context of employees’ own expe-
rience, you’ll have more success actually moving people in the direction
that you’ve set—and making the vision into the best strategic unifier and
motivator that it can be for your whole organization or team.