Why purpose and vision
Let me put it in the most bluntly way, a company without purpose and vision is a dead walking company, a zombie company. Seriously, what all the people in a company are doing if they don’t have a common purpose that guiding them and a vision to define what they are trying to achieve.
Most of the companies (even successful one right now) have a simple vision or purpose or both – we here to make money and make our shareholders reacher than they are today. Sorry guys, this is not a vision and purpose! I had the pleasure to work for let’s make the stakeholder reacher companies. Let’s put it that way, their glassdoor rating never was high. There are always exceptions, but purpose and vision are essential for long term success.
What are purpose and vision
Purpose helps people (that are working together) to understand why they are doing what they are doing. With a purpose, people can understand what dive a company and based on that they can align their actions to support the purpose.
Vision helps people to understand how the world will look like when they reach what they are doing for customers and the organization environment. When vision becomes a reality, an organization need a new Purpose. Vision helps people to understand how the purpose should look like in reality.
Vision and purpose are the glue that keeps people as one organization. Usually, they define by senior management of an organization and will introduce to employees with the warm help of the organization dedicate ‘organization design’ (OD) group members (I.E – sometimes they are really awesome! I worked with several of this rare HR species). This approach tends to end up with a vision and purpose that no one remembers or follows. What is your organization purpose and vision?
Up until here, there is nothing new. We all heard about it and we all aware of the importance and the lack of vision and purpose.
How to create impactful purpose and vision
What I found out is that even if you engage employees in the process of creating vision and purpose. Even if employees define the vision and purpose, most likely vision and mission won’t be followed. Why?
The answer is straightforward. If people don’t have their own purpose and vision they don’t understand what they are. They don’t understand why they important. For them, it looks like yet another corporate BS.
Having purpose or vision is not just a definition; it is a way of living. It defines how you conduct yourself. If you have purpose or vision you extremely motivate to achieve them and you’ll do whatever you can in all the time available for you to make your vision a reality. You’ll be very creative and agile to be able to reach your vision or purpose. Purpose and vision impact almost any perspective in the life of people that have them. Just people that have personal purpose and vision will make the company vision a reality.
Most of the senior management are people that have personal purpose and vision. They understand the need and the impact of defining them. Regretfully, most of the people that need to turn current reality in a vision driven by the purpose don’t have personal ones. Therefore if you want to have impactful purpose and vision for your organization, invest time and effort to make sure that other people in the organization have personal purpose and vision.
Even if people have purpose and vision you want to make sure that they are aligned with the company purpose and vision. If there is a conflict between personal and company purpose and vision, the personal ones will always win.
I hope this post helped you. If you have any question, start a discussion or contact me at natty.gur@ongalaxies.com. I’ll replay on my vlog Ask Natty Gur.