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This is one of a series of regular guest posts that I am running at Changeworks Blog. Today’s post is from Stephen Billing and provokes thought as to the effectiveness of vision for driving behavioural change.

Guest author: Stephen Billing, Management Consultant, New Zealand. Stephen is a facilitator of organisational change. He has significant experience in implementing dramatic change keeping business performing as usual. He helps his clients to be successful in restructuring, changing company culture, introducing new technology or new ways of working, and developing leaders, development of sales and sales management capability, and people development and training.
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Developing a sense of vision is seen by many as a key leadership task. It is commonly thought that a clear vision will drive behaviour if people buy into it. A vision is said to help people to tap into a higher sense of purpose and bring inspiration that will guide their behaviours and their ‘discretionary effort’ in support of the company’s goals.

It is also thought that employees can align their behaviours to a shared vision and this will lead to better results for the company. Some also say that if you have a vision, employees will synthesise this into their own personal vision that is in harmony with the organisation’s vision and their behaviours will then align with the company’s vision.

Famous gurus like Tom Peters and Peter Senge along with many others advocate that a shared vision has an almost mystical ability to motivate employees – to galvanise them – to bring not only their skills to work but also their hearts and minds, if not their souls.

In terms of tapping into the discretionary effort of employees, it is thought that individuals who are committed to a vision beyond their self-interest find they have energy not available when pursuing narrower goals. Organisations that tap this level of commitment will then be able to access from their employees more energy for achieving the company’s goals.

I might be going against the advice of A list gurus and common managerial thinking, but I have to say that I think that shared vision is overrated as an explanation for successful organisations. More often than not, creating a shared vision simply enables the senior managers to feel satisfied that they are following ‘best practice.’ In other words, everyone else is doing it so we should too.

It does not take much to realize that the actions of employees are driven by much more complex and individual things than the organisation’s vision, such as their individual backgrounds, their interactions with others in the organisation and their own intentions. Not to mention the specific situation they find themselves in at the time. The leader’s vision, whether or not it is created through a process that has wide involvement from the employees, can not become a ‘shared vision’ and drive employees’ behaviour. As a leader, you can only interact with a limited number of people during your day. Even when you do large-scale road shows to present your vision, your speech amounts to an intention, a provocation to your staff, and you cannot control how they will respond, what themes from your presentation they will take up and which themes will be ignored.

Further, the most important conversations in the organisation are not those that occur in the presentation’s formal (and intimidating) large group arena, or through the other official channels you provide. The most important conversations are those the most senior people can not control – those that happen in the cafeterias and around the water coolers. The Chief Executive’s speech about the vision is only one of many things that influence the important everyday conversations through which employees make sense of their world as people working in the organisation. The things that are important to particular employees cannot be controlled by the CEO, whether it is family obligations, peer opinions, their manager’s influence or their personal values.

The vision represents an ideal, what George Herbert Mead called a cult value. The vision is an abstraction that can only have meaning as it is taken up in everyday situations. So employees are daily negotiating what the ideal might mean as they choose between, say, spending time to help the customer in front of them or hurrying on to the next customer to meet their targets for number of customers assisted.

Rather than waste time and money paying consultants to help you come up with beautifully articulated vision statements, leaders should discuss with people what their intentions are, what they want to achieve. And then encourage them to tell you about their everyday experience as they grapple with your intention. Listen and observe their responses closely. Then respond accordingly.

You may feel this is risky because you won’t have control of where the conversation goes. You are right, you won’t have control of the conversation – the employees may say difficult things that you find hard to hear. They may say things that are plain wrong from where you stand.

The reality is that even with the most well crafted vision statements and well planned change initiatives, 70% of them fail.

So don’t worry about it – you weren’t in control anyway.

by Stephen Billing, Management Consultant, New Zealand

Blog: www.changingorganisations.com