A Shared vision: aids collaboration, creates a culture of shared ownership, eases tracking of development, creates purpose, gives direction, creates alignment, a clear ball field and unite.
Most organisations have an overall vision defined a while back by top management, but what I often find is that the vision is not aligned or shared throughout the organisation. In fact, what I see is that most organisations have various visions in different parts the organisation, basically meaning that you have organisations’ of individuals chasing dreams and goals in different directions. Which often leads to silo thinking, lack of cooperation, loss of commitment, motivation and engagement.
I recently participated in an MBA class in the courses Managing People at Henley Business School where we were introduced to a classic theoretical framework, the Bath model.
The Bath model gives an overview of inner organisational people management tools and their correlations. What truly interest me in the Bath model is the Ability, Motivation and Opportunity (AMO) part (highlighted with the red circle).
- A: Employees skills and abilities, often tested with an intelligence test.
- M: Engagement and motivation, often test with personality test
- O: The inner organisational conditions, which the employees have to perform under, often tested in leadership tests.
A simplification of the Bath model is to say that A*M*O = Performance
What I have found through my consultancy work with different organisations is that creating a shared vision bottom-up is a strong way of working with AMO in order to ensure Performance.
How to create a shared Vision and executing accordingly
A vision is something that all people should have a share in, in order to see their contribution to the overall organisational performance. One of the best ways to ensure commitment is by involvement, and thereby also ensuring the creation of a culture of bottom-up innovation and engagement.
When working with the creation of a shared vision, I prefer to work with the following steps:
1: Future
- Destination: Where are we going?
- Purpose: Why do we exist? What greater good do we serve?
- Values: What principles guide our decisions and actions on our journey?
When a vision addresses all three it tends to stick and there is a higher level of commitment because employees are able to see the relationship between the direction of their company and what they personally believe in and care deeply about. Everyone is clear about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how their work contributes.
2: Present
In order to realise the vision, we need a clear and honest take on the present in order to clarify which change/actions that are needed in order to execute according to the vision.
When assessing the present I like to work with the tool Leadership Equity Assessment (LEA).
The LEA test basically assesses an organisation’s’ opportunity (according to the Bath model) to perform, by analysing foundation, drive, development and relations.
There is greater trust in organisations’ where people know they share the same purpose and values and desire the same end-result, and because of that, there is more room for differences, creativity and innovation.
3: Change/Action
When a shared vision has been created and the present has been assessed you are ready to work with the change or actions needed to execute on the vision. Classical tools here would be to update your operation model, define new responsibilities, train staff and/or recruit new people.
I recommend: I can truly recommend that you start working with your team or organisations’ shared vision in an honest and bold way, it surely is a strong way to address the AMO and thereby ensuring optimal performance from a people management perspective.
Please don’t hesitate to get in touch, share or comment on my post, I would love to get a little debate going
Stay tuned for my next blog post, which I expect will be on how to design the optimal evidence-based recruitment model, even though it statistically only will ensure you a 40% success rate.
Further readings:
Links:
Creating a shared vision: https://hbr.org/2009/01/to-lead-create-a-shared-vision
Books:
The Bath Model: Purcell, J, Kinnie, N & Hutchinson, S (2003a) Open minded. Inside the black box: overview. People Management, 9 (10).
