Podcast — From Strategy to Team Vision

Create a team vision that your team understands and relates to and you give

them better direction and motivation. Explain the purpose of your team and how

their work creates value for the company as a whole is very motivational for most

people. When you link your team vision into the functional goals and the

company's strategy you are helping your team understand the context of their work,

how they fit into the bigger picture and what they can do to be individually

successful and contribute to the company's and team's success. We all feel

happier and more fulfilled when we can directly see how our work creates value

for the wider team and knowing how our work fits into the company's strategy

provides safety and knowledge that our bosses will be happy. Create a team

vision to link what each person does day to day to the bigger picture and your

team will be happier, more motivated and ultimately more successful. We're

going through these seven ways to create a team vision and link company

strategy to your team. The last few steps are sharing tips of how to implement

your vision or turn it from a good idea into reality for you and your team, which

is usually the hardest part.

My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here Enhanced.TrainingShare's

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becoming a great manager. I've included links to additional videos and resources

in the description below as well as a video timestamps so do take a look at

these and if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The

first way to create a team vision is to understand the company's strategy. Linking

company strategy to team objectives is a great way to keep your bosses happy and

your team efforts coordinated with everyone else's efforts. Studies

estimate that more than 70% of companies fail to implement their strategies and

achieve the success they should. How to create your team vision is easier when

you start with looking at the function you work in. What underlying

purpose does your function undertake within the business and what are the

functional goals? Understand this before you think about explaining the purpose

of your team. Firstly for instance your finances purpose might be to create

performance visibility and increasing profitability and the cash generation of

the company. Secondly a marketing might be to build a recognized and trusted

brand and increase the number of leads fed into the sales team and sales might

be to increase the conversion rate of the leads generated and grow sales by

recruiting and training a strong knowledgeable sales team. Understand what

your functions role and purpose is in relation to the company's strategy

before you think about how to create a team vision. Depending on the size of

your team your team might be the function or it might be part of the

function. The smaller your team in relation to the business the smaller the

part of the company strategy your team's work will feed into as a general rule.

Communicating strategy to your team should be focused on what role they

specifically play in implementing the company strategy. Second when linking

company strategy to your team work out what problems you are really solving.

Many managers make the mistake of regurgitating the parts of the company

strategy they think are relevant to their team. This doesn't make the

strategy relatable to the individual team members. To motivate your team

members your team vision needs to be phrased in language and problems that

your team can directly relate to. So work out what problems your team are

solving that feed into the functional goals and company strategy. Sticking with

the finance example touched on earlier part of the company strategy might be

expanding Germany to be more than 25% of the group's revenue. The finance function

might be tasked with ensuring profitability in Germany is more than

10%. The problem your management accounts team might face is creating visibility

to support both of these goals. A solution might be creating P&L and

working capital reporting by German customer contract so the business as a

whole has objective information about how each company is supporting the

company's strategic goal in Germany. Work out exactly what the key set of

problems your team is trying to solve to support the functional goals and the

company strategy. The third step to linking company strategy to your team is

creating a relatable vision. What is going to be the main purpose or goal of

your team over the next few years? How would you use everyday language to

describe the high-level solution to the big problems facing the team? Answer

these two questions and you will have a good relatable vision to share with your

team. Keep your team vision simple and straightforward. A team vision doesn't

have to be and probably shouldn't be a masterpiece of wordsmithing. Back to

the finance example used earlier, your team vision could be to create and share

detailed financial reporting at customer contract level across the business to

improve decision-making, accountability and profitability. A really useful step

is to put a draft team vision statement to your team and ask them to finalize it

with you. This action gets the team members owning this part of the step

and introducing language that they understand and use into the team vision

statement. Then communicate the team vision with all team members and keep

reminding them of it. The fourth step to create a team vision is to set clear and

measurable goals. Most of us like structure and direction at work. Setting

out clear and measurable team goals is a great way to provide this to your team.

Now I like using the SMART framework for this step and asking the team to be

involved in creating each goal. This group exercise gets everyone involved

and owning the goals we create together. Do spend enough time to get SMART goals.

This is not usually a quick process. If you take an hour to get each goal really

clear that might be perfectly okay. Do think about how you're going to measure

progress. Make the measurement of progress as simple as possible and ensure

the data needed is easy and quick to gather. Keep your final team goals

visible and keep reminding the team of progress against these goals. The fifth

step to create a team vision is to break down the goals into team inputs. This

fifth step is helping the team to move from the what to the how to achieve the

goals. Helping the team to mentally overcome the how step massively improves

the chances of reaching your goals. When we have goals but don't really

understand how we're going to reach the goal we remain stuck and inactive. When we

understand the tasks activities and projects we need to do to help us

achieve team goals we are much more confident of taking the right action.

Back to our finance example. Some of the inputs or tasks to achieving our

financial reporting vision might be if firstly to set up project codes within

the financial system. Second to implement a simple timesheet system to capture

each employee hour spent on each customer contract. Third to add a project

code to all invoices inputted into the finance system and fourth create P&L

reporting for each project code or customer contract. When you've worked out

the main team's inputs or activities to achieve the goals then work out which

individual will do what. The sixth step to implementing a team vision is to

assign ownership of individual goals. Once you've shared a clear team

vision with the team and the goals and activities at team level the next step

is to create goals and activities at individual level. Focus on how to achieve

the goals as much as the goals themselves. Work out who is best placed

to work to achieve each team goal. This may be one person or several

people. In each case give overall responsibility to achieve the goal to

one person to make ownership clear even if several people will work on the goal.

Give each team member as much of the roadmap as you can to help them

successfully achieve each of their goals. It is in everyone's interest for each

team member to be successful. Running a set of team planning workshops focus on

how to achieve each goal and who should be responsible can be more productive

than deciding and telling each person yourself. If the team has a strong say

they will be more motivated and successful because it is their plan too.

Teams often produce better solutions than one individual working on their own.

The seventh step to implementing a team vision is to outline milestones and

progress measurement. Create visibility of progress so that everyone knows and

understands exactly how far the team has progressed in reaching each goal.

Visibility is a key step in driving ownership and accountability. I would

suggest you add in sensible milestones for each of your goals. The longer the

time period in question the more milestones you should add in. This is

good project management plus it gives everyone a more immediate sense of

purpose and achievement. Goals to be achieved in 12 months don't really seem

as real as the ones that need to be achieved in this month. Creating lots of

little goals on a journey will make achieving the final end goal a lot

easier. So in summary create a vision of how your team will support the wider

business goals. Make sure your team understands and believes in the team

vision and they will be more motivated and more focused on maintaining team

direction. Higher motivation levels and more focus generally means better

results. Getting the team interested and behind where you want to take the team

also helps team happiness and provides the leader a lot of satisfaction. To

recap the seven ways to create a team vision while linking company strategy to

your team are firstly company strategy understand your team's contribution.

Secondly what problems are you really solving? Third creating a relatable

vision. Fourth set clear and measurable goals. Fifth break down the goals into

team inputs. Sixth assigning ownership of individual goals and then seventh

outline milestones and progress measurements. And if you have any

questions on creating a team vision please leave them in the comment section

below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look

forward to speaking to you again soon.