SL Mastery – VISION

Strategies, Stories, and Stimulus for Leading with Respect Along with Results

Chapter 9.

What Do Team Members Want from Their Leader?

Vision

A multinational corporation, that once, led the market in manufacturing several electronic goods, such as smartphones and computers is now on the brink of obsoleting because of the mixed messages it is sending to the market. Once a giant and the pioneer in the industry began with a lot of promise, successful with innovative product designs, features, and price points. Over time, the company’s vision began to weaken with multiple diversifications and getting defocused, blaming the market pressures and following the ‘me too’ path, which was all too apparent to the customers.

The leaders were finding it challenging to articulate a clear VISION for the future of the organization, and as a result, its products started to become undifferentiated. The lack of direction meant they were serving everyone and anyone, just so they did not miss the boat. Customers were no longer excited about the company’s products, and sales declined. At the same time, the company’s brand identity was weak and indistinct, since it has not invested in building a strong brand that would resonate with the customers resulting in a lack of product personality as the customers found it difficult to recognize its products versus its competitors.

When leaders cannot create a vision for the organization, several issues propel caused by inconsistent messaging, such as:

1. Confusion Among Stakeholders – Causing ambiguity and confusion among customers, investors, partners, and employees about what the company stands for, what its goals are, and how it intends to achieve them.
2. Weak Brand Identity – Weaken the company’s brand identity, making it difficult for customers to recognize and connect with the brand.
3. Loss of Credibility – Damaging the company’s credibility and reputation, causing customers and investors to lose trust in the company.
4. Internal Confusion – Affecting alignment among employees, making it challenging to work together effectively and achieve the company’s goals, while misallocating resources can happen.
5. Missed Opportunities – A weakened reputation and lack of customer recognition decrease customer loyalty, problematic to charge a premium price, as it may also reduce market share. It makes it difficult to connect with customers and differentiate itself from the competition, to achieve business objectives.

When attracting customers and retaining them pose a question, such challenges mirror within the organization.

A weak company vision and brand identity cause challenges to implementing strategic HR practices:

1. Difficulty in attracting top talent.
2. Reduces employee engagement and productivity.
3. Creates lack of alignment in values, mission, and vision, henceforth, unclear business goals which pose performance management measures inconsistencies.
4. Difficulty in succession planning to build a strong pipeline of future leaders when identifying candidates that do not align with the company’s current values and mission.
5. Increases turnover and increases recruitment costs.

TIPS: Servant Leaders can begin to listen and understand from the customers the organizational strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to develop a more accurate picture of the organization from their perspective. Communicate a compelling vision and mission that motivates the employees. Create an environment that fosters collaboration, initiatives, innovation, and creativity, encourages sharing, and is agile to changing market conditions. Invest in the employee’s development by providing training, resources, and support for their growth and well-being to support their success. Lead by example by demonstrating the values and behaviors important to the organization by modeling ethics, honesty, integrity, and care to build trust and accountability with the teams.

By consistently listening to the customers and employees as the organization is polishing its messaging towards its vision and mission, refining actions according to their advice, and feedback and collaboratively focusing on the compelling vision created it engages the stakeholders within.

Empowering the employees with opportunities to be part of such a big exercise, brings them closer to feeling and appreciating the sheer effort and kinship with the organizational purpose and vision as they contributed to its implementation.

________

Dr. Maria Pressentin is a Servant Leadership Strategist, a multi-award-winning behavioral scientist, and a leadership development professional, Maria helps people shift their mindset and apply serving-leader skills to their daily interactions. Her work involves incorporating competencies of servant leadership in organizational functional and strategic roles to build long-term vitality in businesses. Her latest book is titled “Key Factors and Use Cases of Servant Leadership Driving Organizational Performance”, IGI Global, 2021.