The challenge we’re going to talk about today is one that all leaders face, but too many of them face it alone. I’ve been teaching, coaching and mentoring business owners and leaders for 2 decades now and these same points come up time and time again. The first goal everyone wants is to work less hours for more money, and that’s as much true for those in a role as it is for business owners. In fact, it’s true for everyone. If you were offered more holidays for the same salary, would you take it, of course you would. If you could increase your profits without working harder, would you? Of course you would if only you knew how.
Today’s topic is all about the second most common goal for business owners and leaders. How do I get my business to run without me, or how do I take a step back. Today, I’m going to give you a way to do that.
Today we’re going to talk about vision. Before you start thinking ‘not that again’, I’m going to show you a way to think about vision differently, in a way that’s more meaningful and useful.
Every leader understands the importance of vision but as your business begins to grow, so vision begins to leak, it dulls, and it gets lost in the complexity of organisational life. You believe you’ve covered it, perhaps in your monthly meetings but the reality is, we never talk about, share and project the vision enough. We assume people heard what we said, and we think people are sharing it too, but the bucket leaks as the vision is projected through the organisation.
We’re building vision promotors.
My career started in the hotel and hospitality industry and latterly I was part of the team that trained the staff in some of the biggest hotel chains in Europe. The single biggest impact on customer experience in that and every industry is the ability of the customer facing staff to promote the vision of the organisation. For most staff, they simply cannot do that because the vision had got lost before it even reached them – how on earth could they then promote the vision and deliver an exceptional experience to customers!
Your team carry their version of your vision.
Remember the leaky bucket and the fact that messages become diluted as they filter through the organisation. It’s the same with vision. If you are not continually talking about, sharing and promoting the vision, your team will carry and promote their own version. Scaling a successful organisation really is about how you work the vision into everything you do and your team does. It becomes the very core of your purpose.
Read more about organisational health here
Read more about purpose here
4 little words that can kill vision promotion.
“It’s not my job”. When it comes to vision promotion, it easy to think that it’s the job of the business owner or leader when in fact it’s everyone’s job. Those 4 little words and the attitude behind them is one of the most common reasons you cannot take a step back or hand over responsibility in your business and achieve that second goal. Read more about leadership strategy here.
Everyone in your organisation should be carrying and promoting the vision.
Everyone represents your organisation in some way, whether it’s how they talk about it outside of work, how they talk to each other, or how they talk to your customers and suppliers. Your job is helping them to understand the role they are already fulfilling, helping them to do a better job, and gain acknowledgement for their achievements.
Way back in my hotel industry days, one of our main training challenges was making sure the company’s vision and brand values were filtering through the whole organisation so that when a customer called to make a booking, their experience was consistent with what they actually experienced with the front-line staff, and right through their stay in the hotel. Their perception matched their experience.
Are your front-line and customer facing staff able to carry and promote the vision that you as the business owner or leader created. Is your whole team able to carry and promote the vision when they talk to each other and talk outside of work. Until they can, your business will never be able to grow and scale without you. It may tick along quite nicely while you take a holiday etc. but truly letting go is impossible unless your team can carry and promote the vision into future generations of the organisation.
Here are 2 things that get in the way.
Working with as many organisations as I have over the years, there are a few things that get in the way of empowering every level in your team to become a vision carrier and promoter.
The first reason; many organisations don’t have a vision that is promotable. By that I mean that it’s not crystal clear at the top so there’s no way it can ever by carried or promoted by your team. “If it’s misty at the top, it’ll be foggy on the ground.” If the vision is even a little unclear for you as owner and leader, it’s going to get even less clear for the second, third and fourth tier in the organisation. One of the ways this shows up in an organisation is in your Net Promotor Score (Google it), because your customers’ experiences are not matching up to their expectations.
The second thing that gets in the way is that sometimes as leaders, we confuse responsibility and role. As the business owner, leader or director, you understand that your role is to promote vision, but that’s different to the responsibility every single person in the organisation has to carry it. If that responsibility is not communicated to me as an employee, then I’m not going to do it, not necessarily because I don’t want to, but because I can’t.
We all have those pivotal moments in our careers when we learned something that changed our world. One of those for me was back in 2005 when I attended a team meeting ran by one of my team, Ben (I shared his story in my delegation as a leadership strategy blog). Briefly, Ben was an emerging leader to whom I had delegated responsibility and ownership of a project. Anyway, the meeting I attended was one of our regular monthly review and planning sessions so I wasn’t expecting anything out of the usual, but what changed my life was seeing and hearing Ben carry, project and promote the vision to his team is such a way that I began to think to myself, I could pack up and leave it all to you because you’re doing a better job at promoting vision than I did. It was such a proud and thrilling moment and gave me the leverage to achieve that second goal – how to take a step back and the business (almost) runs itself.
I’ve found that many business owners, leaders or directors have never experienced the rush, the joy, the thrill of sitting in a meeting and watching another leader in the organisation promote an even more compelling vision than they’ve been able to.
If you are even going to be in a position to take a step back from your business and have it run by itself, not just in the short term, but for future generations, I believe you must work towards building your team with vision carriers and promoters.
Your aim should be to transition your people from ‘benefiting from the vision’ to ‘participating in the vision’. Your employees benefit from the vision at its most basic level, because they have a job in a growing organisation but empowering them to participate in the vision requires additional focus and planning, (if you want some help, drop me a line).
We’ve all heard of Word-of-Mouth marketing, what that actually means in the context we are discussing today, is that your customers become vision carriers and promoters too! In marketing speak, that’s creating raving fans. Every satisfied customer carries the vision you created when they talk about your products or services, whether it’s a hotel experience, food or any other kind of product. We’ve all experienced that when we talk about a positive experience with our friends. We don’t think of it as promoting a vision, it’s just sharing experiences, but it’s still part of what we are talking about today.
Our world is changing faster than ever with free access to information about anything, anytime we want it. That’s giving our customers more control than ever, with more credibility than ever. It’s one thing to sell a product or service and provide an exceptional customer experience. It’s a completely different thing for that customer to then go on and promote your business to others. (See all the content I have on Relationship Marketing)
Let’s take this a step further
What’s the one question every one of your prospects asks? Not out loud but this is the bottom line: Does this business or organisation care about me now? The degree to which you can get your customer to answer that question with a yes, is equal to the number of raving fans that you are creating, which connects to the number of customers who carry the vision, and the number of customers who promote the vision. Do you really care about your customers, do you care about your people or do you just care about growing your business.
Perhaps that’s something worth taking to your marketing team and all the social media noise that’s created when people just shout about what they’re doing.
Let’s circle back to today’s question – How can I get my business to run without me.
We’ve talked about the clear link between word-of-mouth, creating raving fans and vision promotors in our customers. Now let’s transfer that into our team. Creating raving fans in your team may sound a little strange, after all, it’s expected that your staff will automatically rave about their employer. I think we all know that’s not true in many cases. If it were, no one would ever resign!
One of the simplest ideas I implemented is to get everybody together in the morning and say “today our goal and our mission is to let everyone know that we really care about each other and the people that we will interact with”. What was the result? Fans and vision carriers who felt involved, energised and inspired. They talked with each other and others, inside and outside the organisation. These vision carriers then go on to becoming vision promotors which means that you are creating a culture and vision in an organisation that doesn’t rely on one person (you) to carry it.
The next thing I did was to capture and share stories, and systemise that process.
We all know the power of stories, good marketeers and salespeople use them all the time.
Often used externally, but my learning was that there is incredible power in stories when shared internally. Let’s say you have team of 25, doesn’t have to be 25 but in an organisation around that number, not everybody talks with everybody else everyday. So capturing and sharing customer and staff stories in team meetings proved to be a game-changer in terms of how the team knew that we cared about each other and our customers, which empowered them to own and carry the vision forward.
Include some time in your team meetings where you capture, share and record stories, not just file them away as testimonials or case studies.
Taking this a step further – ask yourself “What did I do today to promote the vision?”
The key word there is ‘today’. It’s easy for us to say that you’re working on something, or something great is happening soon, but there has to be something every day. It doesn’t have to be huge; it can be just a small thing like a thank you card to a customer or catching a team member doing a great job. Of course there have been many times when I’ve looked at myself and said, I was so busy, I did nothing today to promote the vision. My advice to myself and to you is to make this one of the top one or two things that you do because if somehow, you get so busy and forget the ‘today’ part, then you are not being the best leader you can possibly be, which means that your goal of stepping back is not getting any closer.
When you and those who report to you do this with their teams too, and you do this on a daily basis, like anything, it begins to build habit and momentum. Your mind is open to more ideas, and you’re collecting more stories, and your meetings take a more inspirational tone rather than an informational tone.
Here are 3 things that you can do to start moving towards a position where your business runs without you.
Start where you are; the first suggestion I can give you is to do what I call it ‘vision inventory’. You can do this by simply asking your team “what do you think is the vision of our organisation and why are we here”. You are probably going to hear some things that encourage you and you’re going to hear some things that discourage you, but you need to find out where you are starting from. Do a vision inventory and don’t assume that people understand why they are here.
Use what you have; I think sometimes in the business world we think if we had more money we could do more things. Many times more money creates less thinking because you have a lot more resources. In terms of word of mouth, there are things that you can do that don’t cost you anything. I believe social media has a place, but it can be overinflated, and most of it is free and an ideal place to carry and promote the vision internally and externally.
Do what you can; this goes back to ‘what did you do today to promote the vision’. It’s not about conquering the world, but you can do one thing every day to promote vision through others who can carry it and promote it themselves.
What I hope I’ve been able to show you today is that to let go, you have to hand over responsibility to others. Not just responsibility for tasks and activities – I showed you how to do that here: Delegation as a leadership strategy. But to hand over responsibility for carrying and promoting the vision to others throughout your organisation and on through your customers to your prospects. Now you’re building an organisation that has a future without you and into future generations.
To refuse to do so is simply going to ensure that when you leave your department, division or organisation, the vision is going to leave with you. If your goal is for everybody to think back on the good old days when you were at the helm, then keeping responsibility for vision to yourself is an excellent way to ensure that outcome because the vision left with you. If you want to build a multi-generational organisation, something that’s not simply going to outlive you, but maybe even be better after you, you’ve got to raise up vision promotors and create vision carriers at every level in the organisation. And that’s your role.
To get some help with building vision into everything you do, or indeed anything else to do with growing people and scaling businesses, get in touch for a chat.
That’s it, I hope it’s useful.
Work with me:
I help owners, founders and leaders create a scalable business that works without them, build a world-class team, and 10x profitability. Book a call with me here to see if we could work together.
Remember, there are only three types of people – those who make things happen, those who wait for things to happen, and those who talk about why things don’t happen for them. Which one are you?
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