People don't follow strategies, they follow people!
Do you see your vision of what you will accomplish! Most leaders that step into such a role, do envision how they will make an impact!
Exercise:
Visualize it, draw it, record it on your iPhone. (Tip: I recorded myself on my iPhone speaking about my vision and have gone back to this video time and time again, when I felt discouraged, confused and helped me get back on track).
The raw draft of your vision may first and foremost be yours, but my tip is - have the guts to share it and you will be surprised as to how effective it is to show this to your team. You don't have to have all the answers, solutions, etc. The most important part of the vision is to show the “progress” from A to Z and how you envision to get there. Give them the power and opportunity to make the vision come alive.
Example:
My best example of how I did this, was when I stepped into ALSO as the Managing Director. Before taking the job, I had made my vision on a 1-page PowerPoint slide, illustrating where I would take ALSO. I had drawn it out and that became my roadmap to take upon such huge responsibility at a young age. In the first month, I interviewed several of the Directors, Business Unit Managers, and a key question I asked every single person was: “What is it ALSO do?”. To my surprise, I got multiple answers and versions, which is normal by the nature of people's different perceptions and interpretations of their roles. However what surprised me, was that in all the answers, there was a certain hesitation to recognize our role in the market (Which was extremely misleading, as the dominant market leader with 43 % market share). So why was this? Where did this come from? I decided to change my question. “What if ALSO didn't exist?”. With this question, people suddenly got bolder, more direct, and pride came to them to speak of our role in the market.
Connecting all the dots, I realized that people had never really been allowed to visually see the WHAT - what ALSO do?
The first thing I launched with the team, was a new tagline/slogan/vision:
“We Make Technology Accessible to the market”
This is something you can see, envision, and take ownership of! Every person in the organization was part of the HOW we do that! This may seem simple, but trust me when I say, it created the first steps to get the organization together as one team and the empowerment from this, was truly impressive, because people started using it, referencing it with their own words and it became their compass and roadmap.
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