Did We Lose Direction?
Perhaps you think the statement that your colleagues and even more so you yourself lack vision and purpose is complete nonsense. As a matter of fact, the very goal of a typical transformation project is creating vision and purpose for the employees.
But wait! We all have many visions in our imaginations – i.e. mental images of how something could be in the future. We have a vision of our next holiday, retirement, afterlife or our team’s performance in the next sprint. All these visions compete for mental capacity, fuelled by their purpose and ultimately the meaning for us.
Of course, every initiative has a definable vision and a purpose. The key question, however, is whether the vision and purpose of the initiative have a sufficient impact on you and your colleagues – i.e. whether the vision and purpose of the initiative come to mind often enough when you are making day-to-day work decisions.
The claim is not that people have lost all meaning in their lives and no longer have any vision at all, but that the vision and purpose of a particular initiative are not sufficiently represented in everyday working life.
Not Taking Decisions To Overcome Obstacles
The vision and purpose allow us to be enduring, motivated, and take the right decisions to overcome obstacles that wait between starting point and target of an initiative’s journey.
However, when we look at employee performance from the perspective of large initiatives, we often observe a mismatch of employee behaviour and the needs of the initiative. Employees lack the inner compass, so to speak, that points in the direction of success for the initiative.
Not Knowing The Target
The trivial main reason why the vision and the purpose of an initiative do not play the desired role in the minds of employees is that they are not known, or at least not known well enough.
For example, employees may know that a certain website is needed for a business plan, but they lack the crucial information that the business plan has a window of opportunity, and the website must be available at a certain time.
Confusion About The Way
The next reason is that employees lack the imagination as to how the purpose of an initiative is to be achieved, or they have conflicting ideas about different ways.
For example, if a particular initiative is intended to increase IT security, the goal can be achieved with centralised security measures such as firewalls. The same goal can be achieved with decentralised measures such as hardening individual IT components. Both approaches can lead to the same result but require different courses of action.
Insufficient Presence
As we have discussed above many initiatives, tasks, deadlines, goals etc. are competing for the employees’ attention.
Even with an initially well calibrated inner compass and clear sense of direction focus can easily get lost along the way. Daily team rituals deal with other aspects and top-down provisioning of direction dies down. The result is that the progress of an initiative is coming to halt in the middle of nowhere.
Vision and purpose of an initiative are not sufficiently reflected in daily decisions and priorities because they are communicated “too quietly” – e.g. not often enough or not on a prominent place in team rituals.
Conflicting Interests
Sometimes vision and purpose of an initiative are well understood but they are conflicting with other interests.
For example, one of the goals of an initiative is to simplify the company’s application landscape. At the same time, your team’s goals include the development of a new application using a new exotic technology. Also, personal motives can lead an employee to follow a path that is for example more convenient.
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Christoph TonkProgram and Project Management, Allianz
