Camille Rapacz: Do you have a clear and compelling vision for the future of your company, your team, your project, or yourself? Having a strong vision is one of the several key attributes of good leadership. And while it sounds simple, it is often underutilized. When it's done well, it guides all your efforts toward a common purpose, and it helps you make decisions, prioritize, and align a team so they're working most effectively.
So today we're going to talk about the importance of vision and what kinds of problems this tool can solve for you.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hey, George. Hey, Camille. Now, I know you're familiar with this saying, begin with the end in mind, you've heard this before. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cause this is a Stephen Covey thing.
You're a big Stephen Covey fan.
George Drapeau: If you could see people what I'm holding up right now, I have my Franklin planner that I got from a Stephen Covey time management and personal leadership class back in 1998. And I no longer use the physical planner, you know, because online, but I've created an Evernote template that basically replicates the format of this stuff.
And I use that format and that methodology to this day. The single best training online training I've personally taken in my career because of my need for connecting vision with behaviors and all that. So yeah, kind of a fan.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I think we're going to end up talking about all seven of his habits. So he's the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
And I am sure we will talk about all seven of them this year. But this idea of starting with the end in mind, it's his habit number two in his framework. And I bring this up when we talk about vision, because it's another way that I like to think about this idea of, having a vision. And sometimes we think about having a vision as just this really big, you know, unattainable thing.
But it's so it can be so tangible and so useful. So I want to talk about how to put this idea of starting with the end in mind or having a vision of where you're heading. Because it's really critical to being effective as a leader, but as a human, to be honest, just planning out your stuff. So it's how it's going to help us prioritize, align the team, all those good things.
But it's also sometimes one of the hardest things I find leaders come up against is when we start talking about, well, what's your vision for this? Oftentimes when I'm coaching people, that's when I'll get this blank, like, huh, what do I want to have happen? So I don't want to say this is. Like, Oh, easy tool, everybody should just use it because in some ways it is, but in some ways it's not.
There are some places where I think it's really easy to figure out what do you want this outcome to look like? And other times when you're going to get stuck. So it's something to practice.
George Drapeau: I'm challenged by this all the time. I mean, as I'm hearing you talk, I'm thinking, what am I doing right now to set a vision for the organization that I run?
And I can clearly think about gaps between what I'm telling and what I should be. Absolutely. There's gaps in my own setting out of vision. I don't think it's easy, but it's
highly worthwhile.
Camille Rapacz: Oh highly worthwhile. It's one of those things when you think about how useful it is to make yourself go through a thought exercise It's painful.
It's hard to do whatever like thing you're trying to process whether it's critical thinking or problem solving or vision setting They're hard things to do, and so we tend to not necessarily make time for them because they're hard, but that's also why they're so valuable. Like that hard work that you're putting your brain through, putting yourself through, it pays off in really big ways. So yeah, super important for us to talk about.
I also want to make the point here that this isn't just about having a big vision for your company or your department. This also comes down to some day to day stuff. So I want to talk about how you use this tool in different levels and different areas of complexity in your work.
I think I've got like three main areas for us to talk about just to give people a sense of how this isn't just like, don't check out just because you're thinking, Oh, I don't, this isn't my job. I don't set the vision for the company or anything like that. No, no, no. Anybody who wants to do leadership well, you got to have this vision thing down. Even if it's just for yourself.
So let's start with why vision matters. Actually, the way we're going to tackle this is we're going to talk about why vision matters from the perspective of what goes badly, what goes wrong, what problems get created when we're not doing it well. So that will help us sort of frame around, the reason why you need a good vision here is if you're experiencing these things, it's one of the reasons is usually this vision problem. It's not like the panacea and going to solve all your problems, but it certainly is a big core element to why a lot of these problems come up.
So let's start with the big obvious one, which is vision for an organization. Okay. So you were just kind of talking about this, George, talking about just having this big picture of where the organization is heading.
So I'm curious if you can think like back in your past. You're such a seasoned leader now, all these years of experience to pull from, think about in the past, like, was there a time when you were working for a company or even a big part of the organization, you know, like your whole division or something where you realized, Oh.
We don't have a really clear vision and that's what causing X, Y, or Z problem. Can you think of any?
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely. I can think of two instances off the top of my head. So I'll pick one. Yes. At one company I worked, we hired , some VP to run a piece of our business and he was chaotic. And fast moving and alpha male type of personality and wanted to get things done quickly, but he was basically random in his thinking process.
I remember the 1st presentation he gave to organization. Look at the slides. And I remember most of us in the room thinking these slides do not make sense. Sentence fragments. It was just the thoughts did not make sense. Not only did he not have a vision, he didn't have any coherent thought really going on.
This guy didn't have vision. And so we were running at random in the organization and we couldn't really coalesce. We couldn't work coherently together. It was just a mess. It was just chaos and morale went down and we didn't know how well we were performing. People were quitting left and right, and he was firing people left and right and hiring new people who didn't really know their purpose when they came on board, because there was no larger vision for them to plug into.
There really wasn't. So here's my, not my challenge back to you, but I want to ask you this. The one thing about him that I thought was interesting and maybe good was pace. He did things very, very quickly. And what he wanted to do was he would, we would go after some business plan that he thought was valid, try it for a little bit.
We would see that it didn't work out. And so he'd get the leadership team together. We'd immediately pivot and try something else. Some other idea that he had and pivot quickly, quickly, quickly. Now, I know people talk about the benefit of iterative development, right, doing things in small chunks and not having to over plan everything.
What's the difference here? This guy had no vision, but he moved quickly, but I don't think that worked. Other organizations move quickly and it works. Why? What's going on with that?
Camille Rapacz: I feel like you just answered it, which is if you don't know where you're headed, then your pivots are random.
Yeah. you're headed, then you're being iterative. Then you're actually iteratively improving towards a destination. But if you haven't clarified where you're headed, then it's basically like, you know, I'm throwing darts at the wall, hoping to hit something.
George Drapeau: That's exactly how this guy was.
Yeah, you're right. He was thrashing.
Camille Rapacz: It's our spaghetti at the wall solution, right. That we talk about, like, I'm just going to throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks and that's what he's doing. The other problem that happens with this is it creates this environment where even if one of those ideas that you pivoted to was a good one, the team probably didn't execute well on it.
And so it wasn't set up for success because they didn't understand the purpose or the vision behind why we were doing it. So without that, the morale and the performance and all that is going down. So you're not executing on the plan well. You know, even a good idea goes bad,
George Drapeau: That absolutely did happen.
You're right. Also, this reminds me. This happens so much and we were just pivoting all the time that we ended up spending more of our time wondering what's he going to do next instead of what's the business we need to focus on? Like, why should we be worried about what move the leader is going to be making next?
That's, that's a distraction.
Camille Rapacz: When I think about what goes wrong here, I think about the idea that if you don't set this clear vision for people this is where we're going. Which means I both have a vision, but I can also communicate it well. And we'll talk about communication in an upcoming episode.
But both are required. I can't just hold a vision in my head. If that vision isn't clear to people, they're going to fill in the gaps. So kind of what you were just talking about, like, they're going to worry about where we're going next with a lack of a vision, or I'm going to just make one up for myself.
Like, I guess that means we're doing this, like, we're gonna just fill that gap in with information, that's what we do because our brains were sort of meaning making machines. Like, our brains are trying to give meaning to anything that's happening. So we're trying to understand, why is he doing this?
And we'll put a reason to it, but everybody's doing it individually. Yeah. We're not all on the same page about it, which is why you execute poorly, because George thinks, well, that's because he wants us to go this direction. And then your colleague next door thinks, no, I think he's trying to go this other direction.
Absolutely. And you don't know. So you're, you're executing differently. So I think that's the key problem. You have to remember that if you don't tell people what you are headed towards and what your expectations are, they will come up with their own answer to that question. No matter what. So that's number one.
But the other thing you talked about is, you know, this idea of just the morale of people.
I often hear people say, yeah, I don't know. Like, they lose faith in their leadership. You're losing trust with your people because you aren't being really clear with them about what we're trying to accomplish. And so they start to think, do our leaders actually know what they're doing?
Right? You start to question that. So that lack of vision is, is killing the performance of the organization overall, just from that perspective. It also means that the organization, and this speaks to your example directly, it will lack a solid strategy and plan for success. If I don't know where I'm headed, I don't have a vision, there is no way I can create a strategy around that. No, you know, you just can't.
So if I don't know where I'm going to go, what my destination looks like, how am I going to say the, how, what, who, and when of all of the work that has to happen, I haven't said where we're going. I haven't put that pin on the map to say, here's where we're all going to go.
Sure. There's a bunch of different routes to get there, but imagine how many routes there are from where you are now to literally anywhere on the map versus a specific pin on the map. That's the problem you're trying to solve.
George Drapeau: Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thanks for helping me bring back that memory.
Camille Rapacz: This pod should probably just be George's leadership therapy or something like that because that's often what we're doing. It's awesome. Okay, let's talk about another variation on this vision problem.
So that one was about the organization level. Now let's just talk about like the team level, the department level. So there's little old me running a team of, I don't know, it could just be like four people. It doesn't mean you have a big team. It doesn't matter what size, but you have a team. So I know that for me, I have definitely had times when I think in the past of where I was leading a team and I realized I had not set that team, just my four people, any sort of vision.
Cause I just didn't think it was that important for them. So it's an easy thing to miss. Cause I'm like, it's just us. And there's four people and we're doing fine. But later realizing I'm not helping them be successful at all. Like part of the reason we're struggling is I haven't given them any clarity here.
I'm curious if you've got like your own personal experience. This is something that comes up in the early days of becoming a leader where you don't realize that that's part of your job.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely. I can think early on when I was a new manager and I was working with people more senior than myself.
I naturally felt that they all knew where we were going, what we're doing, because I would hear conversations. They would talk about what's the architecture we need to support for the thing that we're building. But I realized now they were a bunch of individual, very smart people who worked well together, but they didn't have a coherent vision.
And I didn't know enough to assert like, Hey, let's get on board with one common vision. What we're trying to do. I didn't realize that that was part of my role. And that's why I didn't step in and fill that gap. And partly as a result, the team just kind of dissolved. We got overtaken by a larger group.
That imposed, that did have a vision and things went better, but these guys, no.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I think that this is something that as a leader, you can think, well, the organization, the top leaders, their job is to set a vision. And I just then tell my team what that is. And that's not what I'm talking about. Right.
This is for our team, and you gave a perfect example of what can happen, which is, well, nobody sees the value of that team operating as a team. And so it's going to get, you know demolished, sucked into some other team. Something's going to happen. That team's going to go away because nobody sees the value in it.
So what is the vision for your team to be delivering value inside the organization to its internal customers, which ultimately leads to the value it provides to the Customer customer. And if you don't know what that is, you haven't set that out for your team. Like, hey, this is what good looks like to me of our team. We want to be the team that as, indispensable in this organization.
What does that look like?
George Drapeau: This reminds me of a class that I took a long time ago when I was at Sun called finance for non finance managers. And during the course of that we had a two day simulation game where you're all in small teams supposed to create a small business.
You see the lessons we had learned and one of the key messages, the key lessons they told us when you play the game is when you're deciding on the product you're going to build, first decide what kind of product organization do you want to be. Like, are you the low cost leader? Are you the high quality person?
Are you the customer service leader? Decide basically your vision for who you are because all your decisions are driven by that. And I remember very clearly there were two kind of alpha male types in that group who didn't listen to the message and they just started hacking out ideas. And we suffered as a result because our ideas didn't have coherence.
There were other teams that decided, Oh, we're the low cost space. And so they knew very clearly what kinds of decisions to make about the product and what not to make. I'm saying this because I think that's a very tangible example for small businesses. Vision can look as simple as that.
It can like, this is who we are. We want to make sure that we get the lowest prices in town. Everything falls from that. All right. Yep.
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. And you can do it for your team. You might not say we're the low cost team. But there's another version of that, like you might be like, Hey, I want us to be the team that is the most responsive to our internal customers.
So our vision is that we respond to, emails in 24 hours. Sometimes we think about this as just, let's just set clear expectations. That's really what this is. My vision for us is that we are this type of a department and therefore it leads to, these are the expectations.
These are our working norms. Like this is what it means for us to operate in that way. And when you do that, everybody's on the same page about that. It serves that team itself because they know what good looks like now, but also it serves the rest of the organization. Yeah. When you do it right, because you're like, Oh, and now everybody's very pleased with us as a department because we're providing whatever your services, it could be your little internal it department, you could be running the customer service department, like whatever it is, you're setting a vision that's clearly for what the purpose of your department is.
When you do that with your team, all of those other things fall out of it, and it helps your team stay aligned. It helps keep morale up, it prevents people from doing wasteful work, which I think is one of the biggest things that I see people struggling with, it's just, people are kind of off doing things that they think are the right things to work on and it's not what the boss wants them to do at all and. It's because they haven't been really clear about Here's the vision which out of which comes that means this is what our priorities are and this is what we're focused, this is how we work together all of those other things fall out of it But you have to start with that end in mind. First, what is it that I want this to look like at the end of the day?
Like what are we striving for and everything falls out of that? This also kind of relates to, you know, how we talk about people don't quit jobs. They quit their bosses or their managers? This is 1 of the number 1 reasons if you as a leader of a team are not giving them a clear vision and direction for the work, who wants to work in that environment? Yeah. People lose faith. Yeah, yeah. They get like, I'm kind of bored now. I'm not really sure what I'm doing. I go to work and I do stuff, but I don't know if I'm achieving anything. I hear that a lot.
George Drapeau: Why are people with a plan so appealing to us?
Camille Rapacz: Well, we like to go do things that have purpose. I think it's human nature that we want to have a meaningful impact on things.
We want to do things with purpose. We want to be difference makers. We want to make a difference in some way. We want to influence something like that's kind of hardwired into us. We're always trying to make a difference in some way and that shows up in our work.
Absolutely. So again, if my boss doesn't give it to me, I'm probably just going to make something up for myself. Or if I'm not getting it and I can't make it up in that environment, I'm going to go to another job where I can. Because otherwise, this job just showing up to get a paycheck, most people that's not how they roll.
That's not very satisfying. I mean, that's why when you look at the things that motivate people, pay is not the number one motivator. It's actually all these other difference maker things.
Let's hit number three. Okay. So this goes even to another level of granularity, but what happens when you're the facilitator of a meeting doesn't have the vision for the meeting?
I know this sounds like, what? A vision for the meeting? What it really is is start with the end in mind. What do I want to accomplish? You're already making faces.
George Drapeau: I was looking at the notes before we went on air, and I got, you got a question for me here, and I read it, and I groaned, like, oh, yeah.
Camille Rapacz: Oh, that's what you were rolling your eyes at.
Yeah, okay. So, I know we just jumped down to the micro level of applying a vision, but this one is a big one for me. So, yeah, so I'm curious, George, if you had to guess, here's the question that made George roll his eyes. If you had to guess, what percentage of meetings in the course of your whole career, Lacked clear desired outcomes or meeting objectives? Not just an agenda, but the actual objective of the meeting.
George Drapeau: I read this question, the number that came to mind was 90 percent and then I got depressed. Like most meetings, most meetings I find are well intentioned, but lack, lack discipline. I have an example from earlier in the week in my own meeting, in my own meeting. It's an ongoing, basically status check meeting.
And I realized. I gave feedback to one of the people on the team who is great, great team member, but we were basically going through status of a bunch of things that were in crunch time to deliver, and it's going okay. And then one of the people in the meeting was starting to tell stories about the status of each project, and it was like bloating the time, and I just stopped the person and said, hey.
Less talking, more status. We have an hour, but this meeting should be a 30 minute meeting maximum. So we talked about it separately. And I realized the problem I have is I didn't really set out the, we knew what we were supposed to do, but I didn't say the objective is talk about triage status.
The whole style of meeting is triage status. We're not talking about how well people did or accomplishments. If you need to do that, that's separate, not this meeting. I myself wasn't absolutely clear. And so. Easy. Identify it. We correct it. It's going to be better next time. It's going to be great. But I didn't come into that meeting for the last few months being very clear about how we're going to do it or the I would say about the outcome.
Sure. The outcomes, but the rest of it, the goals or the behavior, how the meeting is supposed to be run. So that's me. And I think I'm pretty good at this. I would say most meetings that I go to No, no, not very well set up a run.
It's so rare that when I get into one of these, I'm impressed by the person. I want to find out who set up this meeting, who's responsible for this. I want to be your friend. That's how rare it is.
Camille Rapacz: It's true. It is very rare. I hear this one a lot. People actually come to me and just say, can you help me fix meetings in my organization?
Yes, I can, but it does start with, what do we want meetings in general? What's our vision for how meetings go and how they serve us in this organization? But every single meeting has to have a very clearly defined outcome. What do I want to accomplish in this time, in this room? Because meetings take up a bunch of time and energy.
They're very expensive. If you just sit in the room and count the people and the salaries and you start doing the math, monetary cost is high. The time cost is high and the morale cost is high. How many meetings do you go to them? And you're kind of like, Oh, I just have so many meetings. I see people looking at, and I've been this person looking at my calendar, looking at all those meetings and thinking, do I need to go to all those?
Cause what am I going to do the real work? It's killing productivity, it's killing morale. And it does come down to if you don't set a really clear vision for meetings in general, but every specific meeting, then it's going to go badly. And you bring up a really good point of it does require you to think through these details.
So I always take people through this set of, you know, we've talked about meetings on the podcast before, but we'll probably talk about it again. Just how you make sure that every meeting goes well. I think the number one thing is part of this vision of how you want meetings to go needs to be that every time you're facilitating a meeting, you are taking the time to prepare, not just an agenda, but clear objectives and then what behaviors you are going to ask of the people in that meeting for it to happen and that's the part that's hard because you have all these meetings and then you think, and on top of that, I'm supposed to also prepare.
But yeah, you have to prepare in order for them to go well, because you also brought up a good example of what is a 60 minute meeting could then turn into a 30 minute meeting. And that really is the goal. How do we shorten the amount of time we're meeting so it's effective? So yeah, this is a really big one. And it can apply to a lot of very small things, having set a vision, whether you're setting a vision for How this day is going to go, how this week is going to go, how this project is going to go, how this event is going to go.
You should be thinking about this outcome first, all the time. How do I want this to go? What is a good outcome? I mostly say to folks, what's a good outcome look like? And we just talk about, we kind of envision, what's a good outcome look like for this?
Okay, and then we work backwards from there. Well, then then what does that mean we need to do in order to get to that outcome? And that's just even somebody who has to have a really tough one on one with one of their employees. Well, let's talk about what a good outcome looks like and then walk backwards from that.
George Drapeau: I would say, also, on the flip side, when you get good at this, at constructing and running a crisp meeting with clear outcomes and a good cadence and good behaviors, people will notice because it is so rare. People will notice and guarantee they will come to you and say, Wow, that was one of the best meetings I've been into at all levels.
Senior leadership will come to you and say, wow, thanks. They will.
Camille Rapacz: Absolutely. It's not sad,
George Drapeau: but it's not rare, but it's true. You can be competitive. You can, this could be a competitive advantage for you if this is something you care about just by being crisp about this, which is not that hard to become, I think.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, I think that's a great point. If you are trying to really elevate yourself, stand out in a way in your organization as a leader, being really good at this particular skill is huge. And not all meetings are the same. So you have to get good at navigating, like how am I good at a meeting where I'm trying to get decisions made versus a meeting that's just trying to do collaborative brainstorming versus like there's different types of outcomes.
And you have to get good at how do I create the structure for the meeting, the structure is different depending on the outcome, but when you get good at that, and you start thinking that way and approaching it that way, it does get easier, by the way, it starts to become automatic, but you'll absolutely stand out, people will absolutely just notice like, oh, I I, I like that person's meetings.
And I know you've had that experience, where people like going to like your QBR versus others. Cause you're like, Oh, these are, I really learned something and they're really valuable and it doesn't feel like wasted time. People are actually moving through the agenda in a thoughtful way. All of that stuff is matters and people you're absolutely right.
People will notice. Because, unfortunately, most of the time we're all doing it very badly. So sad.
George Drapeau: I know. It's so spooky. You were talking about different times of meetings have different behaviors. It's so funny. Actually stole away and wrote a little note for myself saying different meeting types, different behaviors.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. We're alike. Yeah. Yeah. In our next episode, we're going to touch on this from a different angle, which is it's going to, it'll relate to meetings, but we're just going to talk about it from the standpoint of communication. So hold that thought for the next conversation because that's where we'll really get into this.
Interesting. Can't wait. Yes. All right. So let's wrap things up here. Creating a vision and communicating it. It doesn't always come easy, but it's totally worth doing. So I just want to note that sometimes it'll be really clear to you what that vision should be. And other times you will struggle. And it's different for everybody, but I do notice like for some things, some people are just like, Oh, I totally know what I want this, this, and this to look like.
And then there are other areas where they're just not sure. They just either haven't spent enough time thinking it through. They don't have enough information, whatever it is, they're struggling. So be, be just knowledgeable, just know that. Sometimes it'll be easy for you, and sometimes it won't be. It's still worth doing, and definitely worth it when you're not clear.
Because the more you can work to get clear, the better that's going to be. It's worth doing the hard brain work to make that happen.
The other part of this that I want to mention, which is why I teed up the next topic to be about communication, is that once you have a vision, you have to communicate it clearly.
There's no point in having a vision if you don't communicate it. You might as well have no vision at all. Secret vision. It being in your head doesn't do you any good. But I can't tell you. I know. Well, it's funny because this is one of those things that feels so obvious when we say it like this. Yeah. But I can't tell you how many times I have talked to a leader and my feedback to them will be, well, it seems like you don't have a clear vision here.
And they're like, oh no, I have a vision. And then they, they rattle it off and I'm like, oh, that's fantastic. Who else knows about it? Nobody. They haven't connected the dots. Because they see the vision as, well, it's, it's guiding me. So I'm good. Like, no, it should be guiding everybody. And so you have to be able to articulate it clearly.
So yeah, I know it sounds funny, but also is a very serious problem. So we'll talk more about communication next time. Okay. I look forward to that one. Yeah. All right. Any last thoughts on vision in leadership?
George Drapeau: I can't top that. That's excellent. All right.
Camille Rapacz: Awesome. Well, thank you for recording the pod with me today, George.
Thank you everybody for listening. I'm glad that we were able to bring some levity into this conversation for George. Yeah, I needed it. You were entertained. Sign of a good therapy session for you.
And if anybody wants to talk further about setting a vision, needs help setting a vision, needs help communicating a vision, just leadership stuff in general you can book a free consultation with me at camillerapaz. com slash book a call. There'll be a link in the show notes. I would love to talk to you about it. Awesome. All right. That's all I have for this week. And we'll be back in your ears next week. See you everybody.
