Shared Vision: "The Fifth Discipline" - Small Book bit -
The "Shared Vision" Byte - One of the five disciplines
“When people truly share a vision they are connected, bound together by a common aspiration”
This is an overview of the chapter about one of the five disciplines, “Shared Vision”. The amount of great content and wisdom summarised in a single chapter left me with a new perspective on how to gather a group behind a common vision. This article tries to share some of the key takeaways from it.
Most visions in today’s organizations unfortunately, at a closer look, are one group vision imposed on the rest. So why should people care? Will people believe the vision just because they have to?
There are visions and visions. Extrinsic visions are the ones focused on achieving something against an opponent (e.g. be the leader in the market). These are weak visions because they lose their powers once the goal is achieved, shifting the balance of innovation towards maintaining the status achieved. This results in the organization operating in a defensive position.
What leaders really need for continuous growth and development is an intrinsic vision, one that “uplifts people’s aspirations”.
The reason for this to be so important lies in this insight:
“Shared vision fosters risk taking and experimentation”
This is a desirable state for a truly innovation-inducing process. And it turns out that it also helps ensure commitment to the long-term goal of the business. One way to make sure people focus on the long-term goal is to make them “want to”, not “have to”. This can help create almost a self sustaining process.
It comes down to each individual “caring”, and “caring is personal”, writes Senge. This is important because the author also believes that shared visions emerge from personal visions.
Making people care fosters shared visions. Successful shared visions could lead to a mass of fully and truly committed people that in return keep the vision growing and expanding, helping the organization to grow and develop.
What can leaders do to create a shared vision?
The author suggests that leaders should communicate in a way that encourages everyone to share their vision so that everybody contributes to build and shape the shared vision. This starts by giving up the traditional approach of vision coming from the top or coming from an institutionalised planning process. These visions often do not build on personal visions and therefore do not create an environment where people get together and understand the common direction to take.
Another important aspect leadership should pay attention to is that “vision is not a solution to a problem”. If a vision is focused on a problem we have an extrinsic vision. Once the problem is solved the motivation in people declines because of a lack of a common aspiration that drives people’s efforts.
Unfortunately, when this happens, most managers make the situation worse by resorting to strategic planning processes in order to make people focus on new problems. But no planning can introduce the key personal aspect that a shared vision has.
“For those in leadership positions, what is most important is to remember that their visions are still personal visions. Just because they occupy a position of leadership does not mean that their personal vision is automatically “the organization’s vision”. When I hear leaders say “our vision” and I know they are really describing “my vision”, I recall Mark Twain’s words that the official “we” should be reserved for “kings and people with tapeworms”.”
How to build a Shared Vision?
The author acknowledges that it is not a glamorous process. Because it consists in listening to the organization and articulating a cohesive vision of what they are saying. The simple process of listening and collecting people’s feedback is often challenging enough in most organizations.
In order to build shared vision the author explores 3 important concepts:
enrollment
commitment
compliance
Enrollment
The “buy-into-vision” approach, very popular in many organizations, creates the wrong attitude and, in most cases, leads to compliance masked as commitment. Enrollment actually involves free choice of becoming part of an initiative.
An enrolled person is someone who “will do whatever can be done within the power of the law“. A person that buys into it can at best offer fake compliance.
Once a person is enrolled, the next step is getting to commit to the vision. Committing to a vision means feeling fully responsible to make the vision come true.
Commitment
A truly committed person, one that has the personal vision aligned with the shared vision, has a natural and unmatched passion in navigating the challenges along the way. A committed person takes risks, challenges assumptions and experiments, driven purely by an energy fuelled by personal mastery (one of the other 5 disciplines) and aspiration to achieve the vision.
A company of truly committed people has an enormous competitive advantage when it comes to innovation because it has unlocked inner dynamics that can almost self-sustain the vision and guarantee useful experimentation to achieve the vision.
“Still today, many managers are justifiably wary of whether the energy released through commitment can be controlled and directed. So, we settle for compliance and content ourselves with moving people up the compliance ladder”
Unfortunately the “prevailing ways of management” as Deming described them still hold us back from achieving our personal and collective best work.
Compliance
In the author’s experience, 90% of organizations achieve only some level of compliance in their members. In the context of compliance, Senge warns about different levels and the impact that each has in the business activities.
The best type of compliance, called “Genuine Compliance”, is embodied by an employee that acts as a “good soldier”, sees the benefits of the vision and does everything expected. Then, on a lower level in the scale of desirability is:
“Formal Compliance”a pretty good soldier
“Grudging Compliance”, does not see the benefit of the vision. Still does what’s expected but openly disagrees
“Noncompliance”, refuses to do what’s expected from them
“Apathy”, neither for nor against the vision
Surprisingly the author admits that the “Genuine Compliance” is the most problematic because the person is committed to the team, not the vision. And it is often very difficult to distinguish it from true commitment. Still, a company of genuinely compliant people is far more productive and effective than most organizations.
Visions, after exploring these aspects, do not appear as marketing stunts or PR materials to excite shareholders, but become a foundational stone to build an organization that can develop, grow and sustain its growth.
The Internet has allowed people to share stories more easily around different companies’ visions and how they operate to achieve them. The picture that is in front of our eyes says that most organizations get what they deserve. An ocean of compliant people that do not share the same passion as leadership and do not see the value of investing their full potential to reach a vision they don’t agree with or share.
When companies complain that people lack the passion at work, they are often describing in great detail a leadership failure to create and communicate a truly shared vision.