Vision: the often missing leadership ingredient

Why having a vision is critical to team success and how to assess it

One of the most important skills I look for from current and future leaders is to be able to communicate vision. Without a clear vision, it’s impossible to align between members of the same team — let alone people from different teams. This is a skill everyone in the team can develop — so when I say leadership, I don’t care about the job title. A new graduate is just as capable of demonstrating this as a vice president. In fact, the sooner you start developing these skills within your teams, the more effective they will be within your career.

The trouble is how do we assess the ability to set and communicate vision? I remember the annual engagement survey at various companies, where people are asked to rate their managers on their ability to set a vision for their team. Almost uniformly, this is where you’d see some of the least positive responses, which would be great if it was intuitively obvious to do something about. So, the issue would be quietly brushed under the carpet until next year.

I’ve inherited a large number of teams over the years, and one of the first tasks has been to work out what those teams are working towards and understand whether they are set up for success. I’ve also written and delivered hundreds of courses on management and leadership where I’ve looked to develop this skill and discussed it in innumerable 1:1s. The first step is convincing people that it’s necessary and that there is a problem. Luckily, I found this is easier than you might think. Try asking everyone this question to start the ball rolling:

Describe what problem you are working on in under 30 seconds.

I remember asking it in a manager training and saw a succession of people freeze up or proceed to try and reel off long waffling answers. Here are some warning flag answers I’d receive and what they meant.

• Describing the problem in terms of features they were working on. A feature factory is not problem-solving — it’s working through a to-do list. In this situation, people are simply doing what they’re told without knowing why they’re doing what they’re doing. I wouldn’t expect the team to be invested in what they were doing or that the full capabilities of the team were being harnessed.
• An unintelligible stream of jargon. Leadership is about clarity. When there is jargon, then there is no clarity and everyone winds up doing what they think is best. Worst still, no team they were working with would be able to effectively align with them. This team will be busy doing things, but they may not be that useful.
• The problem was framed in terms of vanity metrics — for example, “we need to grow the number of active users.” The moment you start doing this, you start incentivising Goodhart’s Law and the wrong kinds of behaviours. If you’re not focusing on solving user problems, you wind up focusing on manipulating your users to make yourself look good. This happens at Big Tech a lot.
• That’s the product manager’s job. The people doing the work don’t feel a sense of ownership of what they’re doing. In fact, if it doesn’t work, they’re perfectly happy to throw the product manager under the bus. People who aren’t committed don’t do their best work. They don’t anticipate problems. They react. They play politics.

In all cases, you will find teams lacking one or all of the following: purpose, ownership, or alignment. Where there is a lack of purpose, people will be busy but ineffective. Where there is a lack of ownership, then people will do the bare minimum, and you won’t build something you are proud of. Where there is a lack of alignment, you’ll spend most of your time mediating between people with strongly held opinions.

When I’ve coached teams, I’ve asked this question: are my opening gambit in individual 1:1s a litmus test of whether there is alignment with much of the same results?

Leaders must bring clarity to the problem(s) their team(s) are working on. You cannot make sensible decisions if you don’t know what problem you’re solving. When you move into the realm of managing managers (or even managing directors), then this is one of the biggest ways you can bring value to your people and organisation because this is a skill that can be coached. You can also save yourself an inordinate amount of time by being able to identify:

• Misalignments before they turn into full-blown ideological wars between people and teams. This is an easy way to bring value if you know how to handle decision-making constructively.
• Overlaps where people should work together but aren’t where you can act as an introduction agency. I remember talking to a team where they were working on the same problem as a team that sat next to them but was completely unaware of. Talk about an easy win.
• Untapped potential from people without a sense of purpose or feature factories where success is about delivering and busy work rather than solving user problems. Your ability to deliver is the ability to extract the combined potential of everyone in your team(s)
• Broken team dynamics — in particular between product and engineering leads. This is a great way of talking about these and clarifying how things get done to team members, which saves a lot of back-channeling.
• Lack of rigour. If you don’t know the problem you’re working on, you cannot know what success looks like. At which point, you’re just doing stuff.

You can also use this technique to sanity-check what you’re working on. So, having discussed some concerning answers, what should a good answer look like?

• The problem should primarily be defined as something that brings value to the customer. We’re trying to build products we’re proud of, after all.
• The outcome should also bring value to your company. Corporations aren’t charities, after all.
• Everyone involved in the problem should be able to win. This includes the people working on it — who should be able to progress their careers. The people supporting it should be recognised and rewarded — one of the common pitfalls is people don’t know who they need to work with. The customers should get a better product. Your company should see some upside from doing it.
• The outcome(s) which indicate progress need to be clearly defined and measured. Without this, you cannot understand the relative priority of problems or tasks within the problem space. If you cannot prioritise, you’ll have difficulty planning and will inevitably try to do too much.
• The definition of the problem needs to make sense to people outside of your team. This is one of the biggest litmus tests. If other people cannot understand your problem, you will struggle to align with what they’re working on, which means you will struggle to work on problems between teams. If your problem is gibberish to those around you, you will have a bad time. Beware of team-specific jargon. One of my tests for product managers is to see whether I can read a presentation without a translator.

Now, take all of that and try and communicate it in 30 seconds. You’ll need to cut some stuff out. But the ability to abbreviate without compromising clarity too much is a skill. At most, you should be able to communicate it in a minute, and someone from outside of the team should understand it. This is what vision is. It’s clear, it’s accessible, and it can tie people together if done well.

Without vision, you’ll never be sure what you’re doing. Without vision, you can’t empower people to make decisions. Without vision, you can’t align between people and teams. You can’t sell the value of your team or product. The elevator pitch is a classic example of this.

During my career, I’ve been constantly surprised at how many people struggle to articulate the problems they are working on, from fresh managers to experienced vice presidents and everything in between. I’ve also seen new graduates come in and immediately get it. One thing is for certain though — the very best teams and people I’ve worked with have never had a problem because there is no leadership without clarity of vision.

Vision can and should come from anywhere in the team. Leadership is not just about your job title. But, if you’re in a leadership position and cannot communicate your vision, you’re not set up for success. It’s also one of the areas where you can bring the most value to your team(s) for not a lot of effort. It’s one of your most powerful tools for debugging intra and inter-team dynamics. You need to invest in it regularly because, left to its own devices, vision turns into chaos.

The follow up is: Turning your vision into reality