One of the key components of effective leadership in business, is building and communicating your vision statement, your vision of the future if you like.

Only when you have done this do your team really understand where it is they are going. And once they all know and understand this you can together start to work on the strategies and steps that will take you there.

The best vision statements not only make for effective leadership, they can make for inspirational leadership. If everyone is crystal clear about the end game and there is no energy being used in understanding or clarifying, then the whole team have more energy at their disposal to look for creative ways of achieving the goal.

One of my clients recently did this to great effect. She has recently taken over a team whose remit is to provide admin and sales support for a national sales team. Her vision of the future was to completely overhaul the team so the services it provided were of a much higher calibre than previously. Where the emphasis was to be more on sales rather than support. She wanted to build a vision that reflected this and asked me to help.

Using Clean Language, I asked her lots of questions about the team she wanted to build.

She came up with a metaphor for the word support – an Olympic podium, on which both her team and the national sales team stood. The podium represented a strong base, the processes and procedures that provided the admin that kept the whole thing running smoothly. The people standing on the podium were members of her team and the external sales force they were supporting.

The sales aspect was represented by the winners medals – Gold, Silver or Bronze depending on sales success.

My client drew the vision to present to her own team and the sales force. Instantly they understood that everyone had the same goal for themselves – excellence in sales. Further more, they were all on the same journey, albeit at different stages. And finalIy, no one could forget the crucial aspect of admin support, for without that, no one would achieve any medals because the whole thing would come crashing down.

From that point, identifying the steps and actions needed to get there were relatively easy and good progress is now being made.

So if you would like to build and communicate to your team a vision that will give the journey to your vision a kick start, why not try building your own metaphoric landscape using Clean Language?

Clean Language was developed by David Grove

Whether you are a business owner or other business leader, if you would like to know more about how to build and communicate your vision using Clean Language, please call me on (07551) 303835 or e-mail me at allison@macintoshwright.co.uk for a free 30 minute consultation