After you know that you have top down buy in to the new vision for your organization, you need to create a team that can develop a strategic plan that will allow you to move into the future. I cannot tell you the number of times I have reached this point in the process with great new ideas and the approval to implement the necessary changes only to fail.
The next step is extremely important is communicating the changed vision. In all my years of doing this, I think this is the beginning point of where the process starts to break down. We all have served on teams and worked for months on change initiatives and come out of the process totally together and passionate only to meet one year later trying to decide why the plan died.
What we simply fail to remember is that we have thought, discussed, and even hotly debated these ideas for literally hundreds of hours and the people who are on the front lines for execution have had no exposure whatsoever. We always undervalue the process of bringing everyone else up to speed and wonder why in the end they simply don’t get it.
There are several key criteria for effective communication:
- Keep It Simple
- Use Multiple Forums and Methods
- Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
- Environments That Allow Give and Take
The only way I have found to know that people have got it, is to let them hear everything they need over time and then let them ask questions and give back to me in their own words what we want them to understand.
Another very important aspect of communicating vision is that the leaders must be prepared to immediately walk their talk. John Kotter writes based on his research, “Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision.” If the vision is empowering teams and the top leaders of the company are still micromanaging everything you can be sure the plan is dead.