Step 4 Up the Tribe Triangle: Your Shared Vision Brings the Others Home
Establishing a powerful North Star for your tribe attracts, engages and retains the best people. It is also how you can get the best from them and for them. Your vision is the lighthouse of your culture.
The brighter and more powerful it is, the more it will guide and protect your collective journey when nights are the darkest.
Whether it be family or faction, your vision is why your group exists. I recommend you dig deep into this initial question because a shallow why, such as money or pleasure, is a shallow vision and that will be inadequate to attract, inspire and guide your tribe, especially when things get stormy and uncertain. And they will. Below are some techniques and best practices to discover and establish a powerful vision for your tribe.
The 5 Whys
Using the Japanese strategy of the 5 Whys is a great technique for beginning to excavate your powerful shared vision. This process consists of asking a series of iterative questions to dig down to the root of an issue.
Here is an example of a corporate 5 Why process so you can see how it works. Do this collectively and verbally.
First Why: Why does your company exist? Often the initial answer to this is to provide a service or sell a product. Good start. Practical, but not strong enough to attract and maintain powerful wolves to your pack and guide them into engagement and retention when things get hard.
Second Why: Why is it important that we sell the product (or whatever you do)? The answer to this second why is ‘to make money’. This is a better, deeper and more honest answer. Wolves like money.
Third Why: Why is it important to make money? Because otherwise we will go out of business and no one will have jobs. This is even more powerful because it speaks to the fact that underneath the comfort and technology of our current world there is still the fear of starvation and a drive to survive and thrive.
Fourth Why: Why are those jobs important? Because, behind all those employees are families and communities that count on our company for a livelihood. Now you are speaking to all those lone wolves about pack and community and things that are larger than themselves. When you start to share your vision of caring about a service greater than self then you and your culture are just one step away from purpose and meaning.
We have now landed at the real vision of the company: to support the employees, families and communities that surround it. This is a vastly more powerful, engaging and long-lasting purpose than just selling products and making money. AND you still have one more Why to go…
This shared awareness of service becomes part of the engagement, innovation, morale and retention strategy for employees as well a vital part of the company’s brand that is reflected in marketing and client relations.
This 5 Why technique works with parenting, vacations, education and just about anything else humans do together and need to drill down into a deeper motivation and truth. And that’s what vision really is.
“Leaders are dealers in hope.”
-Napoleon Bonaparte
Vision as Inspiration
A powerful vision is aspirational and inspirational. Establishing this ambitious destination is one of the most important jobs you have as tribe leader.
A powerful vision galvanizes the hopeful and optimistic person inside all of us. An aspirational vision is irresistible to high-drive humans which are the ones you really want in your pack and on your team.
Your aspirational vision does not have to necessarily be specific in a granular way or even particularly realistic. This is why mythology and inspiration works. We all have a powerful ability to suspend disbelief when it comes to story and vision is a story at its core. Holy Grail, heaven, Valhalla, championships, curing cancer are all visions that have captivated and engaged people across time.
One of the most powerful examples of the power of an aspirational vision in my career as a culture consultant was working with a management team at SpaceX.
On the wall of the boardroom we were working in were two giant, round, globe-like maps. One of the maps was a beautiful, blue-green Earth planet and the other, a cracked and desolate Mars.
During our conversation about vision, the Space X leader pointed to the globes and said, “That’s our vision.”
“I get it” I said, “we’re going to Mars.”
He stood puzzled for a moment and then looked at me carefully and said, “look at the maps again.”
I did and saw that the blue green planet was not Earth, it was a terraformed, blue-green Mars.
Space X is not going to mars. Space X is going to get us mars.
The hair still stands up on my arms when I tell that story because it perfectly demonstrates the power of an aspirational vision. I wanted to be part of that team and part of that epic goal. Make sure your vision is BIG enough to feed a family, support a community and power a career. This is how you make a dent in the universe.
No one accidentally walks uphill. No one inadvertently climbs a mountain. Success is not casual and it is not random. It is a product of relentless will following a steep, long and arduous path towards an aspirational vision. It also creates light in the darkness.
Vision as Lighthouse
Things are going to get hard this year. There will be setbacks, doubt and adversity. Vision is your tribe’s anchor to the meaning that makes the suffering of life make sense.
We’ve all heard Nietzsche’s quote that “When a man’s why is strong enough, he can bear almost any how.” This is the definition of resiliency and all the primary pillars of resiliency come from a sense of belonging and service to something larger than ourselves. Vision is the source of that why.
Whether this vision of the ‘larger thing’ be in scale and scope that drives legacy and significance or about the service to community or even the planet, it can all be sourced to an inspirational shared vision.
Like all treasure, aspirational, shared visions are not easy to find. Here are a few places to start.
Click here To watch the video of Step 4: Your Shared Vision Brings the Others Home
Leaders must write and speak
Answer these questions in your journal by really writing them down. Discuss them with at least one of your most important people and really listen to their response.
If money were no object and you could not fail, what would you be doing with your life? This exercise will free you from objective and realistic goals and liberate an aspirational vision for your life. Can you be that brave for your family and work team?
What are the important priorities your family or work team is focused on and why?
Ask ‘why’ to the answer to that question.
Ask why to the answers to the next 3 more as well and you will have arrived at a much deeper purpose, drive or maybe even the meaning of life.
Ubuntu,
Philip Folsom