Mastering Your Business: Supercharge Your Team’s Common Vision
The rags to riches stories of a Michiana business achieving high success are still too rare. What is the missing factor? Focused common vision.
What makes the difference in small businesses that struggle ramping up after their initial startup and those that reach 2-, 3- or 10-times revenue increases in their first three years is simple – a focused common vision.
Regrettably those first few years are too often consumed with getting the rent paid and not at establishing that team who works with common mindsets and a spirit of customer engagement and generating raving fans.
Is your team aligned with this year’s success goal? If you aren’t having and sharing that conversation, what is your reason for running the business? To be blunt, you are shortsighted by not sharing the reason to believe in you and your business with the most important people in your life – your team.
Does your team know your true goal? I see it as creating a business that you can walk away from, without a dependence on your talent, your ability, your body, your skill, or your time. Knowing that such a goal takes a few planned years to accomplish, you must establish a strong clear vision, recruit, and grow your team and instill a focused common vision.
What is the difference between a turnaround sports team, a nonprofit or a small business that moves from unsuccessful to high performing resulting in a loyal group of supporters? A tight, clear focused common vision is communicated and embedded in the organization.
Here is how you can lead the shared vision conversation especially early in the year.
1) Honestly describe the current reality to the team. What is working and what is not from the owner’s viewpoint.
a. Describe or review your “why” (your burning reason to be in this business)
b. Describe your current client groups, vendors, and team. Describe what they could be in five to ten
years in the future.
c. Summarize by expressing this current vision clearly and frequently.
d. Forward trust and collaboration
2) Plan for involvement and communications with the team.
a. Ask each team member how they envision team success, use a survey or individual interviews.
b. Group the individual responses into broad themes, for example customer expansion, customer
satisfaction, revenue growth, innovation, and work culture.
c. Create a powerful team vision – think of signs and banners!
3) Involve the team in setting and reviewing proposed goals and objectives.
a. Meet as a group where the owner can communicate the current status of the business, ensuring that
everyone is up to date on key data – customer types, distribution and support, manufacturing and
services production, systems quality.
b. Educate and exercise the team on which baseline metrics you’ll use to collectively measure. How you
measure success needs to be clear to the team.
c. Today key performance indicators (KPI) and objectives and key results (OKR) are now more and more
standard practice in small business. These team and owner tools provide a clear and collective set of
baseline metrics that define success at the beginning, throughout and the end of the period Hold
classes on how to write, execute and report these metrics.
4) Relook at the individual’s responses together. Look for the overlapping and diverging answers.
a. Each person’s envisioned view of team success needs to be grouped from the singular perspective to
broad themes. This is important as it allows the team members to individually make personal commit
ments and engage their hearts and minds.
b. Seek consensus and respect of common broad themes and conclusions. By reviewing individual success
responses as a team, you look for overlaps and how priorities diverge.
5) Then as a group, you agree to figure out the metrics you’ll use to collectively measure success. I call it “what winning looks like”.
a. Aligning everyone’s values and purpose establishes a connection.
b. Build specific, tangible, and emotional measures of success that can be framed with a “now what” urgency.
c. You provide a “line of sight” between your vision and the teams’ day-to-day responsibilities.
Establishing these five conversation points becomes easier after the initial learning, individual understanding becomes normalized, and the sharing process strengthens team comradery. At that point, the clarity increases and results are incredible. You are a winner.
Your Takeaway:
Recognize a common vision with your team. With everyone focused on that goal, a long-term winning mindset is achieved and embedded as your culture matures and teams’ alignment grows.
Who is Mike Ronchetti?
With more than thirty-five years of real-life, on-the-ground small business experience across various industries, Mike has owned, operated, and successfully exited seven businesses. Mike lived in Plainfield, IL, St. Paul, MN, Anchorage, AK., and returned in 2013 to Plainfield. In 2020 Mike and Becky, his wife, relocated to South Bend to be closer to family. In 2021 he became an ActionCOACH certified business and executive coach and opened a local office. His mission is to work with businesses owners to create vivid dreams, establish aggressive goals and then crush them.
