Keeping Teams Aligned Through Vision, Not Just Strategy

Part 3 of our 4-part conversation on leadership design.

Leaders often mistake strategy for identity, creating rigidity and disconnection. In this conversation, host Russel Lolacher and Georgi Enthoven — bestselling author and venture partner with deep experience advising businesses on impact and culture — discuss how leadership design helps teams align on a compelling vision. They explore how to co-create purpose with diverse perspectives and keep teams engaged without losing sight of the bigger picture.

And connect with me for more great content!

• Sign Up for R@W Notes
• Subscribe on Youtube
• Follow on Linkedin
• Follow on Instagram
• Follow me on Threads
• Follow on TikTok
• Email me anytime

Transcript

Russel Lolacher: I'm glad you segued for me there, Georgi. You got me right into the teams conversation I wanted to have, because as leaders, designed leaders that have this purpose, have this vision, how can they bring their teams along? To your point with all that other perspectives, diversity without losing their own perspective and vision.

Because as much as I love hammering home, this is the promised land, this is the North Star, people are gonna have different perspectives because your vision could be a very personal one and your team might be like, eh, I'm not feeling it as much.

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah, I, I, I think it's important to be aligned on vision. How you get there is really the strategy, and that's up for debate. So I think sometimes the strategy becomes our identity. And that can get really complicated. And we can see that in politics. So I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican, or in the US anyway, right?

And that identity is really hardship. We really move from one to the other. That should actually be the strategy. It depends. So you're, you're voting for something you care about and how you get there, you should be able to change. And so often when I see it go wrong is the strategy now becomes your identity and therefore you don't have the flexibility to make the changes that need to be made.

Russel Lolacher: Any questions you'd suggest to start asking your team to sort of, I guess, co-create the journey?

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah, I, I mean, I love that idea of co-creating, but a vision needs to be created for any brand company service so that you understand how to get, again, to communicate to your customers what you are able, how you're able to serve them, and what is unique that you can bring to the table to make sure that you're meeting their needs and you need to have a, a, a higher vision of how you see the world and how, and, and what you can deliver. And so either you've already got that and it's well established and you have sort of a mission and values already established when the company that people buy into when they join or if it's something that you don't have, then it needs more work. And I'll give you an example where things are in, in the world that I'm in seem like really misaligned on college campuses. So students come into college campuses with they or the, the admissions personnel require students to have an incredible vision of the world, already dedicated to solving world problems, have started a not-for-profit, have dedicated hours to making their communities better, wanting to change the world.

When the, when the students are in college, they get very little of that messaging, and when they leave college, the career centers are not bringing the people on campus to help those students change the world. They're bringing the big corporate, so banking, consulting, or big tech and sometimes some small not-for-profits 'cause they help make the story look good, but they're not aligned with the value system from start to finish.

And students are feeling that misalignment, is also, and feeling disappointed with what they're being helped with when it comes to the careers of the on the other end. And so that's an example. It's not a office example, but where a value system is not clear and the losers in the situation are the customer, which is the student.

And so that often happens also in companies where you have a purpose or a mission that is a nice to have, but it's on the periphery and it's not really deeply integrated into how you do business and serve your customers.

Russel Lolacher: I've always found vision and mission to be underutilized in the workplace as A communication tools and B engagement tools. Because, if you get a vision right, your team will fully buy in. They want to feel like they're part of something bigger. They want to feel like they're fixing a problem that is beyond the and, and this can work in organizations and there are a lot of organizations that have horrible vision and mission statements. But individual teams can have their own.

I sometimes even call them purpose statements 'cause they don't wanna have a, another vision on top of a vision for the organization. But it still has the same impact. It's still like looking to a, a, a better place. What's a bad vision? What is something within, and I'm still looking at teams at this point, not the macro, but more the micro a leadership, their team, their vision.

When is it too much or too narrow?

Georgi Enthoven: Well, I would say my number one red flag is if it's too vague or difficult to communicate. So if you can say, if everybody on your team knows what the vision is and can say it, you've got the right vision. Sometimes people have visions of we're going to help serve people, live a better life. It's way too vague.

Like what does that actually mean? Or they have a vision of it's very like detailed and complicated. And may have made sense with people wordsmithing something and fitting in all the right pieces to keep everybody happy, but it's not something that can be repeated by every employee. And so when it's easily repeatable or even the value system when it's easily known, okay, I'm, I'm, I'm at a crossroads.

I need to make a choice for a client. What do I do? The values of the company should be things you can easily sort of step into, and now you'll know what to do. And if that's not the case, then I would call that an ineffective vision.

Russel Lolacher: I've, I've often gone and asked people from all different organizations and I go, so what's your vision? They'd be like, I don't know. I'm like, then it's a crap vision because if you, if it, if it doesn't, a, it doesn't resonate with you obvious enough to even remember. B, do you even know what it like, sure. It might be on a poster or on a website somewhere where you have to go 17 clicks on it, but this should be hammered home and living and breathing and organic and something that you believe in every day, but if you don't, you can't even remember it. Or it's to your point, it's gobbly goop corporate corporate speak because they're trying to please too many masters that want to feel like they're a part of it.

And I'm like, then it's useless to everybody when you're trying to help everybody.

Georgi Enthoven: and I've actually been on a not-for-profit board where we as an offsite hired somebody to help us with vision work for the day, and then nothing was done with it. So I think often companies sort of think, okay, that would be an interesting thing to do. We should go do this work, we'll do an offsite, we'll take everybody's day.

We feel bonded, we feel close that day. And then there's silence. And so, you know, not integrating it or not building a vision that is integratable into the business is also you know, ineffective.

Russel Lolacher: Too many cooks in the kitchen, as it were.

Georgi Enthoven: Yeah. Yeah. Or it's like anything else that we're doing today. We're consuming so much and putting so many inputs in, but what are we actually implementing And you know, just even on the individual level, the amount of information we're all consuming is becomes almost addictive. It's like junk food, but if we're not doing anything with that information, then it's not really worth it or worth the investment. And so if you are a company that is needing to build out a vision or a team that's needing to strategically build in a vision, I would even build in the time afterwards that it's gonna take to implement it and then to think effectively, how have we used it and what do we need to adjust or not adjust, but it can't just be a one day affair.