THEY'RE JUST NOT GETTING IT, AND I DON'T KNOW WHY!
You’ve spent school holiday time drafting and redrafting your new Vision statement. You have had endless meetings with staff, the Board, parents, other stakeholders, and you’re proud of what you’ve done.
The big launch is at the staff day at the beginning of the new term. Your slides are brilliant! Your mood is positive; they all look pretty well rested and bright eyed ready to start the term.
The initial response seems positive. A rattle of polite applause sees you back to your seat, and they mooch off for coffee in the sunshine comparing notes on their holidays.
Five weeks pass. Another staff session to get some feedback on the way the new vision has impacted on each department’s planning for its implementation - and you leave the session completely underwhelmed.
They just don’t get it! you tell your Deputy when you meet at day’s end, And I don’t know why!
Executive Coach Alisa Cohn has a few suggestions that might help (in Leaders, here’s what you’re getting wrong when you try to communicate vision, in Fastcompany, 18 June 22). We all know how important it is for employees to understand their organisation’s vision, Cohn says, continuing, that’s how they get aligned and engaged, know how their work fits in to the bigger picture, and make better decision with less supervision. And yet, a frequent issue with the leaders I coach is that they tell me—with frustration—that their employees say they don’t understand the vision, while they believe they articulate the vision all the time.
Over her twenty years of working with CEOs, Cohn says she has found five root causes for this troubling disconnect.
YOU THINK YOU’RE CONVEYING THE VISION, BUT YOU’RE NOT
You may be taken aback to hear that your employees aren’t hearing the vision from you, but the first thing to consider is that they may be right, Cohn helpfully points out. The trouble is, when you’re a leader, you are living with this stuff. It’s on your mind all your waking hours, and even during hours when you should not be awake. You are so close to it, you carry a lot of context in your head. Inevitably - conscientious, well-intentioned, dedicated you - you think about your organisation, your sub-school, your department – whatever part of the school you lead - a lot, Cohn explains, and then adds the cautionary note: That means that the vision and other higher level topics might be so clear in your head that you simply forget to articulate them. Her advice? The first thing you should check is whether the words that you think you’re saying actually come out of your mouth.
Perhaps you know for a fact that you talk about the vision, Cohn concedes, but adds, remember that, for people to really take in what you’re saying, they need to receive it from you repeatedly, in large groups, in small groups, in one to ones, and in writing. And they need to hear your leadership team around you articulating the same points. That’s how people will really ingest it.
The second reason people don’t seem to get it is they don’t get how it fits for them or worse, how they fit into your vision.
THEY DON’T HAVE CLEAR GOALS OR UNDERSTAND THEIR ROLES
Sometimes, people have trouble articulating what’s wrong, calling out the vision as the problem, when the real problem is that they simply don’t know what their role is, or how their work fits into the bigger picture, Cohn points out, suggesting basically, they’re just confused, and instead of doing the work to figure out what’s bothering them, they lump their complaint into not understanding the vision.
Your team members’ confusion about their roles usually stems from one or two things, Cohn claims: They may not have clear goals or ways to know how to define success in their role. This is often tied in with your mid-range leader sub-ordinates who don’t do the work of helping them create metrics and then achieve them, and then help them see how their goals tie to the bigger picture.
As the leader, it is important that you ensure all your subordinate leaders at every level know that a key part of their role is making sure their team members know what they’re shooting for and how it relates to your vision.
Sometimes, it is worth taking the time to offer your sub-school heads and department heads a preview of the vision, and enlist their aid as your collaborators and change agents in ensuring all members of their own teams are up to speed on the vision by repeating it and incorporating it into their discussions and planning sessions.
Cohn offers some questions you can use and encourage your senior and mid-range leaders to ask their team members:
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These questions are obvious, but they help people to focus. Heads of Departments need to work with individual teachers, especially new teachers, to ensure both that they are on the page and also that it is the same page as everyone else. By deliberately involving mid-range leaders in the change process with you achieve two things – you draw them in to supporting the adoption of the new vision, and you empower them to draw their team members in as well. This is good professional learning experience in managing change in a labour-intensive institution like a school.
Cohn’s third reason some people don’t catch the vision as well as others is that they cannot visualise how they and you are going to get there.
THEY DON’T KNOW HOW THE ORGANISATION OR SCHOOL WILL GET THERE
As the Head or high-level leader, Cohn indicates, you might think an aspirational vision will help motivate your team, but this backfires when it seems so far-reaching that they have no idea how you’ll get there. They may understand their goals and they may appreciate the vision, but they have no idea how personally they’ll bridge from here to there, and nor will they know how they can help others to get there.
You can resolve this by making sure you and your team think about how each group‘s efforts translate into making progress toward the vision, Cohn says, suggesting you might ask your leaders to come up with a hashtag that showcases their teams’ contributions to the bigger picture. Then make sure they’re using these hashtags with their teams and working with them to translate them into even more finite nuggets so people understand how to contribute their ideas and actions towards the vision.
A medical company did this beautifully in their executive team offsite I facilitated, Cohn offers as an example of how this might look. Their vision was a lofty statement about touching lives, and they did this through their agreements with various partners. Each group took that vision and strategy and connected it to their teams with a slogan, so that even teams without direct customer contact felt involved in the bigger picture. The technology team, for example, rallied around “seamless connection” and the finance team coalesced on “make it easy for partners after they say yes.” These taglines helped everyone be connected to the company’s vision while guiding them day to day.
Cohn’s next stumbling block is a little more sinister and a lot more serious.
THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE WRONG
It’s alarming to hear that your employees don’t understand the vision, until you dig deeper and find out that what they really mean is something worse: like your culture is toxic, or they’re angry at you or the leadership team personally, Cohn baldly affirms, adding, When people are struggling, and they don’t feel safe to talk about back-stabbing, bad management, or other problems in a dysfunctional culture that’s toxic; they may turn to a safer complaint of not understanding the vision. They blame the new vision rather than raising things that must not be mentioned.
Again Cohn offers an illustration in a CEO she coached who did legitimately talk about his vision all the time, both for the company as a whole and for the good it could do to humanity. But his executive staff were adamant that they still didn’t understand the vision. It was really puzzling what was going on, Cohn explains, so we decided to do a retreat to get everyone on the same page about the vision.
As the day went on, she continues, and we discussed in great detail the vision and the strategy, I realized that the that the problem wasn’t the vision. The problem was the CEO. They were angry that he was so external-facing and hadn’t tasked anyone with dealing with operational issues. They were upset about his lack of management of the executive team. And the list of their grievances went on and on. They got the vision, but they didn’t have any other way to express their frustration.
The final obstacle is one that arises from time to time – people say they don’t get the vision because they just like to complain.
THEY LIKE TO COMPLAIN
You can’t please all of the people all of the time, Cohn astutely observes, and some of the people you can’t ever please. They’d simply rather complain rather than do the hard work of . . . actually doing their work.
Cohn says when you have employees like this, bring them inside the tent - you can always find roles that are a better fit for them — more than one employee has turned from a problem to a performer when they get into a more aligned role, she attests. Or perhaps their direct report needs to take a different tack. But ultimately, Cohn allows, if “I don’t understand the vision” is code for “I’m not happy here,” you will be doing everyone a favour by turning them loose to find an opportunity they can embrace.
Managing change is one of the most difficult tasks a school leader takes on – whether at department, sub-school or whole-school level. Resistance is instinctive for some people. Schools are notoriously conservative institutions, where any change poses a real threat to some teachers. Old ways are the best ways, after all!
Cohn admits it can certainly prove frustrating when your team members don’t understand – and seem not to want to understand - the bigger picture you are trying to draw, despite your best efforts. Judicious planning, drawing natural leaders into your confidence as change agents, making sure you are moving at a pace at which most people are willing to move forward, checking in with sub-school and departmental leaders regularly, all while keeping your ear to the ground, will yield rich fruit in time.
Have patience, but be resilient, identifying significant sources of opposition and tailoring opportunities for them to be part of your thinking rather than spreading their own. Cohn doesn’t actually say it, but I will: Hang in there. The change you are wanting to implement will benefit the children and young people for whom you are doing what you do. That is what you are there for.