How To Create A Vision, Strategy And Goals For Your Team

As a manager, it can be challenging to come up with a vision and strategy for your team, but it’s essential that you can demonstrate a clear direction of where you’re headed, and have buy-in from your employees on how you plan to get there.

When we talk about creating and communicating a vision for your team, we’re not referring to the fancy words and mission statements that are often displayed on the walls of organisations about why a company exists. Those can be important, but that’s not what you should be trying to create for you and your team. When you think about your role as a manager in creating a vision and strategy, you should be co-creating a clear framework with your team, where you’re building a plan of where you’re headed, and how you intend to get there.

To create your vision, strategy and goals, you need to be able to answer three questions with your team:

1. WHERE are we going? This is your team’s VISION for the next 5 or more years
2. HOW will we get there? This is your team’s STRATEGY for the next 2-3 years
3. WHAT steps do we need to take to achieve our strategy? These are your team’s GOALS for the next 6-12 months

Step 1: Creating a Vision Statement

Your vision should answer the question of “Where are we going?”. Or put another way, what is the desired future state for your team that you are trying to get to over a period of five or more years?

(For more help with this, click to download our comprehensive guide to building a vision, strategy and goals with your team)

Some examples of vision statements from well-known companies are:

• Create the most compelling car company of the 21st century by driving the world’s transition to electric vehicles (Tesla)
• To be the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline (Southwest Airlines)
• To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices (Amazon)
• To provide access to the world’s information in one click (Google)
  

By looking at the four examples above, you can see that they all have the following things in common:

1. They are focused on a future that is longer term rather than near term
2. They are aspirational and ambitious statements that aim to inspire people
3. They are attainable, even if they are ambitious
4. They are broad and try to encompass all aspects of the business
   

So, what does this mean for you as a manager, if you are crafting your vision statement for your new team instead of a multi-billion dollar corporation? Well, the four rules above still apply, your vision should still be future-focused, ambitious, attainable and broad, but the scope will obviously be much narrower.

To help you with creating your vision statement, it can be useful to discuss the following questions with your team:

• What does success look like for our team in five or more years time?
• Who are the primary stakeholders for our team who will benefit from that success? (E.g. external customers, IT team, project teams, business leaders, marketing, other employees etc.)
• What do we want to do in the future that is different from what we’re doing today? How would you want someone outside of the team to describe what you’re doing in a few years?
• If we achieve our vision, how will it make things better for our stakeholders?
• What are the most important things that we produce? Do our stakeholders agree that these things are important?
• What would be the impact if our team didn’t exist?
  

Our recommendation is that you run a workshop with your team where you work through these questions together in one or two sessions and craft your vision, strategy and goals as a group. This will ensure that your team is focused, moving forward in the same direction, and aligned on what success looks like.

Now let’s take a look at another example, but with a slightly different perspective. Instead of creating a vision for a large company, let’s create a vision for a team.

Meet Sarah, Sarah is a manager at a global financial services company, and she leads a team that is focused on developing her company’s mobile banking app. Sarah brings her team together to work on their vision and strategy, and together they come up with the following vision:

“To deliver the most intuitive and user-friendly mobile banking experience in the world, that consistently delights our customers.”

Although this vision is more narrow in scope compared to the examples above, it still meets all of the requirements for an inspiring vision. It is focused on the long-term, aspirational and ambitious, yet still feels achievable.

Once you have crafted a vision that answers the question of “where are we going?“, the next step is to consider the second question: “how will we get there?“.

Step 2: Building Your Strategy

Your strategy serves as the bridge between your vision and execution goals.

When creating your strategy, it’s best to break it down into separate areas of focus, called strategic objectives. We recommend having between three and five strategic objectives, focused on a two to three-year timeframe.

A great exercise to brainstorm strategic objectives with your team is to use post-it notes (either in person or virtually using a tool like Miro) and ask each team member to come up with 5-10 strategic objectives that will enable you to achieve your vision. Instruct your team that each strategic objective idea should be actionable, begin with a verb and include a timeline or measurable outcome.

As you design your strategic objectives with your team, it’s important to ensure they’re still achievable. Consider the resources available, the skills and capabilities of your team, your budget, and any other strengths and weaknesses that may impact execution.

Let’s revisit the example with Sarah, a manager leading the development of a mobile banking app. Together with her team, Sarah creates three strategic objectives to support their vision:

1. Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 60 or higher by improving the app’s user experience
2. Attract at least 10,000 new customers by enhancing the app’s functionality and capabilities
3. Capture at least 10% new market share in Europe by expanding the app’s language capabilities
   

You’ll notice that each strategic objective starts with an action-oriented verb, such as “Achieve” or “Attract,” and includes a clear description of WHAT needs to be achieved and HOW to measure it, such as a Net Promoter Score or the number of new customers downloading the app.

Once you’ve created your strategic objectives, the final step is to establish goals that outline how to achieve each objective.

Step 3: Creating Execution Goals

Your goals should be set once a year and should align directly with each of your strategic objectives. Typically, they will have a 6-12 month timeframe.

When setting your goals, it can be useful to use the SMART framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. We recommend using SMART goals to ensure that your team stays focused and that your employees understand when and how to achieve each goal.

There’s no limit to the number of goals you can have under each objective, but it’s important to ensure that they are all achievable. Typically, around four or five goals is a good number. Note that at this stage, you’re still setting goals at a team level, and you’re not assigning accountability to individual employees. That would happen when you set individual goals or OKRs, which is a separate topic that we’ll cover in its own blog post.

To bring the goal-setting process to life, let’s zoom in on the first strategic objective that Sarah’s team came up with and two of the SMART goals they created to go under it.

Both of these goals are specific, have a clear way to measure success, are achievable, directly support the strategic objective, and have a clear timeframe for completion. By specifying clear deadlines of Q2 and Q4 and specific actions for each goal, it is extremely clear what Sarah’s team must do and by when.

If you’re interested in seeing more examples of the goals from Sarah’s team, as well as other vision statements and strategic objectives, you can download our free vision, strategy and goals template for managers here.

By involving your team in the process of building your vision, strategy, and goals, and working through each of these three steps with them, you’ll be able to ensure that all of your employees are aligned on where you’re headed as a team and how you’ll be able to get there.