Change management: Form a strategic vision

A strategic vision is a long-term plan that outlines where you want your business to go. It can be helpful to think of it as a roadmap that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.

Developing a strategic vision can be a helpful exercise for any business, large or small. It can help you identify your goals and objectives, and it can also give you a sense of direction.

Benefits

Change management leaders need to form a strategic vision for several reasons.

• Sharing your vision in a compelling way is vital to get buy-in from others.
• Outlining existing problems and issues allows you to create a common goal that everyone can work towards.
• Communicating how finance fits in with business growth helps to showcase what good looks like.
• Sharing the art of the possible gives people something to aspire to.

By doing all these things, change management leaders can create a strategic vision that comes across as sensible to the head and appealing to the heart. This is sure to help with buy-in and implementation down the line.

Common goals

You need to have both a sensible and an appealing strategy to be successful. The head is the logical, rational part of our brain that responds to things like numbers and facts. The heart is the emotional part of our brain that responds to things like stories and metaphors.

For a change management leader’s vision to be successful, it needs to make sense to the head and appeal to the heart.

Here are the six essential characteristics of a common goal:

1. Imaginable: People need to be able to see it, picture it, and believe that it’s possible.
2. Desirable: The goal should be something people actually want to achieve.
3. Feasible: The goal can’t be so impossible that no one believes it can be achieved.
4. Focused: The goal should be specific and clear so that everyone knows what they need to do.
5. Flexible: The goal should be flexible enough to accommodate different people and situations.
6. Communicable: People need to be able to understand and share the goal with others.

If you can form a vision with these six characteristics in mind, you’ll be well on your way to success.

Summary

By forming a strategic vision that appears to your key stakeholders and affected employees, change management leaders can share your vision in a compelling way and generate buy-in from others.

Full workshop recording

Here is a full workshop recording of a GrowCFO Change Management workshop that discusses this topic in more detail: