Communicating a Clear Vision

By Thomas Fox, MBA
Friday, September 12, 2003; 12:00pm EST

Everybody in a business is talking about the mission of the business, but what about the vision? A vision is the clear understanding of a mission result. It is the picture of where you want to be when you have your project completed or your product delivered. Your business very well can be a project. The end of a project won�t necessarily mean that your business is over. You might simply repeat the business mission on a regular basis.

Without the clear understanding of what you want and where you want to be, you can�t reach the mission. You can�t guide your employees, nor find the path yourself to get to the end-result within the parameters you have laid out for yourself if you:

1. Don�t have a clear understanding of your own vision
2. Can�t communicate the vision to your employees and your customers
3. Have an unclear understanding of the vision your customers have

It is very critical when your customers are laying out a project for you and you are trying to understand what they envision you doing for them. If the understanding and communication between your customers and you is clear and comprehensive then the project completion or the product delivery will result in customer satisfaction and repeat business. This will also include effective project performance on your end while certainly being profitable for you.

If the understanding of your customer�s vision was unclear then (a) the customers will be dissatisfied, (b) you will have to correct the product delivered, and (c) your profit will be reduced accordingly. In addition, perhaps the biggest impact on your business is that your customers were already dissatisfied once. They will remember the mishap even if you repaired the damage. A bad memory just sticks longer to someone�s mind than the fact that it had been corrected.

Learning to envision your goals and communicating them to your employees, and communicating the vision from and to your customers is a Visioning course by itself. I have attended training in visioning taught by a business process coaching company in Utah. The visioning techniques and communication tools taught are of holistic nature. Under holistic it is understood that a whole group of methodologies is applied to facilitate clear and perfect communication among all critical stakeholders of a project. These holistic methods applied will improve the teams� project-buy-in and will contribute to project productivity. Even if you are running your home business by yourself, there are still the customers and your suppliers and/or vendors who might all need a clearer picture and understanding of the project vision. I highly recommend learning the trade of visioning.

For More Information
If you are interested in learning more about visioning, please contact me by email tfoxcareer@msn.com or call (801) 687-2324. I will be happy to have the coaching company contact you without any obligations to you. I am not affiliated to the training facility at this time.