To create a cohesive team, one of those teams that people remember working in years and years later. The kind of team that’s a lot of fun, where everyone is united in a clear purpose, somewhere where everyone is engaged and fully committed. These are the kind of teams you want to build in your business. This is where excellence shows up and much more that will all work towards your business succeeding.

But the process of getting there is a bit of a journey, to say the least.

One tip to getting everyone aligned with a vision is to lead them to all contribute towards building the vision. This could be, for example, a brainstorming exercise with the team where everyone contributes towards a chosen and relevant central theme around the company vision.

The key is to realise that there are many layers to a vision. There is the vision set by the founder. This vision is high-level and less detailed. It includes longer-term ideas as well as short-term ideas.

Then, there are departmental layers of the vision. This involves answering questions like: how do we see our department fulfilling the company vision? What are the values we hold as a department, and how will we get there? How will we grow and develop both individually and as a team? What can we visualise in a year’s time or 5 years’ time? What will our team look like? What would be our ‘too good to be true’? What do we require from management to get us there?

One example of this is when a CEO called me in to coach a new department head. This person was new in their position. The owner promoted this person because of their long and loyal service. He was excellent at delivering projects well and mostly on time. The challenge for this newly appointed manager was that he was very used to being hands-on and dealing with issues reactively but not so used to thinking strategically and creating a vision for how he wanted his department to look in the future. Giving him regular and consistent time in our one-to-one sessions to reflect on what he wanted to improve and what he wanted the future to look like in his department got him thinking completely differently from how he had done before.

As we progressed, his creative, strategic talents started to emerge as he found ways of making changes to get himself and his department where he could now see he wanted them to be in some years to come. His leadership abilities shifted quickly in less than half a dozen sessions. The payback for the organisation in this shift is huge, as they have a person who can now lead a department to better efficiency and better performance and who can train others to do the same.

Part of his journey meant he had to figure out how to get the team on board to where he wanted to go. A great way to achieve this is to take time to convey the vision, invite the team to contribute to the vision and work out how they will get there. This is an example of how a departmental manager develops a departmental-level vision, which fits neatly under a company-wide vision.

Every team member will have different answers and ideas in a group session. All contributions are valid.

Writing down ideas in the language in which they are spoken is key. Each team member then contributes, and the session resonates with at least the part they contributed, hopefully, more. Facilitating such a session is not always that easy; it takes a certain skill. If you don’t think you’d be great at it, talk to us about helping you!

After all ideas are captured, the team vision can then be written up.

Bringing everyone into alignment with a vision can be done by taking time to finding and including the language that resonates across everyone.

The next stage is further meetings on ‘how will we get there?’. The ongoing process of this involving the team, is team coaching at its best! Giving team members a chance to review what is written up and refine it, both when it is created and periodically, ensures continued team involvement and engagement. It empowers the team to decide to some degree on their own destiny and to feel ownership of what they are a part of creating.

When I was building a team, I ensured we had time together, with me conveying my vision of where we were headed as a team and what part we were playing in the overall company vision, alongside giving time for their ideas on how we could get there. I also ensured we had team-building time, like meals out and other fun things that did not have to do with work and process. I found that important as I see that often business owners confuse helping the team to work together effectively and feel engaged with simply organising a team-building event and ticking that item off the list. In reality, these events are good, and you deepen team connection, but it’s such a waste when we don’t use that connection to facilitate them to work together for a common purpose via different facilitated team meetings focussed on gaining contributions from the team and ensuring they feel valued and have a voice that is heard and acted on.