Creating your vision, mission and strategy, I must confess that this is one of my favorite topics. It's about building up a vision for the future. It's about engaging your team and creating passion and motivation through why you're about to do and why it's important. There's a great TED talk that I highly recommend from Simon Sinek. If you haven't watched it already, he talks about people being influenced by why you do things rather than what you do. So that's why your vision and your mission are going to introduce concepts to for your team, about why we exist, and why what they do and why their work is so important for the company.

So when you set up your vision, start with the business. Start with the big picture. And by big picture, I simply mean Beyond the simple contribution of your team, and think about how what they do is a stepping stone for the entire success of their corporations. This is going to make the work of your people meaningful. And it's going to drive a lot of engagement and motivation from your people. So I always make sure that I find a way to connect what my team is contributing to, with the overall goals and priorities of the business.

For example, right now, in my job, I know that the business is aiming to grow through internal efficiencies and effectiveness. It's looking to grow through the reduction of the cost and the increase of our margins. Now, the IT team or manager at the moment is 100% contributing to this because they deploy a global template, a global set of ways of working and set of data structure that are going to be used to start consistently across the business. Now, this is going to be a great enabler for the business to save costs to be more effective, and to make decisions better decision making. How amazing is that? My team is directly contributing to the top priority of our business.

And we're talking about a $30 billion business here. So if I can bring it down to each individual, you can imagine how powerful the messages This is how you build a vision. A vision is about what we're trying to achieve. And it's a positive, motivating, and very short and concise statement about your goal, your purpose, your vision. Remember, everyone from your team should be able any point in time to explain to someone what their vision is. So make it simple, make it short.

Also, And this is something I'm going to say over and over again in this course. involve your team include your people in the elicitation process of those type of statements. So whether it's your visionary mission, or even your strategy, it all applies. What I mean is, rather than coming with a perfect answer, include your team in the process of finding how you want to state your vision, ask the opinion of each individual, I love to use, post it notes, post it notes, and just collect the input. And my role as a facilitator, as a leader is just to consolidate the ideas, create some recurring themes, and then again, lead the team towards a consensus where we all buy into the same vision statement. When you get this, all you need to do is make sure that it's impactful that is positive, that is action oriented, and that it inspires your people.

If it's catchy enough For them to remember it, you've got it. The mission is about why you exist. It is about the underlying reason and purpose why your team is contributing to the overall picture. I talked about that already. And here I like to talk about behaviors. I like to talk about value add about contribution.

So again, have a roundtable with your team. A workshop is perfect for this. We're going to talk about our quarterly meetings in this course, much later on. But this is a great opportunity for you to engage your team in taking action for defining why they exist, and what value they want to share and contribute to in the company. So your mission is why do we exist? Currently, in my team, we have four pillars, and it's things like we want to be a role model team for the organization.

We want to drive simplicity. gt, we want to ensure that we minimize the risks for the company and for the division. And we want to create a highly engaged team that inspires other team and creates a very healthy environment within the organization. This is a great type of mission because it's positive, it's encouraging, and my people have defined it. How powerful is it as an influence with an inference technique to let your team tell you what's important for them? So to recap, you have your vision, which is what are you trying to achieve?

And you have your mission, which is why do we exist? Remember, Simon Sinek start with why because people follow you. Because of why you do things, not what you do. And include your team in the process. They're going to be much more believing in it. If it comes from them, you as a leader can consolidate the messages, make sure that it's challenging enough that the team is thinking beyond their limiting beliefs, stretch them, challenge them, ask them, What else could we do?

How more could we contribute? And what's really the purpose? So ask why several times. Yeah, you know, the rule of the five why's, if you really want to go to the root cause of actually why do we exist, ask it five times, you will get amazing insights. This is going to drive such a strong alignment within your team, that from there on, you start to have the right foundation. Remember, we're in the first chapter.

Your strategy is then a simple exercise of you just putting what you're trying to achieve and why you exist into a plan. People use strategy as a buzzword In my view, it is simply a plan. It is simply a way a roadmap, a set of key steps, that as a leader you're presenting to your team. And that will give them confidence that the vision is something that is achievable. So it's stretching. It's pushing people towards what they think is feasible without efforts.

And yet, they know how they're going to get there. This is your role as a leader. This is point A, this is where we are going our vision. And this is how we are going to get there step by step. By the way, when we go next to your team goals, they're going to be directly derived from your strategy. This is why it's essential.

You start with your vision, your mission, and your strategy, which is the plan and the roadmap. You now have strong foundations that came from your team that are supported by every of your people. You can move forward