Product Answers #7: Creating a company vision. Top-down or bottom-up?
This question came from the CPO of a company, which was growing rapidly after many years of stagnation. They had recently entered a new geography and their teams got larger in size and much more distributed. The CPO was pushing for a much clearer vision for the growing company and was unsure on how much to involve everyone in creating it.
A vision for the company has to be formed by the leaders of the company. That’s literally their job description. And then made available to and understood by everyone working at achieving it. Which should be every single person in the company. That does not mean it should not be informed by all the knowledge that sits in the company.
I see organisations doing a huge mistake, while they actually want to do good. Leaders should definitely hear people from top to bottom, before they form the vision. They want all the kowledge they can get. But please: we don’t do vision workshops with the whole company. That will give people the impression they can put their personal vision on the table and hope for it to become the company vision. Lot’s of frustrated people will follow. They feel like leaders asked them for their opinion, just to ignore it afterwards.
Leaders want people to be informed about insights they need to know. But it’s their job to form a vision out of the insights.
They would be stupid not to use all knowledge in the organisation. They need to sit down with people. In my experience 1:1 works best. Maybe teams that work together all day and have a vision for their part already. Watch out for the silent ones. They might have a lot of knowledge to share. They need to be include in the session and listened to carefully. If that doesn’t work, 1:1 will do it.
Group sessions or vision workshops with all of the employees don’t work. Everybody will pour a lot of heart into it. Either leaders follow their opinion (and have no own) or they discard it (and make them feel rejected and worthless spending all the time).
It’s the leaders job to form the vision and strategy out of every piece of knowledge the organisation has accumulated.