This is an example of a vision, categorised by a set of example stakeholders.
Note: The following example is done with mindset of a long-term leader and may challenge ideas currently prevalent in business. It is not intended to lead the witness. This example has a reasonable level of detail.
| Stakeholder | Description | Example vision |
|---|---|---|
| Self (family included here) | This is highly variable. Some owners are still technicians in their business. Some are now passive owners with not activity in the business. However, we want to understand what this owner wants the business to do for them specifically. | I now have discretionary time and reduced my daily demand. I am still connected to the business and get my satisfaction from continuing to solve our customers problems and seeing others in the business grow. The dividends are satisfying my financial wants and needs. |
| Customer - Economic Engine/Offering | Talk specifically about your offering and or commercial direction. This will impact your product vision. | When I was leading the business it was specifically for making one product for one market niche. We recognized that this was not solving enough of the problem and also it is not commercially resilient. We have diversified successfully while still being connected to our foundation expertise. |
| Organisation Leaders | This is usually an area where ALL organisations underestimate the idea of being a Leader and then being a Leader in YOUR business. WE need to make our WAY visible to all and make sure the Leaders of tomorrow continue to build on OUR Way. We don’t want to lose our knowledge. | We have successfully built the infrastructure that will empower us to scale and distribute leadership. We have successfully built the internal training systems to educate our organisation leaders to be as good as they can be. They know OUR WAY and continue its innovation. |
| Operations Leaders | Operations leaders are the IN Leaders making sure that you are delivering your offering effectively and that they are conscious of how to lead effective teams. | We have successfully built the internal training systems to develop great team leaders. |
| Our People & Culture | One of the big differences between great SMEs and other businesses is they care about their people. They also understand people are essential to sustained value creation. | We put a lot of work into our foundation values code and we are keen that this is deployed authentically. We want to provide an environment where people can develop and be highly effective. We are recognized in the industry that this is a key market differentiator. We get good people because they want to work for us. We have been able to pay sustainable salaries (independent of market forces). Our people know they can have internal mobility because we have not built silos. We have created clarity of accountability and high levels of trust to support cross company mobility. |
| Aligned ex-team members (Alumni) |
Ex-employees that have left with high integrity can be the source of filling future roles. They can also impact your brand about what it is like to work at your business.
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When people left our system, we tried to do this with the highest of integrity. Given this, we have been able to recruit people for roles where the ‘re-entered’. They boomeranged because of the culture we had established. |
| Our Greater Community | A business sits in an industry ecosystem. It is wise to think about what you want to see happen in the future. Many companies would see this as being in the too variable for a vision. | |
| Government – License to operate | Your business sits within a regulatory habitat. Attitudes to taxation, superannuation obligations and other regulatory items can be captured here. | We were good corporate citizen and paid our taxes. For taxes that were considered unjust/unfair or drove the wrong behaviours we challenged the regulators. |
| Environment | Many founders have opinions about the environment and what they want for future generations. Log that here. | We want to contribute a number of positive environmental outcomes. Climate change initiatives are well aligned with a number of sustainability outcomes. Given our long term business mindset, environmental sustainability aligns well. |
| Society | How your business has social impact can be logged here. | We established a means to establish community connect teams in each region that could deploy solutions for local communities. We used this approach as another way of distributing accountability/decision rights to establish different leadership approaches. |
| Future Owners - Ownership | Attitudes to capitalisation of the business and who has control of the vision are considered here. If an Owner has 60% of the business they control 60% of the Internal Vision. All of the above stakeholders and potentially others are effected by any change in ownership. Understanding this is critical to successful delivery on the vision. The Owners are the Vision Custodians |
We are a family company and so we want certain financial returns to sustain our family. However, we recognize that the business can provide other benefits to our family members that participate in the business. These include craft and leadership development. We want to control the ownership but build a healthy dividend return business.
Our future owners will be family members that work in the business or will be Leaders that excel in service of our business. We remain open to selling the business if the future owners (the new Vision Custodians) decide that is the best thing to do. |
Owners Workshop 1 - Team Purpose & Accountabilities