 Create a team vision that your team understands and relates to and you give them better direction and motivation. Explain the purpose of your team and how their work creates value for the company as a whole is very motivational for most people. When you link your team vision into the functional goals and the company's strategy, you are helping your team understand the context of their work, how they fit into the bigger picture and what they can do to be individually successful and contribute to the companies and team's success. We all feel happier and more fulfilled when we can directly see how our work creates value for the wider team and knowing how our work fits into the company's strategy provides safety and knowledge that our bosses will be happy. Create a team vision to link what each person does day to day to the bigger picture and your team will be happier, more motivated and ultimately more successful. We are going through these seven ways to create a team vision and link company strategy to your team. The last few steps are sharing tips of how to implement your vision or turn it from a good idea into reality for you and your team, which is usually the hardest part. My name is Jess Coles and if you're new here in Hans Dot Training Shares, people manager and expertise, resources and courses to speed up your journey to becoming a great manager. I've included links to additional videos and resources in the description below as well as the video timestamps, so do take a look at these. And if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and subscribe. The first way to create a team vision is to understand the company strategy. Linking company strategy to team objectives is a great way to keep your bosses happy and your team efforts coordinated with everyone else's efforts. Companies estimate that more than 70% of companies fail to implement their strategies and achieve the success they should. How to create your team vision is easier when you start with looking at the function you work in. You know, what underlying purpose does your function undertake within the business and what are the functional goals? Understand this before you think about explaining the purpose of your team. Firstly, for instance, your finances purpose might be to create performance visibility and increasing profitability and the cash generation of the company. Secondly, a marketing might be to build a recognised and trusted brand and increase the number of leads fed into the sales team. And sales might be to increase the conversion rate of the leads generated and grow sales by recruiting and training a strong, knowledgeable sales team. Understand what your function's role and purpose is in relation to the company's strategy before you think about how to create a team vision. Depending on the size of your team, your team might be the function or it might be part of the function. The smaller your team in relation to the business, the smaller the part of the company strategy your team's work will feed into as a general role. Communicating strategy to your team should be focused on what role they specifically play in implementing the company strategy. Second, when linking company strategy to your team, work out what problems you are really solving. Many managers make the mistake of regurgitating the parts of the company strategy they think are relevant to their team. This doesn't make the strategy relatable to the individual team members. To motivate your team members, your team vision needs to be phrased in language and problems that your team can directly relate to. So work out what problems your team are solving that feed into the functional goals and company strategy. Sticking with the finance example touched on earlier, part of the company strategy might be expanding Germany to be more than 25% of the group's revenue. The finance function might be tasked with ensuring profitability in Germany is more than 10%. The problem your management accounts team might face is creating visibility to support both of these goals. A solution might be creating P&L and working capital reporting by German customer contract, so the business as a whole has objective information about how each company is supporting the company's strategic goal in Germany. Work out exactly what the key set of problems your team is trying to solve to support the functional goals and the company strategy. The third step to linking company strategy to your team is creating a relatable vision in what is going to be the main purpose or goal of your team over the next few years. How would you use everyday language to describe the high level solution to the big problems facing the team? Answer these two questions and you will have a good relatable vision to share with your team. Keep your team vision simple and straightforward. A team vision doesn't have to be and probably shouldn't be a masterpiece of wordsmithing. Back to the finance example used earlier, your team vision could be to create and share detailed financial reporting at customer contract level across the business to improve decision making, accountability and profitability. A really useful step is to put a draft team vision statement to your team and ask them to finalise it with you. This actually gets the team members owning this part of the step and introducing language that they understand and use into the team vision statement. Then communicate the team vision with all team members and keep reminding them of it. The fourth step to create a team vision is to set clear and measurable goals. Most of us like structure and direction at work. Setting out clear and measurable team goals is a great way to provide this to your team. I like using the smart framework for this step and asking the team to be involved in creating each goal. This group exercise gets everyone involved and owning the goals we create together. Do spend enough time to get smart goals. This is not usually a quick process. If you take an hour to get each goal really clear, that might be perfectly OK. Do think about how you're going to measure progress. Make the measurement of progress as simple as possible and ensure the data needed is easy and quick together. Keep your final team goals visible and keep reminding the team of progress against these goals. The fifth step to create a team vision is to break down the goals into team inputs. This fifth step is helping the team to move from the what to the how to achieve the goals. Helping the team to mentally overcome the how step massively improves the chances of reaching your goals. When we have goals, but don't really understand how we're going to reach the goal, we remain stuck and inactive. When we understand the tasks, activities and projects we need to do to help us achieve team goals, we are much more confident of taking the right action. Back to our finance example. Some of the inputs or tasks to achieving our financial reporting vision might be if firstly to set up project codes within the financial system. Second to implement a simple timesheet system to capture each employee hour spent on each customer contract. Third to add a project code to all invoices inputted into the finance system. And fourth create PNL reporting for each project code or customer contract. When you've worked out the main team's inputs or activities to achieve the goals, then work out which individual will do what. The sixth step to implementing a team vision is to assign ownership of individual goals. Once you've shared a clear team vision with the team and the goals and activities at team level, the next step is to create goals and activities at individual level. Focus on how to achieve the goals as much as the goals themselves. Work out who is best place to work to achieve each team goal. This may be one person or several people. In each case, give overall responsibility to achieve the goal to one person to make ownership clear, even if several people will work on the goal. Give each team member as much of the roadmap as you can to help them successfully achieve each of their goals. It is in everyone's interest for each team member to be successful. Running a set of team planning workshops focus on how to achieve each goal and who should be responsible can be more productive than deciding and telling each person yourself. If the team has a strong say, they will be more motivated and successful because it is their plan too. Teams often produce better solutions than one individual working on their own. The seventh step to implementing a team vision is to outline milestones and progress measurement. Create visibility of progress so that everyone knows and understands exactly how far the team has progressed in reaching each goal. Visibility is a key step in driving ownership and accountability. I would suggest you add in sensible milestones for each of your goals. The longer the time period in question, the more milestones you should add in. This is good project management, plus it gives everyone a more immediate sense of purpose and achievement. Your goals to be achieved in 12 months don't really seem as real as the ones that need to be achieved in this month. Creating lots of little goals on a journey will make achieving the final end goal a lot easier. So in summary, create a vision of how your team will support the wider business goals. Make sure your team understands and believes in the team vision and they will be more motivated and more focused on maintaining team direction. Higher motivation levels and more focus generally means better results. Getting the team interested and behind where you want to take the team also helps team happiness and provides the lead at a loss of satisfaction. To recap, the seven ways to create a team vision while linking company strategy to your team are Firstly, company strategy, understand your team's contribution. Secondly, what problems are you really solving? Third, creating a relatable vision. Fourth, set clear and measurable goals. Fifth, break down the goals into team inputs. Sixth, assigning ownership of individual goals. And then seventh, outline milestones and progress measurements. And if you have any questions on creating a team vision, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll get back to you. Thanks very much for watching and I look forward to speaking to you again soon.