Clarity Is Your Competitive Edge

Brands are built over time.

Without a clear vision of what you want the brand to look like in the future, it’s hard to connect today’s actions to tomorrow’s goals. Employees become confused. And stressed.

But instead of dealing with the issue, businesses try to put a patch over it.

They offer perks or try to create a better work-life balance. They provide benefits that outweigh the negatives of the work. And, hopefully, make the work more bearable.

But they don’t solve the underlying problem.

They end up with employees on edge. Confusion about the relevance of tasks. And different departments operating in silos.

These are conditions that make it nearly impossible to build a brand.

Because building a brand requires consistency. Consistency requires everyone to know their goals and work towards the same outcomes.

The real secret is that businesses should start by thinking about how they can make the work easier and more enjoyable. Not offset the negatives.

And the easiest way to do this is by providing clarity.

What Does Clarity in the Workplace Look Like?

When employees aren’t clear about their roles, work is stressful.

Clarity in a business can take two forms:

• Day to Day: Being clear about employees’ roles and responsibilities.

• Long-Term: Being clear about where the business is going and what it is trying to achieve over the long term.

Without long-term clarity, you can’t offer day-to-day clarity to employees. And it becomes hard for employees to make the best decisions for the business when they don’t know what the future should look like.

Lack of clarity often starts at the top.

So, before a business can offer clarity to its employees, leadership must be clear about the company's direction.

Without that clarity, you can’t communicate the bigger picture to employees. And it’s challenging to tell employees what is essential in their daily work and what will help them achieve a larger goal.

A lack of clarity has resulted in vague job descriptions, core values that only exist on a poster on a wall, and business environments that produce managers who constantly change their minds and behave like poor leaders.

To have clarity, you need to communicate a clear vision of what you want the company to be like in the future.

And without this clarity, it becomes impossible to build a strong brand.

Why You Need More Than a Vision Statement

To imagine a vision of the future, most companies create a vision statement.

In the best-case scenario, the statement is repeated regularly. In the worst-case scenario, it is buried in the employee handbook.

In every scenario, it’s not enough.

It’s unclear what success looks like. It’s open to interpretation. And there’s no consensus.

It’s not clear what people should be working towards.

And it’s not clear what the businesses should look like at a specific time in the future.

Without a time-bound company vision, connecting today’s work to tomorrow’s outcome is impossible.

A time-bound vision should be something that you can envision. It shouldn’t be so far in the future that you could never predict what the business would look like. But it should be far enough in the future to create an ambitious goal.

For most businesses, a 3-Year Company Vision best fulfills the balance between creating something that can be both imagined and ambitious.³

Creating a 3-Year Company Vision

In contrast to a vague vision statement, a 3-Year Company Vision should be detailed and have a deadline.

It needs to describe what the company should look like in three years in as much detail as possible. It should run several pages. Anyone reading it should clearly understand where the business is going. They shouldn’t have to guess what success looks like.

It shouldn’t be open to interpretation.

Although what this looks like and what areas of the business need a detailed vision will differ for each business, I’ve found that five critical sections are necessary for all companies looking to create clarity for their employees. These five sections describe:

1. Primary Goals

2. Marketing’

3. Innovation

4. Culture

5. Customers

Section 1: Primary Goals

This section answers, “What are the big goals we want to achieve in 3 years?”

These should be goals that significantly transform the business. They can be numerical goals or qualitative goals.

The key is that achieving those goals should transform the business from its current state and align all departments in the company toward a singular vision.

Section 2: Marketing

Management guru Peter Drucker wrote, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.”⁵

This section and the next section split Drucker’s observation into two functional pieces: marketing and innovation.

Marketing involves understanding customers’ needs and tensions and then translating how you solve those tensions and fulfill those needs back to them over and over again.

This section answers, “What do we want and need our marketing to be like to achieve our Primary Goals?”

Section 3: Innovation

Innovation covers the products and services you produce to solve customers’ tensions and fulfill their needs.

This section answers, “What do we want and need our products and services to be like to achieve our Primary Goals?”

Section 4: Culture

In the words of Jim Rohn, “The major reason for setting goals is to compel you to become the person it takes to achieve them.”⁶

A 3-Year Company Vision should make your organization better.

It doesn’t just help you achieve big goals. It also transforms your business into an organization capable of achieving ambitious goals. Because the culture you have today is unlikely to be the culture that needs to be in place to make your vision a reality.

Your culture has to change in line with the vision.

This section answers, “What type of culture do we need and want to have in place to achieve our Primary Goals?”

Section 5: Customers

Innovations don’t only change the business; they change the customers.

Your business in three years must be different than today. It must transform. And when you transform, so does the customer.⁷

Having a vision of your future customers makes you think beyond what value you provide your customers. And it makes you ask how the customer who uses your product or service is changed by using it.

They become different by using your products.

This section answers, “Who does the customer become when we reach our Primary Goals?"

Onward

Clarity influences every part of employees’ workdays.

It also enables leaders to better understand what initiatives will actually contribute to the organization's long-term health.

A 3-Year Company Vision lets employees know where they need to go. It helps them have context for evaluating decisions. It stops them from guessing because they have a better idea of how to connect today with tomorrow in a way that’s compatible with everyone else in the organization.

It creates consistency.

It improves productivity.

And it helps you build a brand.

P.S. Ready to transform confusion into clarity? Schedule a free 15-minute discovery call today to see how a 3-Year Company Vision can give your team the direction they need to build a brand that boosts customer preference and wins market share.

Notes

1. Ellen Marie Bennett with Sarah Tamlinson, Dream First, Details Later: How to Quit Overthinking & Make It Happen, 2021.

2. Tom Ziglar, “If you aim at nothing…,” Ziglar.com, 2016.

3. I’ve found that the ideal timeframe for creating a time-bound vision is 3 to 5 years out. Whether it’s 3 or 5 depends on many factors, such as the type of industry, where the company is in its lifecycle, executive turnover, and how comfortable the business is with projecting. For the majority of businesses, 3 years is best.

4. Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” Remain in Light, 1980.

5. Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, 1973.

6. Jim Rohn, “The Real Value in Setting Goals,” JimRohn.com, 2019; Rohn’s thinking here was inspire by his mentor John Earl Shoaff as Rohn recounted in a talk from the 1990s titled “How to Have Your Best Year Ever.”

7. Michael Schrage, Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?, 2012; you can find a briefer version of Schrage’s idea in his Harvard Business Review article of the same name.