twenty-one
What Do We Want?
Kallie Dovel, Alli Swanson, Anna Toy, Brooke Hodges, and Jessie Simonson were typical college juniors, enjoying campus life while trying to decide what they wanted to do after graduation. Kallie had recently returned from a trip to Uganda, where she met women her own age who were single moms, without education or jobs, who had grown up in a war-ravaged country. To survive, the women created jewelry, using paper beads they recycled from old posters, which they sold to the few tourists who came through. Kallie brought some of the jewelry back home with her, and it was an instant hit with her friends.
Knowing what you want, both as a leader and as a team, will drive every decision you make.
The five college friends had an idea: maybe they could help these women, and others as well, by providing a larger market for their products. That meant jumping into the world of international business, studying fashion trends, bridging cultural barriers, and understanding social and economic development. It was, in their words, “the beginning of the hardest, scariest, and most incredible journey imaginable.”1 As Simonson told Forbes magazine in an interview, “We were college girls who had never run a business, let alone a business in Africa.”2
That didn’t stop them. They were determined not only to provide dignified employment to women in Uganda, but also to change lives. And today, less than fifteen years later, they are doing just that. They employ previously abused and underserved women in Uganda, and they provide them with income, education, financial training, business mentoring, and healthcare for five years. Their company, 31 Bits, supplies jewelry to over 350 stores, including large retail outlets such as Nordstrom, and they’ve been featured in Forbes, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle. They have expanded into multiple locations and countries, including Indonesia and Bali, and their product line features not just an extensive line of jewelry, but also handbags, home goods, and more.
The company has been a pioneer in providing environmentally friendly, responsibly sourced products. They were among the first “give-back” companies, and their business model has always been about empowering their providers, not just making a profit. Since their beginnings, they have been on the forefront of raising awareness of the need for ethical fashion, educating consumers about the impact of their purchases.
Forbes states that the five friends are “clear on what success looks like for them: rather than a one-for-one model, or giving back a percentage of their projects, they have focused on getting their artisans independent in five years.” That means they continually lose their best-trained employees and have to start over. But as Simonson said in the interview, “We always wanted these women to be out there working, setting up their own businesses, and sustaining themselves. After all, that’s sustainability, isn’t it?”
The story of 31 Bits is an inspiring illustration of social enterprise: a business model with both financial and social goals. Social enterprises address needs or solve problems in the world around them through a market-driven approach.3 This wholistic attitude toward business is gaining popularity because many people want more than a profitable bottom line: they also want to do good and to help others, but in a financially sustainable way.
Defining Success
The five friends who formed 31 Bits understood the importance of being clear on what success looks like for you and your team: in their case, success was providing dignified employment leading to financial independence for disadvantaged women. Every team or organization, no matter the size, must answer the question, “What do we want?” In other words, they need to be clear on their vision and their definition of success.
If you don’t define success beforehand, you and your team run two risks. First, you can be lulled into inadvertent complacency by a false sense of progress. You might feel like you’re doing well, but feelings are notoriously unreliable. Without a predefined, objective way to measure progress, you can coast along on minimal effort—and produce minimal results. Having no established goals means no accountability; and no accountability allows complacency and even laziness to set in. You can subtly create an environment that values things like camaraderie, team spirit, and unity, but undervalues actually getting work done.
The second risk of undefined success is unfocused busyness. In other words, your team might do a lot of work in a lot of areas, but since there is no cohesive direction, you don’t really move forward—you just keep busy. Henry David Thoreau wrote in a letter to a friend: “It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?”4 In other words, what is the goal of your busyness? That is the question every leader and team must ask, because busyness is not always connected to vision. What future are you aiming for, and how do you plan to get there? Define your vision, then get busy. You’ll go further, and you’ll get there faster.
Defining what you want as an organization will help you avoid the twin traps of inadvertent complacency and unfocused busyness. But it will do more than that: it will help you chart a course that is practical and reachable by breaking your vision down into bite-size wins.
Vision and Wins
I like to answer the “What do we want?” question in terms of both vision and wins. There are a lot of words thrown around in leadership that relate to the future: mission, goals, mileposts, steps, stages, phases, objectives, purposes, targets, aims, intentions, focuses, and plans, to list a few. There is considerable overlap in the definitions of these terms, and most teams choose their own terminology to describe the journey they are on. For me, though, vision is the long-erm objectives of the team, including who you are and why you exist, and wins are the short-term, tangible accomplishments along the way.
1. Vision: Long-Term Objectives
Defining your vision requires answering the “What do we want?” question clearly and boldly. Vision is usually painted with broad strokes. It’s not just what you do, it’s who you are and who you want to be. It’s a dream you see in the distance, something to aim for and work toward. Often it is described using superlatives: “to make the best shoe on the market,” “to provide the greatest selection of watches in the world,” or “to be a church where everyone belongs.” The size of the dream makes it inspiring, even contagious. People respond to the vision you see in your head and paint with your words.
Vision has a sense of destiny to it, a sense of calling. It’s not just a business or a job, it’s a calling. You might say things like, “I was born for this,” or “I would do this even if I wasn’t paid for it,” or “I know we can do this.” You find yourself talking about it with anyone who will listen. You stay up at night thinking about it, brainstorming ways to make your vision a reality.
Vision has a sense of challenge to it as well. Hence the superlatives—you want your organization and team to be the best. You want to do what no one else has done before. It’s not a fanciful dream, but it’s not a walk in the park, either. If it were easy, someone else would have done it already, but you believe you are up to the challenge.
Strategies come and go, but vision changes only slowly, if at all.
Vision also has a sense of permanency to it. It’s a goal in the distance, one you use to align your efforts and measure your progress—often for years to come. It’s what you and your team go back to when you are discouraged by resistance or obstacles along the way.
It stands always a little way into the future, beckoning, encouraging, challenging.
The difference between vision and mission, or between a vision statement and a mission statement, is also defined by each leader and team. Not everyone agrees on the difference, which is totally fine. For me, vision is a reflection of mission. That is, our vision describes how we implement our mission. Our mission as a church, for example, is an overarching statement of why we exist: “to help people know God, find freedom, discover their gifts, and make a difference.” Our vision, on the other hand, is more practical and visible: we want to spread a message of love and hope in our city, we want to open church locations in other cities, and much more.
Regardless of the terms you use, the point is that you must have a long-term approach to your organization’s goals. Where do you want to be in five, ten, or twenty years? If you look far down the road, what do you see for your team, your organization, and yourself?
2. Wins: Short-Term Accomplishments
It is important for leaders to be clear about the difference between vision and wins. For example, imagine you gather everyone together and share your dream in grand, dramatic terms. You talk about changing lives, about innovating, about risk-taking, about disruptive products and services, about capturing market share. You give a motivational speech worthy of an Oscar and send people back to their desks feeling energized and excited. But three months go by and you realize nothing has changed—you’re no closer to realizing your dream, and no one even remembers your motivational speech. You can’t help but wonder, Why aren’t people getting it?
What happened? You cast a great vision, but you didn’t identify any wins, any short-term goals. Vision is bold, grand, inspiring—and somewhat generic. It has to be, because it encompasses a future that might take years to become reality. In contrast, wins are now, or at least in the near future, and they are specific steps that put feet to vision.
“Vision without implementation is hallucination,” someone once said, and wins are the progressive implementation of vision. Your team’s vision might be to redefine the industry, but a win would be to launch three new products this year, or to land a feature in an industry magazine, or to eliminate 60 percent of waste during the production process, or anything else that takes you one step closer to your vision.
Maybe your team doesn’t need a tearjerker motivational speech about your thirty-year plan as much as they need weekly sales goals. Maybe telling your startup about your dream of world domination should be followed by simpler goals that you hope to accomplish in the next three months, such as getting your website up, setting up accounting procedures, and purchasing office furniture. These tasks may be more mundane than world domination, but people tend to appreciate big dreams more when they are accompanied by practical steps to accomplish them.
Vision is inspiring and essential, but measurable, achievable milestones are a much better source of ongoing motivation. Confusing the two is where leaders frequently fail and why teams often get frustrated. Leaders have to routinely break down long-term vision into short-term wins. Your team needs to know what to strive toward not just over years and decades, but also in weeks, months, and quarters.
A win is any measurable goal: something you can attain over the course of weeks or months, or the progress from one year to the next. For example, you might define a win as reaching $1 million in quarterly sales, going ninety days without accidents on the job, or growing your social media following by 200 percent.
In order to track wins, you have to define them; and in order to define them, you have to decide what is important to you. Again, it comes back to answering the question, “What do you want?” You have to decide where you are going long-term, then decide what you can do right now to take steps in that direction. Those steps are your wins.
So, how do you decide what steps to take? How do you know what a win looks like for you and your team? To start with, take a look at what you measure. If you claim something is important but you don’t measure it, it’s probably not really that important to you. Conversely, if you think you don’t care about something, but you find yourself tracking it, it’s probably more important than you care to admit.
For example, in the church community I lead, we have a weekly “Monday Report” that summarizes the metrics we track from our Sunday gatherings and, when applicable, compares them to the previous year on that date. We record attendance, donations, number of vehicles in the parking lot, volunteers, load-in and load-out time at our venue, live-streaming viewers, and more. The Monday Report is a quick way for my team and me to see where we are winning, or seeing progress, and where we need to continue to grow.
If something actually is important to you but you aren’t measuring it, figure out how to start. That’s not always easy, but it’s incredibly helpful if you can do it. How else will you know if you are winning or losing? You might be doing better than you think, but you’ll never know until you find a way to benchmark progress. A leader and a team that don’t know if they are winning or losing are losing by default: even if they are making some progress, they can’t be the best version of themselves because they don’t know where they really are or where they need to improve. They will lose opportunities and momentum because they have lost themselves.
Metrics is simply another term for measurement. It refers to measurable, trackable stats that help organizations evaluate their progress. George Forrest, writing for business services company iSixSigma, states that “Metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important.”5 Notice the positive focus of that explanation: numbers bring improvement and focus. Numbers are your friend, even if they aren’t the numbers you were hoping for, because they quantify progress and help a team focus on what’s important.
Never avoid metrics just because you’re afraid of what you’ll discover. It’s better to find out now where you stand or what you’re walking into rather than being caught by surprise later. Good leaders can’t always avoid hard times or bad news, but they can be as prepared as possible beforehand. Forrest continues, “Fudging metrics benefits no one. To deliver real progress, everyone involved with the metric needs to be completely honest. . . . Understanding the company’s true position is the first step toward improving it.”6
As a leader, you can’t be everywhere all the time, so the decisions you make will inevitably come from a combination of data and people. People give you subjective feedback, which has its place, but data gives you objective feedback you can use to make informed decisions. Both objective and subjective sources of input are important, and together they give you confidence in your decisions. Seek accurate information, regardless of what it tells you, and make informed choices.
I have to do this from time to time with our employees. Like any organization, we evaluate people periodically based on their performance: they have benchmarks to hit, goals to meet, and jobs to accomplish, and we usually have data that provides an objective picture of their job performance. But data can never tell the whole story. Sometimes people are going through personal issues, or outside factors kept them from reaching their goals this quarter. Maybe they were recently given a new area of responsibility and are still struggling with the learning curve. As a leader, you can’t just look at the cold, hard facts—but you can’t ignore them either. Get knowledge, but also get understanding. That is, evaluate the data, but then look below the surface to identify what is really going on before making any drastic decisions.
Remember, you as the leader define your wins, along with others on your leadership team. You decide what you want. Don’t get sidetracked chasing someone else’s definition of a win. Of course, you should allow yourself to be informed by what others are doing or pursuing, but you and your team are unique. You can only be really good at a few things, so be really good at the things you want to be good at, and celebrate the wins that get you there.
When identifying wins, take into account the makeup of your team, your resources, and your situation; and do your best to keep the wins achievable. Be realistic about what you can accomplish; there’s no point in discouraging your team by throwing out random numbers everyone knows are too grandiose. Since vision is, by definition, long-term, and therefore progress won’t always be immediately obvious, your wins need to be easy enough and often enough that your team can observe its advance.
The more wins you can define, the better. Sports teams have a very visible win-loss record for their games, but games aren’t the only wins they track. They are also looking for things like player improvement, greater teamwork, ticket sales, positive off-the-field behavior, merchandise sales, a growing fan base, and more. In your organization and with your team, find ways to set attainable goals and create opportunities for frequent success. More opportunities for success means that more people will be involved in winning—and that’s always a good thing.
The clearer your vision and the more measurable your wins, the greater the odds that you and your team will soon feel the wind at your back. It won’t always be easy, of course. But when your resources are aligned with your purpose, and when you have clearly defined steps to take each day, progress is natural and almost inevitable.