From Ken Blanchard, renowned business coach and author of several best-sellers, including “The One-Minute Manager”. Blanchard will be a featured speaker at “Make 2009 Your Best Year Ever” on January 17th at the San Diego Sports Arena.

On creating an effective “vision” for an organization …

While the ultimate responsibility for ensuring an organizational vision rests with the top management, the organization needs to put in place mechanisms to allow other people to have an opportunity to help shape the vision – to put their thumbprint on it. Otherwise, only the senior leaders who created the vision will truly be engaged by it.

Organizations that do not allow other people within the organization to have a hand in influencing their company’s vision statement are missing out on an important opportunity to engage their people. When people have a voice in creating the vision, they develop a deeper understanding of what the vision is really about. It becomes more than just words on a piece of paper, and they see how they can make a contribution, giving purpose to their work.

While many successful companies began as the result of the early vision of their leaders – Walt Disney, Bill Gates, and Herb Kelleher, for example – these pioneers would not have been able to realize their dreams had they not shared those dreams with the people around them. Sharing dreams means helping people see how their own dreams can be incorporated into the vision articulated by the leader so that they want to sign up to bring the dream to reality.

In fact, I believe the process of creating the vision is as important as what the vision says. Instead of simply taking the top management to a retreat to put the vision together and then announcing it to others, senior leaders should encourage dialogue about the vision by asking people these questions:

Would you like to work for an organization that has this vision?

Can you see where you fit in the vision?

Does it help you set priorities?

Does it provide guidelines for making decisions?

Is it exciting and motivating?

Have we left anything out?

Should we delete anything?

To help your organization remain focused and committed to its vision, you should periodically ask yourself these questions:

Are our goals aligned with our vision?

How are we progressing toward these goals?

Has there been a major shift in our business environment that requires a shift in our focus?

Are we on target, or do we need to readjust?

For example, the launch of the first mission to the moon required thousands of mid-course corrections in addition to great up-front planning and aiming. If the engineers in charge of the project had just pointed and launched without making these corrections, the astronauts would have ended up in the middle of outer space instead of landing successfully on the moon. Setting a clear direction is important. Checking to make sure that you are still on course is just as critical.