Principle Based Management™ (PBM), formerly known as Market-Based Management®, provides a holistic approach to making decisions, solving problems, and creating value for individuals in your community, team members in your organization, and society at large. In this PBM 101 series, we’re unpacking mental models, ideas, and tools that can help you reach the next level in your work.
If you’re a nonprofit leader, you likely know that you need a vision. You may even have one that you like. But is your vision having the impact it should? Is it inspiring your team to contribute? Is it a useful guide that helps employees focus their entrepreneurial energy? Is it attracting the right partners, donors, and beneficiaries? Is it effectively defining your organization’s purpose in the world? The right vision will make all of these things easier, paving the way for shared success.
Before you craft and cast your vision, you should define your beliefs around three core areas (which we’ve discussed previously in this series):
- North Star: Your beliefs about what the world should look like
- Point of View: Your beliefs about what the world looks like today
- Capabilities: Your beliefs about your team’s unique strengths
Armed with this fresh perspective, you are better positioned to prioritize what you need to do differently (or continue doing). At this point, you may be anxious to share your new insights in the form of a vision statement. This is important (as we’ll soon discuss), but your ultimate aim should be to develop and connect employees to your most important priorities.
Armed with this fresh perspective, you are better positioned to prioritize what you need to do differently (or continue doing). At this point, you may be anxious to share your new insights in the form of a vision statement. This is important (as we’ll soon discuss), but your ultimate aim should be to develop and connect employees to your most important priorities.
Evaluate Possible Opportunities
Based on your capability assessment and your Point of View of the world around you—and guided by your North Star—you should be able to see the world of possible opportunities around you in a new and different light.
This phase begins with diverging to consider all the likely opportunities that have emerged because of the new thinking and concepts you have applied. This includes considering new opportunities you’ve never acted on before. But it also includes what you’re already doing. (The Vision-Development Process doesn’t happen in a vacuum: you are likely already running programs and have hunches on where you can create value.) This step helps you re-evaluate the status quo, while pushing you to think about the world of opportunities that you may not have seen before.
This phase ends by converging on the critical few opportunities you will pursue. To ensure you are creating value where you are uniquely qualified, a helpful phrase to consider along the way is: “we want to be capabilities-bound and opportunities focused.” There may be any number of good strategies that an organization in your space could consider. It is important to constrain your organization to those activities that you can most effectively undertake.
Articulate a Vision
At this point, you’ve already done much of the hard work of fleshing out your thinking—the vision is where you bring it all together. It’s time to articulate a clear statement for how you uniquely create value by synthesizing your thinking about your North Star, Capabilities, Point of View, and key opportunities.
Below are four key components to consider as you draft and discuss your statement. Your vision statement should:
- Clearly introduce the North Star you’re working towards.
- Describe the status quo (informed by your point of view and North Star thinking). In other words, why is your work necessary?
- Define the role your organization will play to close the gap between how the world is and how the world should be, and identify the high-level opportunities you will focus on to achieve it.
- Be open-ended enough to encourage entrepreneurship and the ability to pivot to changing circumstances. It should also be specific enough to effectively guide prioritization, resource allocation, daily decision-making, and the responsibilities of all employees.
Keep in mind that the process is almost as valuable as the vision statement itself. By creating, discussing, writing about, acting on, and getting feedback on your vision, you’ll spark critical conversations with your team members and get buy-in for the end result.
Put your Vision into Action
A perfectly written vision statement won’t do you any good if it fails to improve decision-making or make your organization more effective. The appropriate way to socialize and operationalize your vision will vary, but consider these three fundamentals to motivate and unlock the creative energy of all employees:
- Conduct ongoing conversations to clarify and connect people to the vision.
- Develop actionable strategies that reflect priorities at the organizational level. Empower teams to translate those organizational priorities into objectives that are relevant to other parts of the organization.
- Ensure that the responsibilities of every employee are aligned with the team’s priorities in support of the overall vision of the organization.
