Company visions are meant to stimulate growth through emotional engagement, although many so-called ‘visions' are really only goal statements. Worse, adding deadlines to those statements can slow achievement and dull motivation. 

‘We'll achieve X by 200Y' might motivate executives in the C-suite, but simply make employees feel tired because they know it's unrealistic. 

Alternatively, a time horizon way off into the future can slow the pace of growth. If employees see they have five, or ten, years to achieve something, why rush? They believe senior management must have good reason to wait and stop employees achieving the vision in say, two years or even six months.

Create a ‘feeling' vision

A company vision such as: ‘To become a leading supplier of widgets in Europe,' doesn't connect with people's feelings and therefore can't energise.

At Shirlaws, we believe a vision is primarily about feeling over thinking and must be reasonably creatable now. People aren't motivated to achieve by simply thinking - they must feel better about the future than today for a vision to motivate.

When people attach feelings to the vision, they become engaged and the vision creates movement. A ‘vision' such as, ‘To grow the share price by $X...' is still a goal. What's the higher business purpose after this goal has been achieved? To reply: ‘Nothing' will leave everyone with a hollow feeling.

But we do recognise the need to address the commercial context and include it in our vision framework, which has two elements:

• commercial - data This element is re-set over time, once the numbers have been achieved
• cultural - feelings Answers the question: ‘What's our higher purpose?' This is crucial because numbers alone won't create movement and growth.

Don't constrain business goals with deadlines

Business leaders often see the vision as data - then compound the problem by creating time-bound goals.

Our many years experience of helping companies have taught us that putting a date on a goal doesn't guarantee it will happen when you say - and is more likely to constrain delivery.

But businesses also need to recognise that when goals are taking longer to achieve than anticipated, the business probably never had the growth capability in the first place. If people are already over committed, why force them to fail?

The moral of the story? Stick to what you need to do and you'll get there faster without a constraining deadline.