What Are You Aiming At?

The great Zig Ziglar used to famously say, “If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” As a business owner and CEO this is one of the core issues you face. You set the course and the rest of the company executes your vision, but if you’re unclear what the destination is then you do your team a huge disservice.

It’s not enough to just point north and tell them to head that way. Your team needs to know where they are going and more importantly why they are headed there.

There is a line in the original Ghostbusters movie that always made me laugh. At the end of the movie when the boys are fighting the evil Zuul they climb to the top of a New York skyscraper and come to a set of ominous looking stairs. The team is understandably nervous about following the stairs to their potential destruction so one of the team, Egon Spengler asks, “Where do these stairs go?”

Peter Venkman the leader of the team played by the amazingly comedic Bill Murray takes a beat and replies plainly, “They go up.” The team then begrudgingly heads up the stairs assuming the worst. Are you leading like that? Giving instructions with no reason or explanation?

What’s the Point?

Your team wants to know where they are going more than you think. They not only want to know where, but they want to know why even more strongly than previous generations did. Studies have shown that Millenials and Gen Zers desperately want to be a part of companies with a mission that they believe in.

As the CEO you need to communicate to your team often about where you are going and why you want us to go there. What’s on the other side of the hill? Due to their limited view of the business landscape and business fundamentals most employees aren’t privy to the perspective that you have as CEO, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to know what’s over the horizon.

That long view gives them hope that the future will be better than today. It gives them faith that what they are doing matters and plays a pivotal role in the company reaching those goals. It retains employees because it makes them feel like they have accomplished something when the business accomplishes something. And lastly it helps them set their own goals to help the company better reach its goals.

This week think about what you could be doing better as a leader to help your team see over the horizon. Cast a vision of what tomorrow will look like if the company hits its goals. The value of vision casting is hard to quantify, but without it its hard to survive.