To build strong buy-in, work with them to develop a clear vision of the future. 

Once you have a clear understanding of your team's current state, the next step is to create a vision of the future state you are aiming for. (Spoiler alert - next step after this is to specifically identify the gaps between the current and future states, and dive deep into the root causes of those gaps.)

Begin by envisioning the team’s future state. You may, or may not, have this well-defined at this point. It’s best to know what you want, but not be dogmatic about it until you get input from others. 

The direction you’ve received from your superiors is key. You want your team’s future state to be aligned with the wider organization. This doesn’t mean that you can’t take your path to achieving that state. But you don’t want to lead your team astray from the organization’s goals. 

Now ask your team members for their vision. Doing so will give you a good understanding of how well aligned everyone is, or if there is significant work to do on alignment. After all, if everyone isn’t rowing in the same direction, there is a high risk of getting nowhere.

This is a great opportunity to use your facilitation skills, following these steps:

• Have each member spend 5-10 minutes silently writing down their vision for the future. 

• Then ask each person to read what they wrote, capturing the key points on a flip chart or whiteboard. If more than one person shares a vision, that’s great. It makes your work easier. 

• Once you’ve captured these for each team member, it’s time for the team to reduce this to a unified goal. It’s important here that you have control of the conversation and don’t end up with a goal that’s at odds with your larger organization. 

• Now define the objective metric goals (based on the same metrics in your initial state) and have the teams paint a subjective picture of how that looks. 

Now you have your team agreeing on:

• What you all are doing,

• The current state, and

• The target state. 

In the next post, we’ll talk about how to identify the key gaps between current state and target state, and how you go about identifying the most important root causes of those gaps. 

See you in the next post . . .

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