How to Align Your Team with Your Vision

The most powerful brands are often born from a leader's unique and compelling vision – a spark of insight that illuminates the path forward. 

But what happens when that brilliant clarity is something only you can see? 

How do you translate that deeply personal vision into a shared understanding that ignites action across your organization?

The challenge for any CEO, Founder, or Entrepreneur isn't just having the big ideas, it's making them resonate with your team, your peers, and your entire company.

Everyone needs to understand the vision in order to bring it to life.

“The challenge for any CEO, Founder, or Entrepreneur isn't just having the big ideas, it's making them resonate with your team, your peers, and your entire company.”

—AMELIA ELLENSTEIN

You can share articles, send emails, and have endless one on one’s. Host team video calls and annual meetings, and STILL feel like no one else really, truly “gets it.”

Why? 

Because all the experiences, A-HA moments, right turns, and wrong turns that led you to your big idea are yours… and yours alone. Your vision is an intuitive, learned, internal  framework that’s been developed through experience. 

Which is why a vision can be so hard to explain… and even harder to understand. 

“Your big idea, is an intuitive, learned, internal  framework that’s been developed through experience. Which is why it can be so hard to explain… and even harder to understand.”

—AMELIA ELLENSTEIN 

A visionary who’s team doesn’t “get it” is in for a frustrating ride as people spin their wheels: teams will struggle to innovate, important projects may never make it off the ground, new initiatives can fall flat, time is wasted on work that doesn’t make sense.

All of this happens not because of the quality of the work or the quality of the team, but because of the team’s quality of understanding.

Quality of understanding signals the depth, accuracy, and strength of an individual's grasp of an idea, and it can be low or high.

A high quality of understanding goes beyond familiarity or the ability to recall facts. It’s a genuine and meaningful internalization of knowledge that enables insightful application and critical thinking.

When CEOs, Founders & Entrepreneurs increase their team’s quality of understanding, they increase the team’s capability to bring the vision to life because they understand it deeply.

I have a mentor who used to say, “There are three ways to learn about something: You can read about it, you can hear about it, or you can experience it. And, the three are not the same.”

So, you can ask your team to read about the vision for your brand by sending articles and emails. You can ask your team to listen to you talk about it in meetings.  The challenging truth is that people can read and listen, and still never really “get it.” Reading about it and hearing about a vision aren’t enough. A vision is too complex and too intangible.

If you want your team to see the brand vision, feel it, and know it as deeply as you do, then you need to give your team opportunities to experience it. They need to live it so they can learn it …just like you did.

“If you want your team to see the vision, feel it, and know it as deeply as you do, then you need to give your team opportunities to experience it.”

—AMELIA ELLENSTEIN 

3 Ways to invite your team to into the experience of your vision.

1 Tell Stories with Emotion: 

Vision, at its heart, is a story about the future. Leaders can help their team experience it by switching out of directive mode and into story telling.

Too often we approach conversations in meetings from an operational mindset—we talk at people. We direct. We follow a structured agenda and check the list. This approach does little to engage people. If you want people to see your vision and feel it like you do, tell them a story.

Describe your vision in action by sharing stories of early successes, A-HA moments, customer wins (even small ones), or moments where the core principles of the vision were exemplified. Make these stories personal and emotionally engaging—share the heartbreak and the triumphs. Be vulnerable. Be honest about the struggle.

Story-telling engages your team differently. Stories trigger emotions and empathy that allows your team to see things, and more importantly, feel things from your point of view.

Here’s an example:

One of the founders I worked with for a decade told a story from the early days when he was bootstrapping growth. He needed cash. The business was on the line. He had to do something and it had to work.

Around that time, the state fair was coming to town and an idea was born: Move the store outside under a circus tent on state fair grounds. Add all the elements that make the state fair exciting: music, balloons, entertainment, and create a buzz so big, so irresistible that people driving by would line up to see what was going on inside the tent.

The founder poured everything he had into that sale. Every dime went toward advertising. Everybody, no matter their job, helped carry furniture out to the tent. The night before the sale, they went to sleep not knowing the future of the company.

When opening day arrived so many people pulled over that the roads were jammed for miles. The sale saved the business—which went on to become a $1 Billion brand—and the story became a part of the brands lore.

The founder told this story (over and over again) to remind his team that at the core, his vision included creative problem solving. No challenge was too big to solve. Anything was possible with creativity and elbow grease.

• Activity: Sit down and reflect on the experiences that were essential to the development of your big idea. Write 3 stories from your early days that demonstrate your vision in action. 

2 Use Vision as a Problem Solving Tool: 

Learning happens through doing and reflecting. Leaders can help their team experience the vision by using it as a problem solving tool.

In the problem solving process, ask questions that require teams to apply the vision using critical thinking skills:

• If we use this problem as an opportunity to live out our vision, what does success look like?

• How would it look or feel if the solution were in conflict with our vision?

• Where is our vision missing from this equation?

The purpose of vision-driven problem solving is to teach teams how to think like the founder. By putting the team in the driver’s seat, they get to imagine solutions through your eyes, and you get to give them coaching to shape their understanding.

• Activity: The next time your team dives in to solve a problem, use vision as a problem solving tool. Ask challenging, open-ended questions that teach them how to look at a problem through the lens of your vision. Then, actively coach the throughout the process to demonstrate your thinking in action.

3 Recognize it when you see it in others:

Keep your eyes peeled for sparks of your vision reflected in your team's actions and ideas.

When you see a colleague take initiative in a way that aligns with the future you're painting, or when they articulate a solution that echoes the core tenets of your vision, acknowledge it publicly and specifically.

Highlighting these moments not only reinforces the desired behaviors but also demonstrates to the entire team that the vision is not just an abstract concept, but a tangible force already at play within the organization.

Recognizing and celebrating these 'vision in action' moments can be incredibly powerful in fostering collective understanding and commitment because everyone pauses to reflect on the lived experience of the vision.

• Activity: Practice recognition—whether you recognize the vision in action with a formal reward or an in the moment high-five—tell people when their actions are expressing your vision. Be explicit. Instead of general kudos like, “Nice job!” try a very specific compliment: “The way you stayed calm with that frustrated customer really demonstrated my vision in action. Keep it up!”