You know the moment. Your CEO wraps up the town hall, the last slide says something big about the future, there’s polite applause, and everyone files back to their desks. And then nothing much happens. A vision that stays in the boardroom is really just a wish, and the gap between the two almost always comes down to how leaders bring people along.

Everyone nodded. Nothing changed.

So, what happens when a vision never lands? The first thing you get is cynicism, and once that sets in, it’s really hard to undo. People who’ve watched a few visions get announced and then dropped get very good at nodding along. They say the right things in meetings and keep their real opinion to themselves. And from the top, that looks like momentum, when actually nothing is moving.

Frustrated leaders often go into overdrive with command and control to make things happen, which kills off the exact energy and ownership the vision needed in the first place. Over time, the vision gets watered down into something “more realistic”, and everyone pretends that was the plan all along.

As I wrote in my book Lead the Future, if you can’t sell the vision, it stays just that, a vision. And selling it has very little to do with better slides or a more inspiring town hall. It’s the human work of helping people see themselves in a future they didn’t design themselves. Most leaders have never been taught how to do that.

Oh, and if you’re a leader in the middle, here’s the tricky bit. You probably didn’t vote for the vision either. And you’re the one who has to sell it to your team on Monday morning.

When you get it right, though, the energy that it creates is huge. People make good decisions without escalating everything, because they know where you’re all heading. And you build a shared sense of who you are that a competitor simply can’t copy.

Standing at the departure gate

Imagine you’re a tour guide who has fallen in love with a place your group has never been to. You can see it all, the landscape, the light, what it feels like to be there. Your excitement is real. But your group is standing at the departure gate with their own worries and one very fair question. Why should I trust this will be worth it for me? Describing the destination more beautifully won’t help much. What helps is finding out what each person actually cares about, and showing them how this trip gives them that.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Great slides, no change

I have been coaching Daniel, the CEO of a healthcare organisation. His vision is honestly one of the best I’ve come across. You can feel how much he cares about the people they serve. He presented it at their annual leadership conference, and he nailed it. Great slides, confident delivery.

Six months later, almost nothing had changed. When I talked to leaders two levels down during a leadership workshop, they all said the same thing. They could roughly remember the vision, and they thought it sounded good. But they had no idea what it meant for the decisions they make every day.

So, we started working on what I call the translation cascade. Every leader, at every level, sits down and works out what the vision asks of their team. What decisions change because of it? What behaviour needs to shift? What would success look like here in six months? It took time, and it made every leader do some real thinking instead of just passing the message on.

Say it ten times more than you think

John Kotter found that leaders undercommunicate their vision by a factor of ten. By the time you feel like you’ve said it way too many times, most of your people are only just hearing it properly. And it’s about how you say it, too. Kouzes and Posner, in the research behind The Leadership Challenge, found that the leaders who inspire a shared vision are the ones who connect it to the hopes and values of the people they’re asking to follow. If you frame it around what the organisation gets, it falls flat. Frame it around what it means for them, and people lean in.