You Communicated the Vision. It’s Stalled and You Don’t Know Why.
The problem might be the packaging, not the message.
What happens when the positive motion of your vision starts to falter? The vision was cast, the room nodded agreement, but there is more to the organization than just those people in the room. Part of the work of creating a vision is giving people in the organization something to strive toward.
When any new initiative is launched, you have the usual suspects. Some will take up the call. Others will be resistant to change. But the majority will wait to see what happens. Maybe they’ve been through this before — a new vision was launched but nothing ever changed, so they don’t expect anything different this time. A lot of leaders, young and old, make the mistake of spending too much time trying to win their enemies over. They don’t like it when it seems like others don’t like them, or they’re focused on building consensus, which is good but can keep the conversation going past the point of being healthy.
Invest in Supporters Not the Resistors
In Leadershift, John C. Maxwell explains that whenever a leader casts a new vision or pushes for change, people naturally sort into three groups: roughly 25% support immediately, 50% stay uncommitted and wait to see what happens, and 25% resist regardless of the leader’s actions.
It is not that the bottom 25% don’t matter, or that they are somehow less than as people. However, organizationally, they will not be as effective at bringing that vision to life. So what do you do?
Some people think the leader should then focus on the middle 50%, but that is a mistake as well. That group will not be moving anytime soon. That said, you do have to be aware of what is important to that 50%. Your focus as a leader is on the 25% that support the vision. Your job is to equip them with the tools and language they need to bring parts of the 50% on board.
The uncommitted middle is still deciding what this vision means and whether it’s worth their investment, and they’re watching the committed 25% far more closely than they’re watching you. Move the middle toward the top, and the resistant group loses its audience. Spend your time chasing the resistors instead, and you accomplish something sharper than wasted effort — you give them a platform. Debating them, negotiating with them, treating their pushback as the thing that needs solving all legitimizes their position instead of neutralizing it. The middle notices who you’re spending your time on, and it tells them something about where the real weight is.
Package the Message From Their Perspective Not Yours
This is where understanding their perspective is important. You have to be able to frame the benefits of the vision from their perspective, not just yours or the organization’s.
There are countless examples I have of clients and others approaching an issue solely from how they see it, without giving any consideration to how the people they are communicating to see it.
You know exactly why it matters to you. You’ve said the reasoning so many times it feels self-evident. You think, of course they understand. You keep saying it louder to people who were never going to be moved by your reasoning in the first place — because it isn’t theirs.
The shift is simple to describe and hard to do: stop restating your case and start naming their stake. Not your version of what’s in it for them — their actual seat, their actual pressure, their actual version of a good outcome. It means taking off the glasses you’ve been wearing since the day you designed this thing and trying it on theirs.
This is not limited to communicating a vision. This is what I would call the platinum standard of communication and connection:
“Communicate to people in a way that they need to hear, not just how you are comfortable saying it.” — Dr. James Bryant
I learned this the hard way. During the first three years of my marriage, I had to learn how to communicate in a way that my wife would be able to receive it. I always err on the side that says the onus is on the person that wants to communicate.
When the vision is lived, it becomes part of the culture
Once you have been consistently communicating the vision and living the impact — including how that vision translates into everyday actions — that vision starts to take shape and take on a life of its own in your organization.
Years ago, during my time at the Transportation Research Board, I traveled to state DOTs across the country as part of a national research initiative on highway maintenance. Part of that work meant sitting down with agency leadership and also walking the yards and job sites with field maintenance crews — two very different audiences inside the same organization.
At PennDOT, before I’d even fully gotten my bearings, someone in an early meeting told me PennDOT is an agency that finds a way to say yes. I didn’t think much of it in the moment — it sounded like the kind of line an agency puts on a poster. Then I heard it again. From a secretary. From the engineers in the office. From field maintenance techs standing next to their trucks. There was a sense that they believed what they said, and part of that was tied to the fact that the agency celebrated every opportunity it had to get to yes.
Design your delivery, not just your message
There are several reasons why a vision may fail to become reality. A vision can be said clearly and still never travel, not because the people hearing it are slow or resistant, but because it was never packaged in a way that made sense to them. .
The inability to communicate that vision from the perspective of those you lead is one of the major reasons it stalls. The package is just as important as the message it contains.
Dr. James Bryant, P.E.
Win By Design
PS — This article is about communicating your vision but many of these principles apply to communication as a whole.