Performing the Exercise With Your Staff

The exercise above, in which you define your vision and plan, is both engaging and motivating. The good news is that you can go through this exercise with your staff. You should have a pretty good idea of how to do it as you’ve just done it yourself, but here are some additional tips.

Let’s start with defining a vision.

Step 1: Ten-years exercise

First, they’ll need to look back over the last ten years using a timeline in the same way that you did. You can decide to do this collaboratively, such as drawing it all out on a whiteboard together, or perhaps, they’d prefer to go away and think about it. It’s up to them.

The result of this stage, regardless of whether it was done alone or in partnership with you, is that they’ll have filled in their timeline. Get them to document it somewhere so you can find it later. It’s time for the first coaching session.

Step 2: Ten-years coaching session

In this session, you’ll be using the timeline of the previous ten years to help them dream about the future. You need to assume the role of the coach, keeping the thought bubble over their head as we’ve learned before and asking leading questions to help them realize that ten years is a long time, as demonstrated by the past. This should allow them to be ambitious about the future.

Your aim here is to use coaching techniques and language to allow them to think creatively and to think big, meaning beyond the next few promotions and pay raises. You can borrow from the “What About the Next Ten Years?” approach that you learned when we went through the exercise together in the Your Vision lesson.