How to Make Your Team Understand Your Vision

Inside the mind of every founder is a clear vision for what they want their startup to accomplish. However, for better or worse, team members don’t have access to the inner workings of a founder’s mind. Thus, a common source of frustration for founders is when their team doesn’t understand the vision they see so clearly in their mind.

Conveying that vision is a key component to startup success. It helps keep everyone on the same page and rowing in the same direction. Knowing the vision and long-term goal of a startup can also help to keep employees motivated during the long journey toward startup success. Therefore, it’s not only frustrating but also detrimental when a founder can’t convey their vision to employees.

The natural reaction from founders when their team doesn’t understand their vision is to go deeper into that vision by sharing every little detail. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be effective most of the time. It’s also going to waste a lot of time and energy.

The problem for founders is that they are too focused on what they’re trying to convey. They know their vision inside and out, and they make faulty assumptions about what team members understand. The best way to convey their vision is not a deep dive into the details but rather by addressing the questions team members might have.

One exercise I’ve had founders do to best explain their vision is to condense everything into a single page, or at most, a three-minute talk. Anything longer will be too detailed and too time-consuming. The founder can then share that three-minute explanation with small groups of top executives, and eventually team members lower down in the company.

The next step is for those small groups to summarize what they heard. It may even help to role-play with team members stepping into the shoes of the founder and conveying what they believe the vision to be.

The result of this exercise is often founders feeling surprised and flustered at how little their team understands their vision. The good news is that this can be the starting point for a founder explaining their vision. At this point, they will know how much of the basic version team members understand and what questions they might have.

Founders need to keep in mind that the details of their vision are meaningless until everyone else understands the basics. To best explain your vision, start with a single page. Only after your team begins to understand the basic outline of your vision should you start filling in the details. Most importantly, don’t assume your team can read your mind or understand the finer points of your vision until the basics have been clearly laid out.

As a long-time startup coach, I’ve seen many smart, capable founders slip up and make costly mistakes. But I’ve been able to use my experience to help dozens of companies progress through the midstage portion of their journey. That includes a few that turned the momentum they built during the midstage into unicorn status.

If you hope to reach unicorn status one day, sign up for a Unicorn Inflection Audit. With help from the Midstage Institute, you can find out where you are on your journey to becoming a unicorn. You’ll discover bottlenecks that are holding you back and opportunities that you can use to accelerate growth.