• created a mental picture around which the organization can enthusiastically align itself and its resources;
• identified why it as an organization exists; and
• identified how it will operate to achieve its goals.

It is not that organizations without a shared vision won't accomplish things, but rather that breakthrough organizations have a clear vision of what they can achieve, a clear understanding of their purpose, and have identified what it is they want to accomplish (goals / objectives) and the metrics by which they will measure their success

This paper will explore how I have applied these concepts, along with my partner, in the creation of TeamsWork Enterprises and the identification of my strengths and weakness in the development of a shared vision for our organization.

Shared Vision:
If we don't know where we're going,
we'll all take different roads and no one will succeed,
most certainly not the organization.

January 13, 1996: My future business partner and I had just left AT&T to venture out into the world of self employment, each having a vision of developing our own human resource development businesses. We had each been scheduled for a number of outplacement seminars offered by AT&T to help in the transition to this new life. We met for the 1^st time in a seminar called "Starting Your Own Business", and through program exercises, used reflection and inquiry to each develop our own personal vision. Over the next several months we repeatedly attended seminars together as well as participated in a support group with others choosing self-employment for their next career. Through many conversations, we found each of us had passion for improving team and organization performance and had many experiences from which to draw. Ironically, although we had both been employed by the same company, our paths never crossed and the experiences we had to share were totally different given the cultures of the two major divisions in which we worked. It was from these discussions that we decided to develop a partnership to provide our team performance improvement services to organizations wishing to improve effectiveness. Our 5 second tag line is that "we help organizations work and play well together."

In the beginning, with all of our enthusiasm, we jumped right into developing our first deliverable, a High Performing Team Workshop. It was not long however, that we realized that we really had to take a step back and to define our new company in terms of our values, our philosophy, our vision, and our mission. We had each done this for our own company but now we had to do it together if we were to effectively launch this new company. We spent a great amount of time just openly and honestly talking (and listening) to determine our values compatibility. We both felt that this was a critical because conflict in this area could have meant serious problems down the road, not only regarding how we worked together but also our ethics. Our values exploration covered everything from:

• our desire to have fun at what we do,
• always providing customers greater value than what they pay for,
• being honest with the client in telling them when they wanted something that we knew was an inappropriate performance intervention,
• turning down business that we were not qualified to provide or knew would not satisfy the customers needs, to
• faith and family.

This exercise was one of the most valuable things we did because it laid the foundation for building trust and defining our guiding principles. We found out that we both valued the same things, including a belief that as a successful business we had a responsibility to give back to society.

After having explored our values, we dialoged about what we saw the organization becoming. As Bryan Smith (Senge et al, 1994) defines it, " A vision is a picture of the future you seek to create, described in the present tense as if were happening now." We defined ours in the following way:

Our Vision is to be a recognized leader in providing:

• the highest value performance solutions for work groups;
• coaching for extraordinary team and organizational leadership; and
• advice and counsel on achieving team and organization success.

The beauty of this vision statement is that it recognizes that how we get there (having fun) is just as important as the value we want to provide our clients. We see the two of them being closely linked to why we want to be in the business. We also recognize how ambitious a journey it is to become "a recognized leader" in providing these services.

The beauty of this vision statement is that it recognizes that how we get there (having fun) is just as important as the value we want to provide our clients. We see the two of them being closely linked to why we want to be in the business. We also recognize how ambitious a journey it is to become "a recognized leader" in providing these services.

Having the shared vision was critical for us because it provided a mental model of what our mission needed to be. Another way of looking at it is that the vision created a picture of the future for us. If you dissect it, you can envision the future state that it provides. Our mission then becomes the next level of definition that specifies "why do we exist" or "what value is it that we want to provide our clients" today.  Again, after much discussion, we defined our mission as: "Our Mission is to enable others to maximize the effectiveness of their work groups in a positive way while recognizing the impact on individuals, the organization, the business, and their customers."

Key to our thinking was that, while maximizing team and organization effectiveness is the goal, it can not be done without serious reflection about the consequences and impact on all of the stakeholders of the methods used. This is where all of our values discussions really began to shape who we were in providing our services. It was also the result of this effort that led to our development of a High Performing Team Model that we use as a diagnostic tool when working to identify clients needs.

Throughout this journey of dialog through vision and mission, we were defining what we call operating principles. These are the behaviors that we agreed we would abide by as our own high performing team and that we would model for use as an example for our clients (i.e. listening without blame or judgment). I believe in any team or organization, it is important for the team to define their operating principles early in their "forming stage," not as suggested by Bruce Tuckman (Bookman, 1992) that rules for team behavior should be developed in the "norming" stage of group development. If Operating Principles are developed by the group in the "forming" stage, a lot of the conflict experienced in the "storming" stage can be avoided altogether.

Bookman, B. (1992, August). Developing teams. Training, p. 12.

Senge, P. M.; Kleiner, A.; Roberts, C.; Ross, R. B.; Smith, B. J. (1994). The Fifth Discipline fieldbook. New York, NY: Currency / Doubleday Publishers.