Vision Matters
A decade ago, I participated in an exceptional team with a growing company. The company saw profits increase year-over-year for a half decade. Before I joined the company, their talent team told me they expected to grow 30% a year for the next decade. I assessed the situation and joined the company.
While they continued to grow for a few years, unfortunate news eventually came. The company had seen declining profits. New customers were less likely to sign up and existing customers were cutting back on their spending. The company's leadership described these circumstances as unforeseen. Both leadership and talent management felt shocked at their poor results.
The talent leaders told employees that this was only temporary. The company laid off a significant amount of workers. While I had avoided being an employee who was laid off, the environment no longer felt the same. At one point during this time, one honest conversation arose - “We’re spending too much time in meetings,” a leader said.
He set up a committee to discuss meeting time reduction. I volunteered to attend because I had a theory about meetings. He started the meeting and the discussion started. My theory proved correct: the real goal of meetings was to not get anything done. Nothing got done and he ended the meeting with, “I realize how ironic this will sound to all of you. We need another meeting to discuss how we can eliminate meetings.”
I didn’t attend that meeting.
My manager at the company kept emphasizing how much he wanted me to stay. But I could sense a vision problem with the company. Plus, I chose to leave because I felt uneasy about a company that quickly let employees go because of poor leadership decisions.
I moved to a company with a bright vision to change their industry. They needed experts in their field and they wanted me to join their organization. They had a specific transformation goal of their industry - one in which would add value to everyone. They had a huge amount of work to make an impact and they wanted people who took pride in getting things done.
From day one, I began making improvements and enjoyed working with my new team. A few months later, management brought us all in to a meeting and told us they changed their vision. They decided on a new goal. Our team quickly adapted to this new goal and met our objectives. Then another vision change a few months after the previous change.
One of my colleagues at the time uttered to me, "I don't think they have any idea what they're doing." He seemed to be correct. A few months later, they were financially struggling and laid off employees. My team and I were fine, as the company could not afford to lose us, but one-by-one most of us took jobs at other companies over a period of a few weeks.
At this point, I felt discouraged because poor leadership had resulted in demoralizing environments. I correctly did some self-analysis: why was I finding myself at companies like this? Was I missing something during the recruitment process?
I started asking friends about their experience and that's when patterns emerged - this was widespread. I kept hearing phrases like, "It's just how the business cycle is... companies grow and then they have to layoff workers." In other words, everyone (including leadership) expected this. What's fascinating is how these cycles end up costing companies exceptional talent in the long run. I've seen as exceptional talent has gone elsewhere, started competitors, or even switched industries entirely. As anyone in talent management knows, you can't afford to lose your best people and letting go of high performers or even average performers can have huge costs to companies.
Yet while they know this, they do not act on this truth.
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