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Everyone knows that a vision is an essential component of great leadership. But having a vision is useless if you don't know how to implement it. There are three main reasons why leaders fail to implement their vision:

• The vision wasn't any good in the first place – too many companies think they have a vision when what they've really got is a hallucination
  
  
• Thinking that just telling your people about the vision is enough to make it happen
  
  
• Changing the formal structures but failing to change the organisational culture.

Want to avoid these three pitfalls?  Read on to learn how to implement a vision successfully.

Step one – make sure you've got a good vision to work with. A vision isn't an aspiration. It's not some fuzzy phrase intended to make the boss feel good (while making most employees feel queasy). A vision is a goal – a big, ambitious goal, but a goal nevertheless. It's a goal that is clear, excites people and is challenging, yet achievable.

If you want to get the vision right you have to involve the right people in working out what it is. You need to involve people who really understand your business – so that what they come up with is pretty robust. You need to involve people who are trusted – so that what they come up with engages and excites everybody who has to make it happen.

Step two is to make some very specific changes in the way your organisation delivers its products and services. Identify the changes needed to achieve the vision, then set up some project teams to make those changes happen.

An engineering company I worked with decided that its vision was to be the largest and most efficient European manufacturing company in a (fairly specialised) market niche. In order to do this it had to get a lot closer to its customers and eliminate a lot of waste from its manufacturing process. It set up half a dozen projects to achieve this. Four years later it achieved its vision, and set itself another one – to be the world's largest and most efficient manufacturer of its specialised engineering products.

Steps one and two are essential, but not enough. If you want to achieve your vision, you also have to get the culture right. Culture is 'the way we do things around here' – how people really do their jobs. For example, it's no use setting up projects to enhance the customer experience if everyone in the company knows it's better to keep your head down and follow existing procedures than it is to stick your neck out and make sure customers get a genuinely good deal. Step three then, is to create the right kind of organisational culture to support the vision.

How do you do that? In a nutshell, you have to do three things: be a great role model of the kind of culture you want; be a great storyteller in order to communicate the desired culture; and make sure you encourage people who live this culture while discouraging the people who don't. This last point can sometimes be tough to do – more on changing culture in next month's bulletin.