Write a vision so big your team's own visions fit inside

1. The vision is how you keep people

In this view, the vision is what keeps people on the team. The reason is about size: it has to be large enough that each person on the team can place their own personal vision inside it.

A vision that comes down to growing revenue fails that test. The warning is that your best people will go to someone who is selling them a mission, and that this should not surprise you. It widens too: you will struggle to win strong people as well as to hold them, since they are likely to look for somebody whose mission is bigger. This is reported as seen over and over.

The same test of size, applied to a founder courting the most senior hires at a large company, where the vision must be big enough to hold what a senior recruit wants from their own career, is section 3 of SOP 181 — Recruit top talent as the founder. Here it reaches everyone on the team, and it is about keeping people as much as winning them.

2. Pay has a floor; meaning keeps people

The view here is that top performers neither join nor stay for the money. The condition that goes with it: some minimum level of pay does have to be reached, stated without hedging. Past that point, money is not why they are with you. What keeps them is meaning.

3. A description of your service is not a vision

One example comes from one founder's company. Its early statement promised to help its clients grow revenue. That is called about as basic and bland as a statement can be: not a vision at all, only a description of the service, the kind of line you would submit to the tax authority.

The company later replaced it with a cause, a promise to turn around the fortunes of the whole industry its clients worked in. Reportedly, everything changed for the company after that. It was no longer just selling a method; it had become the head of a movement that people were eager to join.

4. What a big vision changes in what people do

In one case, a support rep called a brand-new client about a failed payment and found that, after a month with no income, he could no longer keep his power on. The rep told the company's top-producing salesperson, who gave the client money for his bills so that he could start the program. The client went on to be one of their best-performing clients.

The question it raises: would the team have done that if the vision had been to help clients grow revenue? The reading here is that the cause gave them a reason to act when a client was at his lowest. Put plainly: the scale of the vision shaped how that team behaved toward a client.

5. The test a vision has to pass

A vision is more than strategy: it is what draws talent to you. The bigger and clearer it is, the easier it is to bring in people eager to build work that counts.

The test is whether people hear it and want in. In one reading, if you can't put the vision into a single sentence that leaves a listener wanting in, you have no vision, only a business plan, and you should fix that before anything else; the two are not the same. A looser reading of the same test: without that reaction, what you might hold is a business plan, or perhaps you might only hold an account of your services, and neither one is a vision.

A money target fails as well. One example is a vision of making 50 million in EBITDA: the only person a target like that moves is you, so it is not a vision.

6. Say it, then describe it

A vision is more than its statement. There is the statement, and then there is a description of what the future it names would look like, told plainly enough that people can see it as you describe it. What you are after is something concrete that people can picture.

Write down whether your vision needs upgrading, or not.

7. Use it as your pitch to hires

See the vision as how you sell your company to the people who join it. If the earlier reasons have not moved you, take this one on its own: it is how you sell people on coming to work for you. The diagnosis is blunt. If your pitch is weak and you cannot work out why nobody will join you, the weak pitch is the reason.

8. Where this sits

• The mission as one sentence, the top layer in the layered model of culture, with values as how the company gets there: section 5 of SOP 258 — Build culture in layers from behaviors up, then audit it. Here, vision and mission name the same line.
• Who the most senior hires are, and why a move is a change of life for them: SOP 181, section 4.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• Where the minimum on pay sits. This page gives no figure for that minimum.
• What the description should cover. Not established on this page.
• A worked example of a finished vision. Not established on this page.

10. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	Ask whether each person on your team could fit their own hopes for themselves inside your vision
2	If your vision is a revenue or profit target, or a description of your service, rework it
3	Make sure pay meets the minimum; past it, look to meaning, not money, to keep people
4	Put the vision in one line that leaves a listener wanting to join
5	Describe what that future looks like, concretely enough that people can picture it
6	Write down whether your vision needs upgrading
7	Pitch the vision to everyone you hope to hire

11. What this page does not cover

Building the other layers of a culture is SOP 258. Finding people and running their interviews are SOP 267 — Build a hiring funnel as strong as your customer funnel, and SOP 268 — Gate each interview step, then sell at the close.

Pay levels and employment law are not covered on this page.