20 Years of Vision Boards

Over time, every leader develops certain go-to methods and tools they use with their people—particular approaches to make meaningful impact and connect with them, motivate them, change their perspective, etc. You might call these things elements of one’s “leadership style”.

One thing I’ve found myself coming back to time and time again over my nearly 20 years in sales leadership is building vision boards; taking time to really think about future goals, identifying visual representations of those landmarks, and putting together a physical, real-world collection of those visuals that can be referenced, or more saliently, can be an in-your-face reminder of why you’re doing what you’re doing and encourage decision making that keeps things on track to ultimately meet those goals.

In looking back on my leadership career, I’m taken with how the objectives of this exercise have shifted and adapted for me at different stages over the years. Early on, I think I primarily decided to include my teams because I personally found so much value in making my motivations and intentions more tangible in this way, and wanted to share that same positive experience with them, in hopes that they’d get as much out of it as I always had.

After seeing, first hand, the kind of impact it had on my people, I made it a recurring tool in my leadership kit, to great effect. A few teams later, however, I started to realize there were new and profound layers to why I continued to make it a fundamental part of how I lead.

They were still getting the same benefits from doing it for themselves that I was, but on top of that, I started to find that simply knowing and having a regular visual reminder of what each of their individual goals were was incredibly powerful. It was like having a desk-by-desk cheat sheet for the best motivations of each and every member of my team. Not everyone is universally motivated by advancement, or perks, or even money (yes, people in sales, included!), so it’s crucial to understand and incorporate the unique driving factors that mean most to each person, if you want to be the most effective leader you can be for them. I began to notice that one of the things bringing me the most joy in my work, was having that insight and being able to consistently help each of them connect the dots between what they were spending 40 hours of their lives on each week, and how that was bringing them closer to achieving those goals for themselves.

So what about today, in a world of increasingly remote work? Desk-by-desk cheat sheets suddenly aren’t necessarily as useful as they once were. Short of asking my team to prominently display their vision boards directly on the wall behind them in plain view of their webcams, the real, tactile element of the exercise becomes less explicitly useful for me as a leader.

Does it make sense, then, to keep it in my toolbox moving forward? Working in a fully-remote environment for the last few years, I’ve realized that what that looks like for a lot of people, realistically, is back-to-back meetings, the need for a constant presence in apps like Slack or Teams, and the expectation to essentially be “on” and available to others (not to mention camera ready) for much more of a typical day than they might have once been.

In a lot of ways, this has brought things back around full-circle to where this exercise all started, for me. That initial clarity of taking the time for myself to truly explore what mattered most to me and what I wanted to achieve—outside of the quotas and other baseline expectations of the job—and making them more real. That guiding force of knowing where I’m going and needing only to glance into the immediate peripheral view of whatever work I’m focused on, to remind myself why I’m doing it and what it’s all for. That is where the same value still lives for my people, too. To share that meaningful experience so they have something that belongs to them and can help keep them on the career path they see for themselves, while moving through full days of feeling like they’re perhaps on more of a unified “company path” than they might have once been.

Whether it’s just for you, or to help you better connect with and lead others, identifying goals and making them real can be an absolutely invaluable exercise. Writing them down is a great start, but notes on a page somewhere have less in-the-moment guiding power than their visual representations.

After all, when we think about our future, we don’t see it as words in a bio, or bullet points on a resume—we see it as a vision of what that future could look like.