Lessons Learned the Hard Way: Vision Inversion Can Be Deadly

This was one of those lessons that was tough to learn – tough, because it was very expensive time and money wise, and doubly tough because I had to learn it more than once.

Vision inversion is when your key people put their vision for their position above your vision for the company. It’s quite normal throughout the ranks – and its ok – but for your direct reports, it can be deadly.

Whether people I hired knew it or not, I always made a personal pact with them. If they would do their best and always keep the company’s best interests in mind, I would do my best to help them achieve their goals for themselves. And for the most part, this approach worked.

After a 40 year career starting and building businesses, I look back with satisfaction not just at how the companies grew and what they accomplished, I take equal pride and satisfaction on what many of the people accomplished for themselves and in their lives.

The approach – “aim for what we’re aiming for, and I’ll help you achieve what you’re aiming for” – served me, and the companies I started, well. They bought houses, put kids through university, advanced their own education, and in some cases, even started their own businesses.

Vision inversion is when the order is reversed – “when I achieve what I want to achieve personally, it will help the company achieve its vision as a result”. Through the rank and file, it’s not an issue, but for your direct reports, it’s a different matter.

Once again, I refer to the first lesson in the book “Extreme Ownership” by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin: it’s all about executing the mission, which requires a complete team commitment to achieving it. It’s about everyone believing “the why”.

On two different occasions, I put a very gifted and talented person in place to lead the technology development team of a company where being on the leading edge and being able to scale quickly when early traction was experienced, were critical to the company’s success. Right from the start, I knew their vision for themselves was to “build a small, high performing development team, that would do amazing things”. I thought I could work with that – that as they achieved their goal, their vision for themselves and their team would expand and they’d be able (and willing) to adopt and adapt to achieve the company’s goals.

But it didn’t turn out that way. The same mistake, made twice, cost the company more than money, it cost the company valuable time, market position, and key customer opportunities the company could have built on. Vision alignment wasn’t there. It was a case of vision inversion – their individual vision for themselves trumped the company’s vision for itself.

As costly as those mistakes were, (and they were very costly), they weren’t the costliest vision inversion mistakes I made. Vision inversion also happens within boards and even ownership groups, and that is far more costly for the company and can even be fatal.

When vision focused board members retire from the board and share value concerned members replace them, you get vision inversion. One group might say, “we are all in this for the same reason – to make money”, but what comes first? Building a solid, viable business, or raising or making money? The vision isn’t to raise money to build a business – raising money is a tactic. And generating revenue to make it easier to raise more money to build the business isn’t a vision, it’s a strategy.

What the business is all about must be the vision. The strategies and tactics are subordinate to the vision. Investors and board members that don’t see it that way can do far more damage to the company than good. I’m not suggesting you don’t need their financial acumen or resources, but their interests (as valid as they may be) can’t trump the primary vision of the company.

The same is true with co-owners. If you share ownership of a company with others that place lifestyle or personal status ahead of the company’s vision, you have a case of vision inversion where the company’s potential is limited by what some owner members may want to achieve for themselves.

There is a distinct difference between “vision alignment” and “vision inversion”. In the examples above, everyone could say they held the same company vision in common (i.e. "alignment"), but the difference is in the order. “When I achieve my goals, it will help the company achieve theirs’” is not the same as what Willink and Babin teach – that’s it’s all about the mission, and the commitment to the mission’s successful execution.

If you do not hold the primary “why” in common with your board, your co-owners, and also the people that you count on to lead key parts of your organization, you run the risk of vision inversion, and from my experience, it will always catch up to you.

And the longer you take to recognize and address it, the more costly it becomes.   

For more lessons learned the hard way, check out: Lessons Learned the Hard Way: The Critical Connection Between Board and CEO

For a quick book review of “Extreme Ownership”, check out: A Book Review: "Extreme Ownership - How U.S. Seals Lead and Win"