Your Vision Doesn’t Mean Sh*t to Employees

CEOs love to talk about vision. It’s your big, ambitious idea for where the company is headed. It gives direction. It motivates. It brings a tear to your eye.

At least that’s what it’s supposed to do.

But for most employees, a vision statement is just noise. It’s an abstract concept floating above their daily work. And when a company keeps operating that way, it becomes a source of disengagement.

Trust me, I’m no Eeyore when it comes to vision statements. Having a vision is not the problem. In fact, Owning the Vision is one of the five core responsibilities of the CEO.

But vision fails when it’s disconnected from action.

The Gap Between Vision and Work

A broad, sweeping vision looks great on the wall, but what does it mean for the average employee? Without structure, nobody knows where they fit or what they’re supposed to do with it. While the leadership team cruises at 30,000 feet, your people are stuck in the terminal.

If your vision is to “dominate the market” (cue the eye roll), your sales team, product team, and operations team better know what that looks like in the next six months. Otherwise, they spend their time making up their own priorities or waiting for direction. A vision only works when it comes with a bridge that connects it to real work.

Too Much Vision Can Break Trust

Vision overkill will make your people stop trusting it. If you keep rolling out new ideas without follow-through, you’re just training your team to tune you out.

No one is thinking “OMG. This is so inspiring!”

It’s more like: “FML. This will probably change next quarter.”

A clear and consistent focus matters more than trying to reinvent excitement every month.

Decide what matters and stick with it long enough for real results to show. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are. Credibility is born from consistency and execution.

Employees Need Wins, Not Words

People believe in a vision when they see progress. Not eventual progress. Progress right now.

Concrete results matter because they create momentum. You don’t build a company by leaping straight to world domination. You build it through smaller successes that prove things are headed in the right direction.

Momentum compounds. This is part of why I’m such a big proponent of steady, consistent, predictable performance. Closing a deal, meeting a product milestone, or solving a lingering operational problem—assuming these achievements are aligned with the longer-term strategy—does more to align people with your vision than the boldest PowerPoint presentation. If you can’t link tangible wins to the bigger picture, the bigger picture is irrelevant.

Cut What Doesn’t Matter

You can’t ask employees to focus on everything at once. “Visionary” CEOs love to create a nonstop stream of initiatives without taking anything off people’s plates. That’s a great way to create fractured attention, wasted energy, and disengaged teams.

If you want alignment, clear the path. Shut down projects, irrelevant goals, and unnecessary distractions that don’t contribute to your vision.

Take Action

If your team isn’t excited about where the company is going, preaching it louder and more often is a waste of time. The answer is creating clarity, consistency, and visible progress in the work they’re doing now. Employees don’t need to be inspired. They need to see results and understand how their work contributes to larger goals.

Your perfect vision is not the problem. Start thinking about what needs to change in the day-to-day to make progress.

Your team doesn’t need abstract ideas. They need outcomes.