Vision and Mission

Vision is essential to leadership. It’s the driving force behind a leader. Without a vision for an organization or for his/her group of followers, the leader has no goal, no motivating force that will lead to improvement. Needless to say, having a vision is an extremely important aspect of leadership. What would an organization do with a leader with no vision? It could never grow beyond what it started out as, it would remain stagnant. This is not the goal of organizations, whether they be non-profit or for-profit, the organization must have a leader who can carry it to greater heights. This idea that an organization needs a leader with a vision has been very evident in my life. Growing up back home in Gilbert, I attended a truly lovely little church that had some of the most fantastic leadership I have ever seen. But a couple of years back, our pastor decided to revise his vision for the church to include more outreach, as well as a much more community-based way of running things, because he wasn’t satisfied with the way we all related to each other. He wanted a “doing life together” outlook, the idea being that we should consider ourselves to be part of a family, the church. In a small church of about 50 people or less (as the one I went to was) this type of vision was fairly easy to begin to enact. Anyway, immediately following this new vision for the church, changes started to happen, because this vision changed the behaviors of the leader, because it became a part of his system of values (with the new values being to put the church as family first), and so everything he did started to reflect this new vision. This vision not only altered his very behaviors, but also motivated him to work toward an end. He saw that if his vision was fulfilled, we would be a much closer-knit group then we were before, which far out-weighed the costs of doing things differently and upsetting those that were content with just the status quo. This vision motivated my church leader, but had other effects too. A vision is the basis for the bonds that form between a group and its leader, and in the case of the church vision, this was somewhat accomplished. For those of us who accepted this new vision, we became even more entwined in the workings and doings of the church (which was on goal of the new vision in the first place) but at the same time, some members were upset with this new, altered vision, and so left for other pastures. For them, this vision did not justify changing the organization, and so they left in response.