The Vision Only You Can See: Casting Direction for a Team of Five
In a small company, “they should just know where we’re going” is a leadership gap, and closing it is a relational job before it is a strategic one.
You’ve told your team where the business is headed. Maybe once, at the first of the year, or in a hallway on a good day. In your head it’s vivid. You can see the next hire, the second location, the day the debt is gone.
Then you watch someone on your team work hard on the wrong thing. Or two people pull in opposite directions. You feel the frustration rise: Don’t they get it?
Usually they don’t. The picture lives in one head, and it has never been handed over.
Why Small Teams Are Especially Vulnerable
In a five-person company, there is no middle management to translate your thinking. You are the strategy department, the communications team, and the culture committee. Whatever isn’t in your head and theirs doesn’t exist.
The cost shows up in the ordinary stuff. Employees guess at priorities. They make reasonable decisions that conflict with yours. You conclude they lack initiative, and they conclude you keep changing your mind.
Gallup’s research is blunt about how much this sits on the leader’s shoulders. Its analysts report that “70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.” In a small business, you are the manager. Gallup also lists, as the first item on its Q12 engagement survey, the statement “I know what is expected of me at work,” and it notes that managers themselves often report “competing priorities and unclear expectations.” If that describes your own week, your team is likely feeling a version of it too.
You Probably Have a Vision. You Haven’t Said It Out Loud, Together.
Gino Wickman, founder of EOS, makes an observation that fits small teams well: “It’s not that you don’t have a vision, you just don’t all agree.” He writes that in most leadership teams, “each member has a different version” of the vision, even though it is usually already in their heads.
His fix is simple: get everyone to answer the same set of questions until the answers match. Wickman says answering all eight of his vision questions is vital, since a team that agreed on six of eight still felt it had no vision.
Notice what that is. It’s a conversation, not a document. Vision gets built in the room, with people, and it holds only to the degree they’ve helped shape it.
“A vision you carry alone is a burden. A vision you share becomes a direction.”
The Biblical Picture: Make It Plain
The prophet Habakkuk was told: “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so he may run who reads it” (Habakkuk 2:2, ESV). Notice the two verbs: write and make plain. God does not treat clarity as optional or assume people will intuit it. The purpose is movement, so that the reader can run.
Proverbs 29:18 (KJV) adds the warning: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Teams don’t usually perish dramatically. They drift, grow quietly cynical, and leave.
Stewardship applies here too. If your business is something entrusted to you, then the people in it are entrusted to you as well. Leaving them to guess where they are going is a failure of care, even when the intent was kind.
Why Leaders Struggle to Say It Plainly
If clarity is this valuable, why do capable owners avoid it? A few common reasons:
Fear of being wrong. Naming a direction means you can be held to it, and some leaders keep things vague to stay safe.
Fear of conflict. Stating a vision invites disagreement, and many owners would rather have quiet confusion than open debate.
Identity fusion. When the business is who you are, a team member questioning the vision can feel like a personal rejection.
Exhaustion. You’re running on fumes, and explaining one more thing feels impossible.
Each of these is an interior issue, not a strategy issue. No planning template fixes them.
Five Steps to Cast Vision for a Small Team
Write it in plain language. Three to five sentences a new hire could repeat. Cut jargon and anything you couldn’t say at a kitchen table.
Say what it means for each person’s Tuesday. A vision stays abstract until someone knows how it changes their work this week. Connect the direction to each role by name.
Ask them to say it back. Not as a test. Ask, “What are you hearing? What’s unclear?” Their answers show you what you actually communicated.
Invite disagreement early. Where your team’s picture differs from yours, you’ve learned something. Better to discover it in a Thursday meeting than a missed deadline.
Repeat it on a schedule. One announcement isn’t enough. Put the vision at the top of your regular meetings and refer to it when you make decisions out loud.
Where This Connects to Counseling
Casting vision requires being clear with yourself first, and many owners have never sorted out what they want versus what they fear, or what they’re building versus what they’re proving. If you find that you can’t name your direction, or you dread being questioned about it, individual counseling is often the place to sort that out. For men carrying the lead seat quietly, counseling for men offers a structured, no-nonsense space for it.
If your spouse is part of the business or lives with the weight of it, vision is also a marriage conversation. A husband and wife who disagree about where the business is going will pass that tension to the team, whether or not they intend to. Marriage counseling can help you reach the kind of agreement Wickman describes at home first.
Start With One Conversation
You don’t need a retreat or a consultant to begin. You need to say the thing out loud, listen to what comes back, and be willing to adjust. If you’d like help getting clear on your own direction first, or on the relationships that shape it, I’d be glad to talk it through.
SOURCES
Pitonyak, J., & DeSimone, R. (2022, updated 2024). How to Engage Frontline Managers. Gallup. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/395210/engage-frontline-managers.aspx
Beck, R., & Harter, J. (2015). Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement. Gallup Business Journal. https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/182792/managers-account-variance-engagement.aspx
Wickman, G. (2015). It’s Not That You Don’t Have a Vision, It’s That You Don’t Agree. EOS Worldwide. https://eosworldwide.com/blog/9944-eos-its-dont-vision-its-dont-agree
Habakkuk 2:2, English Standard Version; Proverbs 29:18, King James Version.
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