Do you set aside specific times to cast vision to your organization and other leaders?

My COL and I are both new to our organization. My COL has already expressed his Vision, and I am going to keep reinforcing it.

I don't know if it is used now, but back in the mid 90s whenever a bn or higher commander took command, his vision statement was one of the very first policy letters that was published. I talked about mine to several different groups of soldiers during my first week.

But I quickly learned that another management law overrides the vision statement. It's this one:

"An organization will continue to operate in the manner it has always operated until forced to do otherwise".

As my first weeks and months went on, I would see things that the subordinate units were doing that were contrary to my vision and policy statements. I'd go "CSM, didn't we put out the word on this?" and he'd confrim. But the fact is that it took a great deal of coaching, mentoring and sometimes more forceful emphasis to break old organizational habits. It's not simply a matter of taking command, saying "here's how we are going to do things now and here is our priorities" and then everyone starts acting in that manner the next day. There's a lot of organizational "muscle memory" that has to be retrained.

Another saying I liked was: "a vision without an implementation plan is just a hallucination".

COL Mikel Burroughs, once again, you are timely and on point regarding this relevant topic area.