I sat in a town hall once where a chief executive spent forty minutes on a three-year vision.
Slides. A pyramid diagram. Four pillars with alliterative names. A quote from someone dead and famous.
Behind me, two people were whispering about whether their department would still exist in October.
The gap is the whole problem. The person on stage was solving for 2029. The people in the room were solving for Tuesday.
Vision is a comfort blanket for leaders, not for teams
Here is the uncomfortable bit. Long-term vision work feels wonderful to do.
You get an offsite. You get a whiteboard. You get to talk about legacy and impact and what the organisation stands for. Nobody argues with you, because nothing you say is falsifiable for three years.
Now the alternative. Standing in front of someone whose workload doubled last month and telling them what you will do about it before Friday.
One of those is pleasant. One of those is leadership.
I have done both. I know which one I reached for when I was scared.
The numbers say your vision is not landing
Gallup's global engagement indicator puts worldwide employee engagement at 20% in 2025. In the US it sits at 31%.
Same source, and this one should sting: only 31% of US employees say their company's mission or purpose makes them feel their job is important.
Read it again. Seven in ten people do not feel their work connects to the thing you spent an offsite writing.
Those pillars did not fail because the words were wrong. They failed because you were answering a question nobody in the building was asking.
What people are asking instead
My own research on bad bosses found 99.5% of survey respondents said they had experienced one or more types of bad boss. Not a rounding error. Effectively everybody.
When I dug into what made those bosses bad, almost none of it was strategic. Nobody said "my manager had an insufficiently ambitious five-year plan."
They said things like:
- I did not know if I was doing well.
- I asked for help and nothing happened.
- I found out about the reorganisation from a colleague.
- My workload went up and nobody acknowledged it.
Those are all Tuesday problems. Every one of them is answerable this week, by you, without a consultant and without a deck.
Hope has a shorter half-life than you think
I am not arguing against direction. Teams drifting with no sense of where they are going burn out too.
I am arguing about timescale.
Hope for today is specific and small. Hope for 2029 is abstract and cheap. When someone is underwater, an abstract promise reads as a dodge, because it is one.
The hospital example is worth sitting with. Picture telling a nurse coming off a fourteen-hour shift her hospital will, in three years, become a regional centre of excellence.
She does not need excellence. She needs to know whether next month's schedule is fixed and whether anyone senior has noticed what this month cost her.
Give her the second thing and she will listen to the first. Give her the first without the second and you have taught her you are not a serious person.
Why leaders keep doing it anyway
I think there are three reasons, and none of them flatter us.
The long term is safe. Nobody holds you to a 2029 number. They will hold you to a promise about next Friday. So the further out you aim, the less exposed you feel.
Big thinking feels like the job. Somewhere along the way we decided strategy is senior and operations is junior. So the more time you spend on the future, the more important you look. Meanwhile the person doing the actual work is drowning in a process you designed and never revisited.
Detail is embarrassing. Admitting you do not know why the approval step takes eleven days is humbling. Announcing a bold new direction is not. One of those makes you look competent. The other makes you competent.
I have hidden behind all three. The pattern is easy to spot in other people and almost invisible in yourself.
The test I use now
Before I talk about the future, I ask myself one question.
Have I earned the right to talk about next year?
You earn it by delivering something visible in the short term. Not a big thing. A real thing.
You fixed the schedule. You killed the report nobody read. You gave them the honest answer about the budget instead of the reassuring one. You went to bat for one person and they saw it.
Do it three or four times and your team will follow you anywhere, including into a three-year plan. Skip it, and your vision statement is noise with better typography.
Three things to do this week
Say the true thing about right now. Not the polished version. If it is hard, name it as hard. People forgive difficulty. They do not forgive being managed.
Ship one visible fix. Something your team has complained about twice. Remove it. Tell them you removed it and why. Small and real beats large and promised.
Ask one person what would make next week better. Then do it, or explain why you cannot. Both count. Silence does not.
None of these need budget approval. Which is rather the point. The reason they do not happen is not resources. It is attention.
What the long-term plan is for
Vision has a job. It is not the job most leaders give it.
A good long-term plan is a filter for your own decisions. It tells you which opportunities to refuse. It stops you chasing the shiny thing in Q3. It gives you a reason to say no.
It is internal work. For you and your leadership team.
The mistake is treating it as a communications product and pushing it down to people whose horizon is next Thursday. You are handing someone a telescope when they asked for a torch.
Keep the plan. Use it to make choices. Stop performing it at people.
The version I would give now
Rewind the town hall and I would cut it to five minutes.
Here is what is hard right now. Here is what I am doing about it this month. Here is what I do not yet know, and when I will come back with an answer. Here is the one direction we are heading, in a sentence, so you know I have not lost the plot.
Then sit down.
No pyramid. No pillars. No dead famous person.
A five-minute version with something real in it beats forty minutes of architecture. Your team will not remember your four pillars. They will remember whether the thing you promised in March showed up in April.
I write more about the gap between what leaders say and what teams experience over at Step It Up HR, and it comes up in almost every conversation I have on the Corey-osity Unleashed podcast.
So here is the question worth sitting with. If you asked your team today what you are going to fix for them this month, would a single one of them have an answer?
If not, put the roadmap down and go find out.