Vision Is a Leadership Responsibility

Business can hide confusion for a long time. And confusion is truly expensive. It's expensive to you. It's expensive to your organization. It's expensive to your team. I once watched a brokerage lose three of its strongest agents in less than three weeks. Not over compensation, because someone was paying them more. Not over leads, not over the market conditions.

Your title means nothing in this industry. Your title is not leadership. You can't rely on policies. You have to rely on trust. And you have to rely on your credibility. And you have to rely on your clarity. Titles may create compliance in certain organizations. Vision creates commitment, and a commitment is what moves people when no one's watching.

If I asked five people around you, what's the vision? Would I get one answer, or would I get five different answers? If the people around you are confused, your vision is missing. If the people around you are aligned, leadership is present.

Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books. They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is The Leadership Series.

Welcome to the Jeffrey Scott podcast. This is The Leadership Series, episode two: Vision and the Responsibility of Direction. This podcast series is dedicated to helping you become a more effective, more confident, and intentional leader. We built a series for professionals who lead, who want to lead, or if you know you're being called into a leadership role. Some of you are brokers, some of you are team leads, some of you manage salespeople.

And some of you listening are high-performing professionals beginning to realize that leadership is not just about leading others in an organization. Leadership is also how you lead your clients, your relationships, and yourselves. And that skill set requires a completely different skill set than production ever will.

Today we're going to focus on one of the biggest struggles leaders make even when they work hard. And that struggle is lack of clarity: unclear priorities, unclear standards, unclear directions, and unclear what winning actually looks like on an organizational level. Most leaders don't fail because of lack of effort. They fail because they were unclear, and that leader is unclear. That's what today's episode is about: the clarity of vision.

Vision is not a slogan. Vision is not motivation. Vision is not something you mention once at the beginning of the year in your annual kickoff and hope everybody remembers it a month later. Vision is a leadership responsibility, because leadership without vision becomes reactive, and vision without leadership is just noise and static.

Before we go any further, I want to sincerely thank our three founding partners and sponsors: Wise Agent, Subi, and the CE Shop. All leaders within their respective fields. We appreciate your belief in the show and your commitment to helping agents and professionals grow and perform at higher levels.

If we haven't met yet, I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton. I am your host along this journey. I am a coach, I am a consultant, I am an adviser and a speaker. I am also the former executive vice president of learning development for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. My work and my career has been focused on behavioral strategy, learning design, performance enablement, and leadership development, particularly in high-paced, high-sales, high-stress environments.

This series we've designed, you can think of it as a master class on leadership, and a journey that we're on and exploring together. It's inspired by some of the greatest leadership books ever written and translated through the lens of real-world leadership pressures of my own and other leaders that I know. Today's episode draws in part from ideas popularized in the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek. But as always, this is not a book review or book summary. This is about how those ideas in these great books, what they really look like when you're leading people, when you're carrying responsibilities, and when you're trying to build something more meaningful and real in the world.

As I mentioned in episode one, this podcast is designed to be listened to in order, with each podcast and each episode building upon the previous. So if you're new here, please go back and start listening from the beginning, because episode one was the foundation of leadership. Episode two is about direction, and episode two is about vision. In episode one we spoke about leadership as influence, and leadership is the ability to move people towards something meaningful. And that's what influence is. Influence is the ability to move people in a direction.

And one of the most important questions a leader must answer is: why should I move in that direction? Why are we moving in that direction? Towards what are we moving? Where are we going? What are we building? Why does it matter, if it matters at all? What does success look like? What does trying to become the best, what does becoming the best, look like? What are we becoming?

These are all questions that sit underneath almost every leadership challenge, whether people say them out loud or not. This is what your people are thinking when you talk about your vision and where the company's going. And when leadership fails to answer those questions clearly, people, your people, will answer them individually and internally, probably not in the way you want them to. And that's where confusion begins.

This is where fragmentation begins within an organization. This is where people start pulling in different directions while believing they're working hard and believing they're working towards a common goal, because they don't know what the goal is. And that's what vision actually does. Vision sets that goal.

Now, this part becomes especially important in real estate, because if you lead in this business or want to lead in this business, many of the people you're leading are not traditional employees. They're independent professionals. They're independent contractors. They have options. They can stay, they can go, they can disengage, they can start producing for someone else. They can stop attending meetings. They can be disruptive at meetings. They can ignore systems and policies and procedures that you put in place.

They can start taking recruiting calls from those other companies you never thought they would speak to and never thought they would contact. They can continue working and producing while being emotionally disconnected from the culture, and that's worse than having them leave, because you don't have that vision, or that vision is not clear, or that vision has not been communicated clearly enough.

This means in this leadership environment you cannot rely on authority alone like you can in other corporate environments. You cannot rely on title. Your title means nothing in this industry. Your title is not leadership. You can't rely on policies. You have to rely on trust, and you have to rely on your credibility, and you have to rely on your clarity. It must rely on whether people believe in you and people believe in where you are taking them. That's what leadership is. Titles may create compliance in certain organizations. Vision creates commitment, and the commitment is what moves people when no one's watching. That's vision.

Many leaders misunderstand what vision actually is, because they confuse vision with what they believe is motivation. You can't motivate an unmotivated person. But you can give them a vision of where the future is brighter than it is for them now, and a vision and future that they want to follow. A lot of leaders think vision is just a speech, the kickoff meeting, the slogan on the wall, the rally cry, that burst of excitement. Those may create temporary energy, but they don't create a sustained vision, and it's never going to sustain your vision.

One of the fastest ways of knowing whether vision is currently present within an organization or not is to watch people's behavior. Do they move with confidence in a direction, or are they consistently waiting for permission to do things? Do they make decisions aligned with the mission? Do they make decisions aligned with the vision? Do they make decisions that are aligned where everybody wants to go together? Or do they keep asking what matters most? When vision is clear, initiative rises. When vision is weak, hesitation grows and grows and grows.

That distinction truly matters, because people feel fired up on Monday and then confused by Wednesday when there's no vision. They can love the meeting and still not understand what matters most. It could be the greatest meeting ever, so they say, but they have no clue where the vision is and no clue what matters. They'll applaud the message but remain unclear about the priorities. This happens every day in organizations where leaders speak emotionally, which is great, but lead vaguely or have vague visions.

Real vision is not built in excitement. It's built upon clarity. Clarity around your priorities, clarity around standards, clarity around the direction everybody should be going together, and clarity around what success truly looks like. Are you clear in your organization on what success actually is? What it looks like? What's the vision of success? Are your people clear on what success is and what defines success? Because that's leadership.

Now, let me add something important here. Vision is not what you say, and it's not how you say what you say. Vision is what people experience on a daily basis, repeatedly, over and over and over again. If you state that vision is growth, but the daily experience is chaos, people are going to believe in that chaos. They don't believe in the vision, because they see chaos. They feel chaos every day. Why would they believe in growth?

If you state the vision is excellence, part of our vision is excellence, but the standards are inconsistent, people are going to believe in inconsistency. They're going to see that inconsistency and think that's the vision, no matter what you say. If you state the vision is culture, and that you have a great culture and that's part of the vision, but politics dominate the decision, people believe in those politics. They're never going to see the culture.

The organization always believes the lived experience over a spoken message. Going to say that again so everybody hears that properly. Your organization, your people, always believe in their lived shared experience over the spoken message, or the message that's written on the wall, or the message that's written in your vision statement.

One of the hidden costs of a weak vision is actually drift. And most organizations don't fail dramatically. They fail because of drift. People stay busy, meetings continue, transactions happen, and the phone still rings. Revenue may even go up a little bit, but under the surface, effort becomes fragmented. Different managers emphasize different things. Different people define success different ways. Different departments are optimized for different outcomes, because they don't know what the outcome is, because the vision is not clear. That is your job as a leader, to make sure everyone has a clear, same vision.

People may be working hard, but are they actually working in the same direction, towards the same thing? And that's one of the most expensive leadership problems there is. Not laziness, it's misalignment. Drift happens when activity replaces direction. And many leaders don't notice the drift until the performance drops, morale declines, and good people leave that you never would expect would have left before.

I remember being in environments where people were talented, hardworking, committed, and stayed consistently and constantly active and busy. Everyone looked busy. Everyone sounded busy. But if you asked five different people where the organization was going, you'd get five different answers. And then the next day, if you asked five of those people again, you would get totally different answers, because people didn't understand the vision. What it taught me was something I would never forget. Business can hide confusion for a long time. And confusion is truly expensive. It's expensive to you. It's expensive to your organization. It's expensive to your team.

I've seen offices where talented people, strong brands, good markets, and capable leaders are still underperforming. Not because of lack of resources, not because of lack of talent, not because of lack of good people. They have good people, they have resources, they have talent. It's because everyone was doing different things. Their activity was not alignment. There was motion, but no momentum.

I once watched a brokerage lose three of its strongest agents in less than three weeks. Not over compensation, because someone was paying them more. Not over leads, not over the market conditions. Over confusion. No one could clearly explain where the company was going anymore. There was no vision and no clarity of vision. No one could clearly explain where the company was going anymore. No one could clearly explain what the vision was of the company, or what their place was with inside that bigger vision that everybody should be working towards. Confusion creates openings within your organization.

Let me give you a practical warning here. When leaders do not define success clearly, ambitious people will define it privately. What is success? What does success mean as a company? Because if you don't let me know what that is, if I don't have that vision, I'm going to define it for myself, and our visions may no longer be aligned. One agent decides that value matters. Another agent decides that lifestyle matters. Another one of the agents decides that their visibility or the brand matters. Another agent decides independence matters more than anything else. None of these are inherently wrong. But if an organization has no shared definition of success, no shared vision of it, the culture becomes fragmented by private agendas, and we've all seen that happen at one time or another.

I remember watching a manager in a different environment make mistakes that true leaders never should make. And there is a difference between being a manager and being a leader. And this was a manager. The organization was going through uncertainty. People had questions. Performance slowed. Morale started getting shaky. But instead of creating clarity, the manager disappeared. They were in their office, never to be seen. There was no direction, no communications, no visible leadership. Their office door was closed.

And when people finally did hear from them, it was criticism, what everybody else was doing wrong. It was pressure, not support. It was reaction, not direction. And what happened next was predictable. Rumors grew. Trust stopped. Good people became frustrated. Strong performers, strong producers, started mostly checking out. And then they started checking into other companies.

That experience reinforced something very important to me. When uncertainty arises, silence from leadership gets interpreted as weakness. When the leader is silent, people think it's weak. People think the organization's weak. And to a certain extent, leadership is about strength. Criticism without clarity destroys your credibility. And we've all had those leaders who have just criticized without being clear on what's going on. They lose all credibility.

True leaders don't disappear when people need them the most, or when people need direction the most. They step forward. That's what leaders do. That's what we all should do. We step forward. We communicate. You stabilize the environment that you're in. That's even when you don't have every answer, because it's going to create confidence. It creates confidence through your presence. It creates confidence through your honesty. It creates confidence through your consistency. You don't need to have every answer, but you need to be there when people ask the questions, not behind a closed door.

Now, another leadership trap shows up when leaders become overly reactive, and it happens all the time. Leaders start the day with intention, and their day gets hijacked. Unexpected problems, and some part of that is in the leadership. But when you react, or when the reaction becomes your operational style, that vision gets crowded out. Soon the loudest issue wins and the vision's forgotten. The most emotional person wins, the loudest person wins. That new direction wins. It's just what happens.

That's how organizations slowly lose momentum. That's how organizations slowly lose momentum. Not through one giant catastrophic event, but through those little delays with no direction in leadership. If leadership changes directions weekly on what's important and what's not important, the trust declines on a daily basis.

This is why vision is practical, not theoretical: what everybody should be doing at any given time, where the opportunity is, and what every decision anyone makes should be filtered through that shared vision. When opportunity appears, vision asks, does this move us closer to where we're going? Vision steps in and asks, what matters most right now? When a recruit appears, vision asks, does this person fit into what we're building or not?

Because the worst thing any manager or leader can do is recruit someone if they don't fit into the vision. If they don't fit into the company. If they don't believe in that future vision, where the company's going. You just don't recruit someone just because they're a top producer. You recruit someone because they fit into the vision of where we're all going together. They buy into that vision. And their vision is within the vision of you and your organization. It's a shared vision. And they can see what the future holds for them with inside your organization.

You're listening to The Leadership Series on the Jeffrey Scott Stanton podcast, where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world. I want to take a moment to recognize one of our founding partners, Wise Agent. In any performance-driven business, the systems behind the scenes matter just as much as the person in front of the client. Wise Agent is an all-in-one CRM platform built specifically for real estate professionals. It helps manage your contacts, automate follow-ups, and grow your business with one platform instead of piecing together a dozen different tools from dozens of different companies. If you're serious about building something sustainable, it is absolutely worth your time. Visit wiseagent.com. Link is in the show notes. Tell them J Squared Podcast Productions sent you.

When conflict arises, vision asks which decision best serves the future, and the future we're building, not which is the most important thing to do right the second. They become political. They become inconsistent. They become reactive. They listen to the loudest person in the room yelling. With vision, decisions become clear. Not always going to be easier, but it's always going to be clearer with a vision.

People do not only commit to what you do. They commit to why it matters, and why it matters to them more importantly, and why it matters to the bigger overall picture. That's why people commit to the why. And this applies in real estate more than many realize, because you're paying them, maybe. In real estate, agents may join for a split. They may join for their opportunity, where that vision is something that they can strive to and help the organization achieve. That's when people stay.

Listen, top producers rarely stay for splits alone. They stay where momentum exists. They stay where the vision is clear. They stay where growth feels possible, even as a top producer, and where the growth feels bigger than it currently is. When belief is low, every inconvenience becomes resistance. Every inconvenience becomes an issue. Every little thing is a problem. And that's why vision matters in recruiting. It matters in retention. It matters in morale. It matters in performance. It matters in your company, because if you have no vision, you're not going anywhere. And this is the business that I work inside.

Let me give the brokerage lens on that one. When agents believe the office is growing, when agents believe the brokerage is building something, they'll tolerate the little inconveniences. When they believe leadership is smart, when they believe leadership is clear, when leadership has a clear vision and shares it, they forgive the little mistakes. When they believe opportunity is expanding, they'll stay patient through transitions. But when those beliefs collapse, when the vision isn't clear, every minor issue turns to major problems. That is part of leadership. And that belief management is showing your vision, and where the vision and company is going.

If you want more agents, or if you lead agents or independent contractors, I want you to reflect honestly on something here. Do the people around you know what you're actually building? Do they know what the vision is, where the vision is? Do they know what kind of professionals, what kind of agents, what kind of people thrive within your organization or thrive within your team, or not? Do they know what standards matter the most, or are there any standards that are set? Do they know what behaviors are rewarded versus what behaviors should not be rewarded? Or are you not paying attention to any of that?

Do they know what the next 12 months are about, the next year, the next two years, the next five years, the next 10 years, where the company is going and where they can go with the company? Or do they not think there is a vision of that, so they can't go anywhere with the company? Because if they don't know what you're building, they're going to build their own version of it with inside your walls. They're going to build their own version of success with inside your walls, or most likely outside the walls. And that's where culture fractures, sometimes silently, sometimes not so silently.

If the answers are vague that you give, your office, your organization, your team may still be functioning, but there's no way of compounding that function. There's no way that's ever going to scale. There's no way you can build something bigger and better, because scaling and compounding requires alignment and effort over time. And that's what vision is. Vision is about alignment and being aligned with that vision.

Now, a lot of times, here's where a lot of leaders unintentionally fall, and I hope you don't fall into this hole. Now, here's where many leaders unintentionally fail. They talk about vision but never translate it. If your vision is growth, what behaviors create growth? If it's prospecting, if it's training, if it's recruiting, if it's lead follow-up, if it's database discipline. If your vision is excellence, what behaviors define excellence? What is excellence to you? What is excellence to the organization? What is excellence to you? What is excellence to the organization? Is it preparation? Is excellence professionalism? Is it consistency? Is it communications? Is it follow-through? Is it the way your receptionist greets every single person the same when they walk in?

If your vision cannot be seen in daily behaviors, especially in your daily behaviors, it's going to remain abstract. And abstract leaders never change performance. If you want to be a leader, the question is this: how do I communicate my vision more often without sounding repetitive? And here's one of the simplest ways to do it. Connect activity to direction, and activity to vision.

What I mean by that is, in your meetings, just don't review numbers. Explain why the numbers mean something, why the numbers are getting the company towards their goal. This is where everybody's going, towards that shared vision. Don't just discuss the problems. Explain how solving those problems supports the bigger vision and the bigger mission. Don't just announce priorities. Explain why those priorities matter now and why they're going to matter in the future. Don't just recognize production. Recognize behaviors that reflect the culture and future that you're building.

People get an award for production, get an award for this. What about those that support the culture and support the company? Way too many companies just recognize that production, that's it. But what about all the other things? What are you trying to build? What is going to get you there? And what is that vision? If someone handled a client or a problem professionally, mention it. If someone shows up consistently, mention it. If someone helped another team member grow, they mentored another team member, they helped someone in the company, mention it. That is communicating vision. And that's where vision is communicated.

You should be constantly translating values into visible examples, and visible examples into values, and those into your vision, and why this means something to everyone. If your people only hear your vision quarterly, they'll follow just what's urgent today. And in one-on-one conversations, do the same thing. Help people connect their personal goals to the larger direction, the larger vision of the organization. It shows them opportunity exists. Show them where opportunity exists.

People are rarely going to stay within an organization if they don't see opportunity, if they don't see a vision of the future for themselves. Show them what growth looks like. Show them how their daily discipline connects to the future outcomes. And remember this: vision is rarely communicated in one dramatic speech. Vision is communicated in small, consistent moments, week after week, day after day, that you can use.

Ask yourself these questions. Is my vision clear? Is our vision repeated? Is our vision rewarded? And more importantly, is our vision believable based upon the actions that happen on a daily basis? If one of those things is missing, if one of those things isn't there, vision weakens. If two of them are missing, confusion grows. If three of them are missing, people are just going to stop listening to that vision and go and do their own thing, or make up their own vision, because they don't believe it.

Morale had dropped so bad, momentum had totally slowed and pretty much stopped. She walked in. People were expecting a big motivational speech. Instead, that leader brought in clarity. They explained where the organization is now and where the organization is going. What standards would have to rise immediately and why, what behavior would no longer be tolerated, and now what behavior would be rewarded. And what support was available to everyone, and more importantly, what success looks like now, and a year from now, three years from now, and five years from now, and into the future. All defined, and explained what the vision was.

The room didn't erupt in applause, but something truly important happened. You saw people start to feel safe. You saw people start to feel certainty. Clarity is calming. And that's something a lot of leaders often forget. You don't need motivated people. You can't motivate an unmotivated person. People need clarity. People need certainty.

And even if you're not a leader right now, even if you're not a broker or the team leader right now, your vision still matters. Even if you're only leading yourself and your business, if you're "I'm My Own Agent, Inc." or whatever you want to call yourself before you even get into a leadership position. What am I building? What's the vision for the future? What kind of business do I want? What reputation am I creating? What brand am I creating? What type of clients do I want? What standards define me? What future am I intentionally designing, instead of just reacting to the daily activities? Because if you don't define success, if you can't define success, randomness will define success. And randomness will define your calendar.

Personal vision matters more than many people realize. If you don't know what type of professional you're trying to become, if you don't know the type of professional you want to become, you'll accept any opportunity. If you don't know the type of professional that you want to become, you'll accept any opportunity. And if you don't know what standards define you, you'll accept any standards against yourself. If you don't know what future you want, you'll rent out your time to everything that feels urgent.

A common mistake that I see many leaders make, and actually a lot of us do: they say something once, we say something once, and then we assume it landed. Again, announced priorities in January, kick off that town hall, explain the direction, mention the culture in a meeting, then they move on. That's not how people work. Vision requires that repetition.

You know, in learning theory, they say the average adult learner needs to hear something three times in order to remember it. The first time they hear it, they actually ignore it. The second time they hear it, they're like, oh, it's a coincidence, I think I may have heard this before. The third time they hear something, they say in their mind, this must be important, I'm hearing it a lot. That's how people work. Repetition with clarity, repetition with examples, repetition tied to standards, repetition tied to recognition, repetition tied to your decisions as a leader. Leaders are often worried they're repeating themselves way too much. Meanwhile, the team is only beginning to absorb the message, and then a leader stops talking about it. The team loses the message.

Finally, vision without standards. Having a vision, telling people your vision, sharing your vision without having standards in place is just fantasy. It's not vision. It's not clarity. If a leader says they want excellence but tolerates mediocrity, people notice. If they value culture, if they say they value culture and reward dysfunction, everyone notices. If they say they want to grow, and that they want growth, but they avoid giving people accountability based upon that growth, people notice.

Culture hears what you reward louder than what you ever will say. What they see, what they experience, more than any language you'll ever say, more than anything you'll ever say. Which means that the standards are how vision becomes believable. Which means the standards you set and enforce are how vision becomes believable.

Before we close, I want to honestly reflect on something for a second. If I asked five people around you, where are you going? If I asked five people around you, what's the vision? Would I get one answer, or would I get five different answers? Where is your leadership reactive right now? Where is your organization unclear? Where are you lacking the vision? Where are you lacking the clarity? What future are you asking your people to help build? And what behaviors are quietly contradicting the future that you claim the organization wants, the future you want, the future that you talk about consistently?

Years from now, people will not remember every meeting you had. They're not going to. They're not going to remember the metrics that you tracked. They're not going to remember the policies you announced. They're not going to remember those kickoff meetings. But what they will remember is how clear things felt under your leadership, and how they felt under your leadership. They'll remember whether people felt a direction or confusion. They'll remember whether people felt certainty or uncertainty. They'll remember whether standards meant something, or was just something said that was thrown out the window. They'll remember if growth felt possible underneath your leadership or not. They'll remember whether leadership created momentum, or did leadership create uncertainty and chaos.

That's the deepest impact of vision. Vision shapes memory. Vision shapes culture. Vision shapes what people believe is possible while they are with you, while you're leading. And sometimes long after you're gone and long after they're gone.

Listen, great leadership books give us great principles. Real leadership is tested when you put them into practice. So as you move through the next week, ask yourself this. What am I reinforcing? What am I helping people believe in? Would my actions still communicate the direction and vision that I want to bring to this organization? Vision is not what you hope happens. Vision is what you repeatedly clarify until others can help build it and others can help define it.

Leadership is not only about solving today's problems. It's about creating tomorrow's direction and tomorrow's future, where today's problems no longer exist. If your days are consumed entirely by reaction, then maybe it's time to ask yourself a bigger question. Where are we actually going? Are we going anywhere?

Leadership is expensive when it's done poorly. It costs morale. It costs trust. It costs retention. It costs momentum. It costs your business. But when leadership is done well, it multiplies everything. It is the multiplier to the success of everyone around you and the success of the organization. It has a clear vision. That leadership and that vision multiplies everything. That is the multiplier in this business.

You know, next week we're going to talk about communication, and how to communicate these things to your people, to your agents, to your brokerage, to your teams, to your employees. Because even the strongest vision is going to fail when leaders cannot communicate it properly, when they can't communicate consistently and they can't communicate credibly. People don't need leaders who control every single step and every single phase and every single little thing. They need leaders who make the next step clear.

So thank you for being here. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Please continue to join us and listen to this. Thank you for listening to this podcast, and thank you for being on this journey with us. I am Jeffrey Scott, your coach, your consultant, your adviser. If you want to stay connected, please find me and follow me on social media for future updates, future episodes, and other leadership insights. If you found today's episode of value, I'd really appreciate if you left a comment or like, and it helps other people who want to lead. And finally, if you know someone who you believe could benefit from these series, please share it with them. And Wise Agent, please reach out to them directly.

And once again, I'd like to thank our founding partners and sponsors, Subi, the CE Shop, and Wise Agent. Their contact information is in the show notes. Please reach out to them and thank them and see what they have to offer you, because they can absolutely help build your business. I'm going to leave on this. If the people around you are confused, your vision is missing. If the people around you are aligned, leadership is present. Lead with intent, and lead with clarity, and lead with vision. I'm Jeffrey Scott Stanton. Thank you.

Leadership isn't learned in pages. It's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard. And what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been The Leadership Series, hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by J Squared Podcast Productions.