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One of the most important skills I look for from current and future leaders is to be able to communicate vision. Without a clear vision, it’s impossible to align between members of the same team — let alone people from different teams. This is a skill everyone in the team can develop — so when I say leadership, I don’t care about the job title. A new graduate is just as capable of demonstrating this as a vice president. In fact, the sooner you start developing these skills within your teams, the more effective they will be within your career.

The trouble is how do we assess the ability to set and communicate vision? I remember the annual engagement survey at various companies, where people are asked to rate their managers on their ability to set a vision for their team. Almost uniformly, this is where you’d see some of the least positive responses, which would be great if it was intuitively obvious to do something about. So, the issue would be quietly brushed under the carpet until next year.

I’ve inherited a large number of teams over the years, and one of the first tasks has been to work out what those teams are working towards and understand whether they are set up for success. I’ve also written and delivered hundreds of courses on management and leadership where I’ve looked to develop this skill and discussed it in innumerable 1:1s. The first step is convincing people that it’s necessary and that there is a problem. Luckily, I found this is easier than you might think. Try asking everyone this question to start the ball rolling:

Describe what problem you are working on in under 30 seconds.

I remember asking it in a manager training and saw a succession of people freeze up or proceed to try and reel off long waffling answers. Here are some warning flag answers I’d receive and what they meant.

• Describing the problem in terms of features they were working on. A feature factory is not problem-solving — it’s working through a to-do list. In this situation, people are simply doing what they’re told without knowing why they’re doing what they’re doing. I wouldn’t expect the team to be invested in what they…