Adopting a Shared Vision: Meeting in the Middle

Introduction

I'm privileged to serve alongside health care providers and clinical staff in operating rooms and obstetrics units within Southern New Jersey. My role is to introduce, educate and navigate through bureaucracy to get the preferred medical device technology into the hospitals where my health care providers serve. When I am successful in listening to and executing my customers' needs, I understand that I help contribute to patients' health and well-being across my community. I am a Certified Surgical Representative of medical devices at CooperSurgical.

While our C-Level leadership has committed to a clear, worthwhile, and beautiful vision, I am cautious before claiming success. I'm keenly aware that not everyone in our organization recognizes the deliberate intention behind our company's vision. I believe this is where I'm able to contribute in a bottom-up way and flex my "vision-muscle" (Ashkenas & Manville 2019). However, I'm not confident that awareness at the company level is enough. If we are indeed followers of a vision, shouldn't we spread our desired future to everyone we come across?

C-Level Leadership’s Commitment to a Vision

Eighteen months ago, CooperSurgical renewed its vision statement to "A world with healthy women, babies, and families." It is a drastic change from a lengthy and arguably mislabeled former vision of "To become the premier provider of clinically safe and efficacious diagnostic and therapeutic medical devices to women's health care providers that enhance their practice of medicine and improve the quality of life for all women in our lives" (Vision, Mission and Values).

Not only was this a mouthful, but it also reads more like a mission statement, explaining why CooperSurgical exists, rather than "an aspirations picture of future success" (Ashkenas & Manville 2019).

Since the renewal, our C-Level leaders appear unified in their pursuit to actualize the new vision. We've witnessed this first-hand through not only their words but their actions. Here are some recent changes our organization has implemented:

• Company Acquisition: Purchased medical device technology that enables safer c-section delivery when a deeply impacted fetal head presents at delivery (roughly 4%of deliveries). Reduces trauma to both mother and baby decreased fetal morbidity (CooperCompanies 2021).

• Philanthropy: Corporate Partnership with March of Dimes, who is “(leading) the fight for the health of all moms and babies” (About us).

• C-Level Communication: Without exaggeration, within every company-wide email, a mention of our vision is included.

• Employee Resource Groups - African American ERG & Women's Impact Network: ERG groups have sponsored physician-led virtual events promoting healthy women, babies, and families.

• Swag: The company distributed business cards, cell phone cases, and water bottles. On them, "Healthy women, babies, and families."

Roadblocks Obstructing Execution of the Vision

If a vision exists, but no one knows it, does it make an impact? The answer to this question may be a little more straightforward than the thought experiment of a tree falling in the forest.

While anyone within the organization can easily attain our exact vision statement, passion isn't easily transferred through text. It needs an intermediary to remind folks of the vision, why it's essential, and how our work aligns with it. We need facilitators to connect the dots for those teammates around them. Movements and visions either thrive or die because of communication. The further down the organization chart, moving away from our C-Level leadership, I find limited dialogue surrounding "A world with healthy women, babies, and families." I trust this is not deliberate, just an unfortunate occurrence of top-down communication. Rather than pointing the blame on leadership, individuals within different functional teams should look for opportunities to move the message upwards using bottom-up communication, meeting in the middle to adopt a shared organizational vision.

Opportunities for Bottom-Up Contribution

CooperSurgical's vision is "attractive, worthwhile, and achievable" (Nanus 1992) It's bold and already aligned with what we're doing daily. However, we need all organization functions to understand how their departments, and individual roles in those departments, share responsibility in collaboratively executing the vision.

As a team member of the Lower-Northeast Surgical Business Unit, I must focus on phrasing my future communications around our vision's perspective. The goal is to create a "word-of-mouth epidemic," a concept I've already adopted within my sales prospecting (Gladwell 2000). What does this look like? Within my daily team conversations, I must frame ideas, solutions, and responses to support "A world with healthy women, babies, and families." I will observe shortcomings and successes in this pursuit—consistently redefining the appropriate way to execute the vision-sharing at a peer-to-peer level.

But this isn't thinking big enough. After realizing an effective method of increasing the vision's adoption, I will share my work with Regional Sales Directors across our business unit. I will seek feedback and offer them my support in implementing a similar vision-building opportunity within their team. Ideally, the Regional Sales Director will have a team member who will execute the shared strategy. With enough success and momentum, I will seek sales leadership support to bring this to other organizational leaders to adopt the idea, creating a movement cross-functionally.

Sharing the Vision Outside of the Organization

For a vision to fully actualize, wouldn't more than your organization's inner circle need to know about it? While a vision can be vivid, accepted, and carried out by employees across the organization, if stakeholders aren't aware of it, how powerful is the vision?

"Women, babies, and families" are among the stakeholders of CooperSurgical. As are the health care providers and clinical staff that utilize our medical devices to keep them safe. As a Certified Surgical Representative, I introduce this technology to the latter stakeholders, but I must admit, I've never shared our vision with them. Herein lies another opportunity for "bottom-up visioning" (Ashkenas & Manville 2019). Adopting this information sharing already aligns with what I do daily and would require minimal effort to incorporate into my conversations. I'm simply finetuning, which is a practice I embrace and a skill that could lead to a world of difference.

Conclusion

CooperSurgical has embraced the appropriate vision to pursue for the future of our company and the world. But this isn't enough because a perfect vision statement is just words on a website if the organization does not embrace it. Through contributions from passionate vision-leaders across all organization functions, bottom-up efforts can lead to the mass adoption of "A world with healthy women, babies, and families" at the company. And with a bit of help from sales folks like me, we can spread our aspirations even further.

Works Cited

About Us, March of Dimes, 2021, www.marchofdimes.org/mission/about-us.aspx.

Ashkenas, Ron, and Brook Manville. “You Don't Have to Be CEO to Be a Visionary Leader.” Harvard Business Review, Harvard Business School Publishing, Apr. 2019, www.hbr.org/2019/04/you-dont-have-to-be-ceo-to-be-a-visionary-leader.

CooperCompanies. “CooperCompanies Acquires Safe Obstetric Systems.” GlobeNewswire News Room, "GlobeNewswire", 1 Mar. 2021, 16:15 ET, www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/03/01/2184716/0/en/CooperCompanies-Acquires-Safe-Obstetric-Systems.html.

Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. Little, Brown and Company, 2000.

Nanus, Burt. Visionary Leadership: Creating a Compelling Sense of Direction for Your Organization. Jossey-Bass, 1992.

Vision, Mission and Values, CooperSurgical, 2021, www.coopersurgical.com/about-coopersurgical/mission-and-vision/.

Submitted 3/17/21