Recharge Your Team:
The Grounded Visioning Approach

by Jay W. Vogt
Praeger Press 2009

As most managers know, you need a vision to motivate employees to achieve your—and their—goals. But people and companies have a tendency to lose focus. "We're getting stale," they say, or "I just don't know where we're headed." True leaders know that when this happens only a clear vision will bring their people together, and renew both their enthusiasm and commitment.

Yet waiting for inspired vision rarely works—sometimes you need that vision now. But how can you make it happen?

Recharge Your Team: The Grounded Visioning Approach, just out from Praeger Press, not only shows managers how to do this—i.e., create an effective vision fast—but it even shows how to create that vision in as little as two hours, using author Jay W. Vogt’s time-tested “Grounded Visioning” approach.

Traditionally, companies call in a consultant or trainer to help develop a vision, at a tune of many thousands of dollars per day and untold hours or days or even months. Jay’s Grounded Visioning approach, however, based on a concept called “appreciative inquiry,” allows groups to develop a revitalizing all-in vision in a half a day or less.

How is this possible? As Jay explains in his book, the key is being sure everyone takes part and grounding the vision in how the team acts when at its very best. These conditions set the stage for imagining a vision bold enough to inspire while practical enough to feel achievable. The book walks the reader through six quick, essential steps that ensure such results, whether with a small team or a very large group: 1. Assemble your team; 2. Ignite your spark; 3. Share best practices; 4. Share your dreams; 5. Select the best; 6. Plan next steps.

Any manager, not just trainers or HR people, can lead a successful Grounded Visioning session, Jay asserts. It’s a breakthrough concept of breathtaking simplicity and power that any manager can put to use today, an approach that works, Jay explains, because “it frees up employees to share their dreams, hopes, and aspirations, allowing them to soar in such a way that a vision naturally arises. The result bonds, inspires and recharges the group or team.”

A veteran organizational and human development consultant with over twenty-five years of experience working with government, nonprofit organizations, corporations, and small businesses, Jay W. Vogt founded Peoplesworth, a private practice offering consulting, training, and counseling services, in 1982. Recharge Your Team is his first book, though he has authored many, many published articles for such business journals as Nonprofit World, Mass High Tech, Advancing Philanthropy, The Handbook of Business Strategy and Management Consulting News. His focus is always on empowering organizations and their people to develop a vision that succeeds. Jeff Clanon, Founding Consultant Member of The Society for Organizational Learning and former Executive Director of the MIT Center for Organizational Learning, predicts this will become a book of great value to today’s organization.

“Over the past decade, the value and importance of a compelling, shared vision for generating energy and for enabling exceptional performance in an organization has become increasingly clear,” he states. “Less clear however is how to actually go about creating one. In his book, Jay offers an eminently practical and efficient methodology for doing just that.”

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