How can we get buy-in from staff, motivate and engage them with our Vision, Goals, Strategy and Values?

It is understandable for senior teams to initiate formal 'rollouts' of new Visions, in large presentation sessions, accompanied by high-quality leaflets and posters. There is nothing wrong with this as a start, but you should remember a few things:

• Senior managers have spent long days formulating this, usually with expert assistance, so the intimate understanding they have is difficult to transfer to others.
• They find themselves in 'sell' mode. This is not appropriate. People will not 'buy-in' in response to elequent words, only when something becomes really meaningful for them.

Let's be strongly and precisely clear about this at the outset: the way you communicate with your staff is by the things that you do, not what you say. They will find a vision meaningful when it impacts on some aspect of their working life.

We cannot stress this enough. If you say one thing and do another, it is what you do that people will really take as an instruction for how they should act in future.

Be careful about what you announce
If you are going to do something different, or change a particular system - make sure you can really do this.

Be clear, direct and simple
Try, try try - to talk in common sense terms. People want to know very basically why something needs to happen, and what is going to happen. Tell them as soon as you can, as honestly as possible. Be very clear about what is policy - the 'non-negotiables' - and what you want input and ideas about.

Don't do too much psychology - the more time you spend as a management group trying to second-guess how people will react to your announcements, and massage the words accordingly, the worse it will be.

Change starts at the top
Think 'we', rather than 'you and us'. If a major change is needed, then you'll probably have to change first. Be honest and public about it.

Give key people a key job to do
Involve your next line down - get junior managers to lead some change projects. Form teams. But make sure they are charged with doing something meaningful and business related.

If you explore this site you'll see that there's a main feature devoted to this issue on the home page ('What really makes the difference'). This is because it's so important. Many organisations are now in the difficult position of having to raise overall performance in very tough times. So how is it done?