Is the vision for your business clear? Could every one of your employees explain what your company was set up to achieve? Do they feel inspired and motivated by its mission? Can investors see a clear, compelling vision driving your business forward?

These are some of the questions business leaders should be able to answer easily. If you answered no – or hesitated on what your answer should be – it might be time to sit down and do some work on your company’s mission.

Sam Adeyemi is a strategic leadership expert, entrepreneur, executive coach and author of a new book, Shifts: 6 steps to transform your mindset and elevate your leadership. His obsession with leadership and success began at a young age. His early years took him from engineering to the church to a nationally broadcast radio show in his birthplace, Nigeria.

He has a Masters in leadership studies from the University of Exeter and completed a doctoral programme in strategic leadership from Regent University in Virginia, US. He founded the Daystar Leadership Academy in Nigeria, which has added more than 52,000 people to its alumni since its launch in 2002.

And he has advice on crafting a vision that inspires, avoids leadership pitfalls, turns ideas into action – and sticks.

“If the vision is all about the leader,” he says, “then you have a shortcoming already. Business leaders are driven and they want to achieve big goals. The big question is: for who?

“Leadership is supposed to be others centric. If you call yourself a leader but no one is following you, you aren’t leading. You are just taking a stroll.”

Common mistakes that leaders make when it comes to vision

“The main one that comes to mind is about communicating the vision. I learned this lesson the hard way. I once had the vision that the results of one of our organisations was going to multiply four times over. I announced it with glee and I thought everybody was going to be excited, but they just stared at me blankly. I thought what did I say wrong?

“One of them walked up to me and said, ‘OK, so that means that we’d need more new people to come in than those of us that are here now. That means I will not be able to walk up to you like this anymore and I’ll have to schedule an appointment with your assistant.’ I assured her that wouldn’t happen but I went home and brooded over it.

“It dawned on me that, as far as they were concerned, the big goal was my goal, not theirs. As I was speaking, what they were hearing was how the achievement of the goal was going to affect them. I stood up in front of them again a week later, made the same announcement and it got a completely different response – because I mentioned how this vision would benefit them.

“It doesn’t matter how brilliant your ideas are as a leader. You have to be able to effectively transfer those ideas into people’s minds. When I started describing my vision to people, I would say it once a year and expect people to understand it. But I found out it never works that way. You have to say it over and over and over again.”

Why a compelling vision is so important for scaling companies

“A good leader has to bring people along on the journey to accomplish whatever their plans or their goals are. We humans are visual in nature and one of our greatest focuses is the future. Where are we going? What’s going to happen? How do we get there? So when a leader says, ‘I have an idea where we should go immediately, you provide inspiration for people’, you have to give them a compelling reason to come along with you.

“I define vision as the ability to see people, places and things, not just the way they are, but the way they could be. It’s the activation of the imagination. It’s the ability to recognise potential. Once you understand the concept of vision, you realise there’s actually no leadership without it.”

The steps leaders need to take to ensure a vision takes hold in an organisation

“The aim of the vision is change. Transformation. The first thing you need to do is articulate the vision in your mind. Second, you communicate the vision to your team. Third, you turn the vision into a plan.

“You’ve got to actually sit down and break the steps down from where you are to where you want to go. For that, you set milestones – one year, two years, five years, 10 years, 20 years – this is where we expect to be in the process of achieving these goals.

“Next, you get into action – execution. Sadly, a lot of individuals and organisations are very weak when it comes to execution. I read a book written by two Stanford professors, Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, titled The Knowing-Doing Gap. It confronts the reality that there are big gaps between what they know they should do and what they actually do. I would recommend this for leaders who need help with this topic.

“The next step is the evaluation. You’ve got to have a culture of evaluation. It depends on the kind of industry you’re in but for some, it’s got to be daily. For most, they have to do it weekly or monthly. You’ve got to be looking at the figures. The evaluation is tied to the goals and to the milestones.

“Once you are able to do that, you’ll be able to find what works and work on that, or what doesn’t work. You can decide what works, what needs to be reviewed and which approaches you need to change. With that information, you are able to institutionalise the changes, build policies and restructure around the changes to embed the vision within the organisation.”

Ensuring that the team keeps the vision front of mind

“I wrote my book because I found out that most transformation efforts fail. We humans are creators of habit. When you come across something new, your mind goes into action mode and tries to solve the problem and create solutions. Then you test the solutions, you find what works and you do it repeatedly then it becomes routine.

“Take driving. When I was learning to drive it took all of my concentration and focus. But after driving for a while, I normally don’t think about it and end up focusing on something else.

“When something has become routine, your conscious mind pushes it down to your subconscious mind and then it takes on a life of its own. This habit is powerful because it makes you think without thinking and it has the tendency to override what you’re thinking in your conscious mind. Some people use the word “heart” to describe it.

“What the leader wants to do is to make sure that vision gets into people’s hearts. It’s very important. Whatever you see and hear consistently over time will enter your heart, and whatever enters your heart will put your life on autopilot.”

Sam Adeyemi’s book Shifts: 6 steps to transform your mindset and elevate your leadership is available now.