Each person in a team holds a vision, a hope for what the future could look like. These hopes often differ from one person to the next — and yet, to work together, we have to act coherently. What's usually missing isn't intent. It's cohesion.

If we're going to work together, we need a way of aligning these individual hopes and aspirations into something genuinely shared.

More often than not, what happens instead is this: the leader or founder holds a certain vision, and the team settles into a "move-follow" dynamic around it. The leader, unused to having that vision questioned, hears feedback as doubt rather than as contribution. Over time, the team begins to resent the leader — not because they disagree with the vision itself, but because their genuine concerns were never really heard.

There's a different way through. When a two-way feedback mechanism exists, and a genuine conversation can be held, the vision has room to evolve — the leader's vision may shift slightly to incorporate what the team sees, and the team, in turn, begins to take real ownership of it. That's when a shared vision is truly born — not handed down, but arrived at together.