EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is an excerpt from Unleashing the Power of Rubber Bands: Lessons in Non-Linear Leadership by Nancy Ortberg (Tyndale House Publishers).

The Problem with T-Shirts

Recently I read some statistics on the Internet that said in order to stay aligned with their company’s vision, people need to be reminded of that vision every twenty-eight days. I’m not sure how they came up with twenty eight days; seems like an odd number to me. But suffice it to say, people need to hear about your vision on a regular basis in order to stay motivated.

Great leaders think about vision—a lot. But the problem is, most of us are thinking about it more than we are talking about it. And if vision is that important, we need to be constantly asking ourselves, What’s our vision and how are we doing at communicating it?

In many organizations, once a vision sentence is crafted, it’s often written on a piece of paper and put in a notebook, only brought out again a couple of times a year at new trainee orientation or in a leader’s speech. Occasionally it might make its way onto a mug or a T-shirt.

Nothing inspires cynicism in an organization faster than a T-shirt.

Vision doesn’t belong on T-shirts. As leaders, our job is to breathe life into the vision and fill the words with meaning that stir people in the deepest parts of their souls—the parts that long for significance and transformation. We need to come up with creative, compelling, and repetitive ways to talk about the vision, and then we need to make the words come alive. Sometimes we even need to say those words in different ways so that people can see every facet of the vision, kind of like the shifting colors of a kaleidoscope.

Vision is about stirring and provoking, reminding and imagining. It’s about showing people the wonder of an improved future and infusing them with hope. Vision is about creating a reason to believe again.

Vision is primarily nurtured through the stories we tell and the heroes we create in our organizations. A couple of years ago, we were working with a large school district on the East Coast. We were in the second day of a two-day offsite conference, with about a hundred and twenty people around tables in a large room. As is true with any school district, this one was facing huge challenges: increasing ethnic and economic diversity in their student population, budget cuts, and mounting expectations in test scores.

As part of an exercise in vision, we asked people to stand up and tell a brief story or mention a hero that reflected their district’s vision of “providing a place where every child would succeed.”

The principal for one of the larger high schools in the district stood up and talked about a young African-American boy who had just graduated from their school the month before. He had spent six years, from middle school through high school, in their district, but he stood out from the other kids because he was homeless—by choice.