A vision and mission define your purpose and your destination. While the mission and vision are usually written for top-level organizations, these tools can be used at a departmental level and even at a personal level. They help you focus on work that is consistent with your purpose and that takes you closer to achieving your goals.

The mission is why your organization exists. It specifies the business you’re in, who you serve, and your impact on the world around you. It’s the road you’re on. I run a leadership training firm. My firm’s mission is to advance the art of business leadership through hands-on training and coaching led by dynamic business people. It’s clear what business we’re in: business leadership training. It’s clear who we work with: people in large and small organizations who are their leaders. And the impact on the world is helping people improve their skills in this arena.

The vision is a midterm objective of what you’ll achieve three to five years out. It’s a waypoint along the road you’re on. My firm’s vision, right now, is to be a global firm of uniquely skilled executives who teach managers around the world how to be great leaders. This lays out my expectations for the type of work we’re going to do and when I’ll consider us to be successful. This global element is something that’s new in the past few years, and it’s really getting us to focus on other countries.

The mission and vision are linked. They can be created for any organization. They’ll set direction and help determine the work you will or won’t do. For my firm, our vision and mission do exactly that. We routinely say no to consulting work. It’s not part of our mission and it doesn’t help us achieve our vision. When you lay out your mission and vision for your organization, it’s going to set that direction that will enable you to know which types of work matter and which types of work are off your path.

Market and organizational changes can require you to shift your focus. This can mean temporarily pausing some work to accelerate or add new projects. Remember that your team’s time and energy is a fixed asset. Shifting focus doesn’t mean adding new things to focus on. Unless you add resources, you have to make trade-offs on where people spend their time. This enables you to complete more projects faster because your team is focused on them. During a shift in focus, draft a plan and communicate it. This plan should include:

• What’s causing us to shift focus?
• What’s our desired outcome once we get through the change?
• What’s our strategy for navigating the change?
• What old work will we stop doing to free up resources?
• What new work will we be focusing on?

When I worked at a financial services firm, we had a major event that caused us to shift focus. The regulators came in and took a look at our processes. They didn’t like what they saw. They said we needed to rectify a whole list of issues. We put together and communicated a plan. What was causing us to shift focus? The regulators identified these 10 issues. What’s our desired outcome once we get through it? Well, those issues are resolved to the satisfaction of the regulators. What’s our strategy for navigating the change? Well, we’re going to stop doing some of our technology projects and move all our resources to the regulatory issues. What old work were we going to stop? Well, here are the five projects that are now on hold. What new work will we be focusing on? Here are the 10 ideas, and here’s how we’re going to allocate resources against them.

By being explicit about the shift and moving the resources to it, we got through those regulatory issues pretty quickly. When we finished, we picked up the technology projects and moved forward. If you shift focus without communicating the new end state and explicitly saying what work is in or out of focus, you risk people taking on new work but not feeling like they can stop doing the old work to take on the new. You risk burning out the team. When you have one these major shifts, be deliberate about putting a plan in place and communicating it to the organization.

New ideas and opportunities come along all the time. Resist the urge to jump on the next new thing. Rely on your prioritization process to assess all new ideas. Remember, if you add something new to your list, you either need to add resources to work on it or you have to stop working on something else, or finish something that’s a higher priority before you start working on the new task. Failure to do this leads to the inevitable burnout of your team.

In high growth organizations, periods of hyper growth can be really dangerous. During that time, everything’s interesting and exciting. The team has the energy to pursue a lot of ideas. But eventually, they run out of steam. Initiatives fail. Morale drops and performance suffers. Maintain a rigorous approach to drawing the line, and only pursue initiatives when you have the resources available to pursue them properly.

What I mean by drawing the line is, think of your initiative list. Start at the top of the list with your highest priority initiatives and then list every single idea and project you’re working on. Then, once you have that complete list, figure out what resources you have available to do the work. That may be people, time, or money.

Start at the top of your list and work your way down that list, figuring out how many resources that project is going to consume. When you run out of resources, draw a line on your prioritization list. Don’t work on anything below that line until you have additional resources or you finish a project above the line.

Enforce the discipline of assessing all new initiatives through your strategic filters. The filters let you know how closely aligned an idea is with your overall strategy. When you find something that’s off-strategy, there’s a rationale for saying no to it and staying focused on the most important ideas.