Visionary Leadership

In recent columns, I defined leadership as the ability to take individuals, including yourself, on a journey to a vision. This is accomplished by creating unified teams that focus all of their energies and achieve the leadership’s vision in a reasonable period. Leaders take teams to where they would not have gone on their own.

I’ve also identified three types of leaders: Diseased leaders, healthy leaders, and extraordinary leaders. It is the healthy and extraordinary leaders who’ll move the company forward. They know how to inspire others to look beyond their own narrow self-interests and instead work as a team to achieve goals that benefit both the company and themselves. Alternatively, diseased leaders set a poor example for others and are mainly interested in pursuing their own agendas at the expense of doing what’s best for the company and its employees as a whole.

The central task of healthy and extraordinary leaders begins with developing a vision of the company’s perfect future. Imagine that your business or your department was running perfectly. What would be different?

The challenge many leaders face in developing such a vision can be traced to the presence of “vision blockers,” which are the everyday events and conditions that keep a leader from envisioning a better way. The longer that problems are either ignored or at best temporarily patched over with band-aid solutions, the more they become part of the way we do business. When this happens, the mindset of leaders is that things are the way they are, and it’s their job to manage around the obstacles. But without possessing the vision and determination needed to eliminate vision blockers and remove obstacles once and for all, leaders lose the ability to control their destiny and instead adopt a defensive posture of reacting, hoping against hope that they’ll be able to successfully cope with whatever array of forces hits them at any given point in time.

For the sake of example, assume that a business is having a problem with poor customer service, especially with regard to late deliveries. The leader copes with the problem or obstacle by changing driving routes and having more regularly scheduled delivery times. He/she might even fire a driver and/or hire a new driver and buy another delivery truck. But this is really an institutional problem stemming from the lack of communication and teamwork between the sales and shipping departments. Salespeople and delivery people play the blame game and are constantly at odds with each other. It’s become a vision blocker because the leader, who can’t stand and consequently avoids refereeing internal conflicts as much as possible, can’t even imagine a situation where these internal conflicts no longer exist. As noted above, it just becomes a way of doing business. And once the leader buys into this type of thinking, he/she is no longer practicing good leadership.

The bottom line is that the leader needs to put vision blockers aside and instead determine what the company would look like if it was run perfectly. What would have to change in the production, inventory, and sales departments, for example, in order for the vision to become a reality?

It’s critical for you to identify the vision blockers in your department or company. Once you’ve written them down on a sheet of paper, then imagine what things would be like if they didn’t exist. Now you’re well on your way to developing a vision of the perfect future.