Leading With Vision

The skill of establishing a vision has not only become front-and-center to the work I do today, assessing leadership talent on behalf of executive level hiring managers, but it has also become a crucial skill often exercised as the owner of a small business.

We hear this a lot in academic dialogue - that acting as a “visionary” is an important part of leadership.  But what does this mean on a tactical level, and why is it so important?

Here is a pragmatic description of why establishing a vision is so important as a leader:

People need to know why they should even bother participating in taking something from point A to point B.

Let’s be real... for a professional team or function, the process of executing a project, or taking an asset or a product from point A to point B can be quite disenchanting.  More plainly articulated...the process can suck.  Making “progress” typically requires work that most people don’t have much interest in doing.  There are a lot of points of failure within the process that can become quite messy.  People quit and complain along the way.  And sometimes, point B never even shows its face.  Staying at point A or current state is comfortable to team members.  Progress requires serious grit.

Progress also requires a leader who does these things incredibly well;

• they establish and define a realistic vision - literally a visual picture - of what “point B” looks and feels like
• they weave something of consequence and purpose into that vision, so that, at least the majority of team members actually care about the daily work required of them and feel there is good reason for why point B is even meaningful to them as individuals
• they constantly repeat this vision to their team - they are always referring to this vision, constantly ensuring that every team member remembers why they’re doing this potentially monotonous work

And that’s it.  A great leader knows that to minimize the friction, frustration, or irritation that may naturally manifest in their team members as a result of mundane day-to-day operational work, they must literally paint a picture of the future - one that is better than the present - and talk about it constantly with their team.

After all, most humans are highly motivated by “what could be”.  And they should be.  In teams, our potential is limitless, and most people know this.  They simply lack the capability and perhaps the discipline to establish their own vision, which is the reason it is so necessary that leaders do this for them.

Through our daily work at Cultura Solutions, we know that great leaders have exceptional foresight and they’re skilled at establishing a vision that is both exciting, but also, realistic and within reach.  Leaders are often popularized because they articulate outlandish and earth shattering, futuristic ideas.  These are visionary entrepreneurs who dominate the tabloids like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos.  There certainly is nothing wrong with this and of course, these individuals are important and inspiring, but this is not the “vision” I am referring to in this piece.  We don’t hear enough about the line level managers and supervisors within these corporations who are truly moving the needle on a single product, incubating a new idea, stripping down an entire business unit or function and rebuilding it, or building an entirely new business unit.  These leaders’ capability to establish a pragmatic vision is equally as important as their CEO’s idealism.

If you’re a leader of people within any type of institution, consider your approach to articulating a vision with your team, regardless of the task that lies in front of them.  When we evaluate leadership talent on behalf of some of the most revered employers in our local market, this is a capability we are frequently asked to identify.
 

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Cultura Solutions is a strategic search firm in Minneapolis that partners with executive leaders to help bridge high-impact leadership talent gaps.  Cultura employs an extremely disciplined and transparent search process with a targeted sourcing model and outreach focused on genuine human-to-human interaction, allowing us to turn non-active prospects into interested candidates.  Visit www.cultura-solutions.com for more information.