A visionary leader, who is inclusive, has the power to transform a culture into a forward-looking, responsibility-taking and high-performing team that is focused on meaning and value. Typically, rules and regulations hold an organisation back from fulfilling its mission – talent gets attracted and commitment gets fostered to the vision, but that enthusiasm gets lost as employees become mired in the byzantine rules established for carrying out their specific roles. The mission becomes hard to discover behind the regulations. Effectiveness decreases and spirits are dampened.
To bring about change in such a shackled organisation, a leader’s approach should commence with the individual – one-on-one, to discover the following:
- What’s working right now and what makes people proud of what we are doing? This enables people who feel ‘tied down’ by bureaucracy to have a chance to talk about how meaningful their work felt initially and the frustrations they are facing currently.
- The dream for the future – a sense of the vision and hope for the value that the organisation could have. This discussion taps into the compassion and dedication that people have for their work and their contribution.
- Question whether the organisation is really living its mission and its ability and agility to meet its goals. The process has a payoff – it builds employees’ initiative and their belief that they have answers inside themselves. This process focuses on the management processes that are getting in the way, the rules that make no sense and the outdated systems that must go.
The visionary leadership style, as noted by Daniel Goleman (Primal Leadership), “drives emotional climate upwards and transforms the spirit of the organisation at many levels”. Some of the outcomes include:
- Visionary leaders articulate where a group is going, but not how it will get there – setting people free to innovate, experiment, and take calculated risks.
- Visionary leadership retains the most valued employees – to the extent that people resonate with a company’s values, goals and mission, that company becomes a preferred employer.
- Visionary leadership, by framing the collective task in terms of a grander vision, defines a standard of performance feedback that revolves around that vision.
- Visionary leadership helps people see how their work fits into the big picture, lending people a clear sense not just that what they do matters, but also why it matters.
Visionary leadership transforms culture. By continually reminding employees of the larger purpose of their work, the visionary leader offers a grand meaning to otherwise workaday, mundane tasks. Goleman concludes: “Workers understand the shared objectives as being in sync with their own best interests. The result: inspired work”.
