Blog Posts

By Dr. Scott.

We’re continuing our focus on visionary leadership style this week by looking at strategies for building and sustaining visionary organizations and cultures.  Over the last four weeks, we’ve explored visionary leadership as it relates to various elements of leadership and business operations.  First, we examined the 6 Characteristics of Visionary Leaders.  We then looked at how visionary leaders use Strategic Innovation and Inspirational Communication to influence others.  Then, we looked at Visionary Leadership and the Situation and, last week, we focused on the intersection of Visionary Leadership and Personality Types.

One of the most challenging things about thinking about, let alone building, a visionary culture is that all the actions and strategies we’ll discuss, typically need to be managed simultaneously and we can think about the process as a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” scenario.  It is difficult, then to categorize the following four, interrelated strategies on scales of importance or even steps in a process.  We’ll need to think of them more as a series of ingredients that are all important to the final product.

Choosing Followers Strategically

One of the most important steps, but not necessarily the first or even the most important, is to choose followers carefully and build strong, effective teams.  As we covered in our previous blog on Visionary Leadership and Personality Types, visionary leaders need specific types of followers to be successful.  Visionary cultures are built not only on the leader, but on the strengths, talents, and diversity of skills of the team members the leader pulls together.  So, careful selection of the right individuals is critical, as is reversing course quickly and letting underachieving or unfit team members go.  To be successful, though, you need to build trust and a sense of inclusion for all team members.

Communication is Always Key

Simultaneously, we need to establish and be able to effectively communicate the vision to potential team members.  Building a visionary culture through the shared vision requires a consistent message.  Visionary leaders should use storytelling and other analogies to help team members visualize the goal and understand the benefits of achieving the goal. 

Emotional Intelligence

A third component of building visionary cultures is mastering, or at least improving, in emotional intelligence.  Through emotional intelligence we become better listeners, we become more sincere, more empathetic, more trustworthy, and more transparent.  This helps visionary leaders lead by example and instill a sense of purpose and determination.

Encourage Innovation

Finally, visionary cultures are not self-sustaining.  Visionary leaders must constantly build, nurture, and cultivate.  One of the key ways that visionary leaders do this is by fostering a culture of innovation and creativity and by rewarding experimentation and success.  When followers feel their contributions are driving projects forward and working toward the vision, they are empowered by the ownership they feel in the vision.

Final Thoughts

Few visionaries succeed entirely on their own.  Visionary leaders are dependent on the skills, talents, and cohesiveness of their teams and organizations.  Inspiring others and starting a project or a business is actually the easy part.  Sustaining inspiration and maintaining team buy-in over the course of a project or the life a business is the more difficult part.  Visionary cultures and the overall success of visionary ventures depends on nurturing a visionary culture that can succeed not only the first time, but successfully innovate and reinvent long term.

Dr. Scott Eidson is the Executive Vice President of the Madison School of Professional Development and holds doctoral degrees in both history and business.  When not thinking about leadership, he’s usually thinking about surfing or old Volkswagens.