Using the Exceptional Visionary Leader's Toolkit

Introduction to Module 2 

So let's jump into the Exceptional Visionary Leaders Toolkit, and I'm going to show you five specific tools that you can use to maximize, to optimize your role as a Visionary leader, taking into account all of those strengths, assets, and challenges that we talked about in module one. The names of these aren't going to mean much to you until we get into them, but here they are. We're going to start with something I call The Enterprise Commitment. Then we're going to look at the pause, explain what that means, as I will do with blinkers. That one you might be able to intuitively grasp.

Before we get there, then we're going to move on to the joy of completion, and we're going to close out with your sandbox. And as I say, each and all of these are going to mean more as we jump into them. I just want to make one point about the first of these, The Enterprise Commitment. Is a tool that is in every one of the four Styles toolkit. So Visionaries need to use The Enterprise Commitment.

If you talk to your Operator colleague, they have taken by how to be an exceptional Operator leader course. They will have The Enterprise Commitment as the first of their tools as well. Processors and Synergists. So this is a tool for all four Styles, but it's hugely, hugely important.

The Enterprise Commitment

What is The Enterprise Commitment?

Well, it's actually just 20 words, and yes, you can count them. There are 20 words here, and The Enterprise Commitment says this. When working in a team or group environment, I will place the interests of the enterprise ahead of my own.

Seemingly very simple. INC magazine was kind enough to call these the 20 most powerful words in business. I'm not going to disagree, but let's break them down and see exactly what The Enterprise Commitment is saying, and then we'll look at why it's so important and powerful.

So breaking these 20 words down line by line. When working in a team or group environment, what's important to realize is this isn't just about The Enterprise Commitment. It's actually an underlying point that I should make about the whole Visionary Operator Processor, Synergist leadership Styles model.

It only has relevance in how you work with teams. That's what we're talking about here is how you show up and work with others. There are a ton of other, usually four Styles type quizzes that you can take up. You can go to desk, you can, I could start naming hundreds of them. Most of those are about you as an individual and can be used as just purely individual learning tools.

The Predictable Success Leadership Styles model is all about how teams work. So The Enterprise Commitment is only about you working in a team. Here's the thing, and the world we live in now, certainly in the world of work. Whether in a for-profit, not-for-profit, small business, huge business, multinational, two person chop shop, you are working with somebody else 99.8% of the time.

I'm sure that's the nature of modern work. Now, a lot of it is virtual these days. It's still working with other people. So when working in a team or group environment, we're not just talking about how you show up when you're sitting in a conference room.

If you do ever sit in conference rooms, we're talking about how you communicate on email, on Slack, on Zoom, in the corridor, in passing conversations. That's working in a team or group environment. And what The Enterprise Commitment says is 99.8% of the time when I'm in a team or group environment.

In other words, there's more than me involved, then I place the interests of the enterprise. What do I mean by that? What are the interests of the enterprise? It's whatever the thing is we're talking about. If it's launching the new product, if it's building the second factory, if it's starting a new ministry, if it's repainting the office walls, whatever the thing that we're talking about.

Small or large, I'll place it ahead of my own interests. Now, by that I mean something in this context, very specific. When I talk about placing the interests of the enterprise, the thing that you're in the team environment talking about, ahead of your own.

I don't mean ahead of your need for more vacation or a bigger paycheck or a second cup of coffee. I'm talking about your need to scratch your Visionary or Operator or Processor or Synergist itch. That's what The Enterprise Commitment says. The Enterprise Commitment says, when I'm just doing my own thing, I can scratch my Visionary itch, my Operator itch, my Processor itch, my Synergist itch, all I want.

As soon as I'm engaged with even just one other person, but in any sort of a team or a group interaction, once that happens, my job is not to get what most pleases me. What most fulfills me, what most makes me happy as a Visionary, Operator, Processor, or Synergist. My job is to make sure we do whatever is best for the enterprise. And those two things not only are not necessarily going to cohere, they're almost certainly not. The most perfect solution is not the perfect Visionary solution.

It's not the perfect Operator solution. It's not the perfect Processor solution. It's not the perfect Synergist solution. The perfect solution for the enterprise is highly likely some version of a mix of those. So that's what The Enterprise Commitment says.

Why is it important? What does it do if we begin to try to implement The Enterprise Commitment? Well, essentially it's all about shared vocabulary. I could go off on a separate 20 minute rant very easily on just those two words. The vital importance of shared vocabulary in achieving success in any environment, but we've already been using it.

We use words like Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist. That's a shared vocabulary that helps people communicate in a much more effective manner, and The Enterprise Commitment is a shared vocabulary that does three things that are really, really important. In other words, if your team members as a whole accept and understand The Enterprise Commitment, then three things are going to occur.

First of all, you're going to get much faster and easier conflict management. You're going to achieve much higher degree of alignment within your team, and finally you're going to make decisions and implement them an awful lot faster. That's what shared vocabulary does, and I want to spend a little bit of time just sharing with you how it specifically does that.

In terms of using The Enterprise Commitment within your team, let's start by looking at how shared vocabulary, how the 20 most powerful words in business, The Enterprise Commitment, can help overcome conflict. Well, it works like this. You will have been in team environments probably today at some point, if you're not doing this course very first thing in the morning, at which you have sat and thought about some other team member, you're being a pain in the neck.

Like you just look at Joe and you think, Joe, you're such a pain in the neck. Now let me rephrase. You would never say that, right? You'd never think that. Another would I, but I'm told that other people do.

But here's the thing. That's sort of unhelpful. Joe may well be being a pain in the neck. But expressing that's not going to achieve much. Now, if as I assume you have, you've taken our leadership Styles quiz and you've spent any amount of time with your results, you already will have been using a shift in your terminology.

You'll be using shared vocabulary to think, hey, Joe, aren't you being a bit enter your own Style, aren't you being a bit Processory here, a bit Visionary here, a bit overly Operator, a bit too Synergist? Because that's highly likely why you felt Joe was being a pain in the neck. You're a Visionary. Joe's a Processor. You don't see the world the way she does.

You are an Operator. Joe's a Synergist. The two of you, very little in common. So there's a shift in shared vocabulary when we begin to recognize that not all, but a very large element of interpersonal team conflict is not actually personally based.

It's Styles based, and the use of the Styles terminology helps begin to push the rough edges off that interaction and reduce the conflict. But even more powerful is when we start to think and say, what would The Enterprise Commitment have us do here? At this point, we're not pointing at Joe at all. We're simply asking Joe and everybody else in the team to invoke The Enterprise Commitment. Subtext, start being a little less Processor or whatever the Style is that's being irritating, and that is a huge deescalation of conflict.

Just try it. We'll talk about in the toolkit how you can circulate The Enterprise Commitment and try it with your team. I guarantee you, you'll see a reduction in the degree of team conflict when together you start to invoke The Enterprise Commitment.

The second thing that will happen is you'll get a huge increase in team alignment. Why is that? Very specific reason, and it's that when you've got the Visionary, Processor, Operator, Synergist, all trying to think through and get a solution that satisfies them, and that's trying to square a very big circle or circle a very big square.

One or the other. However, whenever we have the enterprise solution as being what we're all looking for, we're all in the same boat. We're all looking for the same thing. We're not each of us looking for the solution that scratches our itch, so we don't have the Visionaries buddying up and lobbying for their solution, or the Operators doing the same, or the Processors or the Synergists.

We are all using The Enterprise Commitment to find the one solution that's best for the enterprise, best for whatever it is that we are discussing. And the third thing that the shared vocabulary of The Enterprise Commitment will bring for you is a huge increase in speed. Speed to decision making, speed to implementation. And why is that? It's a version of what we were talking about a little earlier.

You have been in these meetings. You have been in these meetings where everybody is talking at each other. Joe is speaking to Fred. Fred is driving Joe crazy and Joe can't see how Fred's solution would be any help whatsoever. Fred, on the other hand, is trying to square the circle with Greg, and so it goes on, and so it goes on, and so it goes on, and we have 20 subtextual conversations going on depending on the size of the team.

Again, if the team together is looking to come up with just one solution, that's the enterprise solution. If we are all trying to find what's best for the enterprise, we're all looking at one thing. We're not trying to reconcile individual solutions that each person comes up with. Try it. Use The Enterprise Commitment distributed amongst your team.

Unleash the power of shared vocabulary. Now, I should say one thing. This is not an instant fix. You can't just distribute Enterprise Commitment cards on them around the team, get everybody to memorize these 20 words, read 'em out at the start of every meeting and expect this to happen immediately.

You will find your team drifts back in to that Styles based, slow, ponderous, each person talking to the other person trying to reconcile their solution, their Operator solution, Processor solution with somebody else's Synergist solution, Visionary solution. It's natural. Your team has been hardwired to do this for a long time, so you've got to persevere. You've got to keep formally reminding yourselves as a team. You've got to put training wheels on, make this work over a period of time.

Sure, you'll slip back into the old ways, but the more you keep pulling yourselves up and stopping it and actually physically saying, hold on a minute, let's get back to The Enterprise Commitment, then the more you'll begin to build that muscle and the more this will become a permanent way of thinking until it's just an inherent part of how you as teams show up, and you'll be amazed at the degree to which new hires, for example, people coming in from another part of the organization will just be like fish out of water for a while because this isn't something that's natural and normal. It is something that you need to learn as a team. You need to work at it and build a muscle.

The Pause

Let's move on to the first of the Visionary specific tools in your Exceptional Visionary Leader toolkit, and it's one I call the pause, and it's just simply that it's pausing.

Think of it this way. You've got to wait before evangelizing your most recent squirrel. Why? Because people become so used to you having great idea after great idea, after great idea, they start to think, oh, well here's just the next one coming along.

As I've said before, they'll get used to Monday morning whenever you're back from being on vacation or having been to a conference. They're just going to learn to virtually put some earbuds in and just yada, yada yada ya and let it go on until they hope washes past them. Whereas if you simply come and say, I think I've got something that's going to really help what we're doing, but I'm going to spend a little bit of time on it and we'll talk about it at our next one-on-one or our next weekly management meeting, or whatever it may be, and you come with something that's more constructed, more thought through.

You're going to see much, much higher levels of buy-in than it being just another big rock you drop in the pond. Now, this is hard. This is a tough thing to do because of the passion that you have. This is a learned habit. When I'm coaching Visionary leaders, it's something we work on for six months or so, just building the muscle of executing the pause, so it doesn't need to be something that you're doing all the time, but I've already hinted.

You said on Mondays your weekend ideas may be great. Talk about them on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, when you come back from a vacation, when you come back from events. Just take a little time. Don't come and throw a rock or even worse rocks into the first Monday morning meeting. As soon as you're back all excited and energized, that may scratch, that will scratch your Visionary itch.

There's no doubt about it, but it won't help in getting the rest of the team on your side. And here's a couple of things to think about to really supercharge the pause. One is, instead of just verbalizing. As Visionaries, we verbalize a lot. We talk to think, write stuff down.

It will force you to think things through and you'll see some of the more extreme, un likely aspects of what it is that you think you've seen when you write it down. Take a little bit of time, get something to Preciate to people, or even that's just going to be talking points. Now, I'm not talking about going into full Processor 45 screen PowerPoint displays. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about disciplining yourself to pause a little, the more important the idea, the more important to pause, think it through.

Get a little structure under it, write instead of speaking and then speak to groups rather than individuals. This is one of the weaknesses we have as Visionaries, is we tend to jump on, I'm exaggerating here, but the first person who's unfortunate enough to be in our line of eyesight and you know, we project vomit this fantastic new thing that is going to change the whole world. And over time they get used to just nodding away. I'm waiting to see will this stick. Whereas if you wait and either call a meeting specifically after a little bit of a pause, only needs to be a couple of days, and sit with a group of people.

Produce the paper that's got two paragraphs on it. Just highlight notes. There's much, much more implicit, immediate buy-in. Now as Visionaries, you're going to react. I understand it, I get it.

I coach this all the time and I see it, feel it, respond it, how to work with it, but that's just going to constrain me. That's not who I am. I'm there to be the catalyst. I'm there to be the change maker. That's correct.

And that's what I want you to do. But I want the arc, and this is where those of you who are following along in the visual learning stuff will see me do this. If you're just listening to the audio, you won't see me do it. I want your arc to look like, not like this, not a catalyst arc with ever diminishing returns as people learn to sandbag what you're throwing at them, but rather an arc like this, a J curve.

Where you're making more impact and more impact and more impact as time goes along, and how do you do that? That comes over time from discipline, from you learning not to turn into a Processor, not to make this a whole exercise in ready, aim, ready, aim, ready, aim, fire. It just is an exercise in putting ready in somewhere, not just coming back on a Monday with fire, fire, fire, instead coming back, take a little bit of time.

Maybe it's a morning, maybe it's a day, maybe at the most it's a week. And put a ready in there, ready, aim, fire. And you know what? One other thing that this will do, it will test your actual real commitment to this new idea that you have.

Think about it being the same sort of synopses happen with late night impulse buying, going on to Amazon. Got to have this thing, just buy it. You wait till the next morning, maybe you didn't want to buy it.

Blinkers

So the pause is a hugely important tool in the Exceptional Visionary Leaders Toolkit. And it's even more powerful if you accompany it with blinkers.

Now, this is a phrase that Visionaries hate, and I wish I could come up with another word or phrase that doesn't put the hackles up right away. But here's what I'm talking about. You're a passionate, Visionary leader. What's very important for your team is that you have a series of really, really clear what I call bullseye initiatives, the absolutely most important things that you and your team have to achieve over the next three to as far as 18 months.

Short to medium term objectives, and build a high wall around them. Why? Because I see so many otherwise exceptional, brilliant, Visionary leaders never really achieve on their core initiatives because they allow other serendipitous things.

This is being part of that catalyst just come in and shift focus. So you're in the middle of launching the new product. And serendipitously, you just see this piece of software that's nothing to do with the new product. It just, it will revolutionize how your team works. Maybe it's some sort of a communication software or an AI enhanced database, whatever it may be, and suddenly it's what I, my mother called the bee's knees.

It's the thing du jour, and it just sucks the focus out of achieving on your core initiatives. You've got to decouple input and action. What do I mean by that? Once you've moved to implementation on those bullseye initiatives, no more new input. Don't go in and smear it with new stuff just because you had a brilliant idea.

Now, am I saying you never remember? We talked about flexibility. I'm not saying you never change something if it's something isn't working. Of course you have to change it, but if you've got your three to five bullseye initiatives going, your focus is on getting them done.

We're going to talk about more of that in the joy of completion in a moment or two, but one of the things that you've got to allow yourself to do is remove the luxury of looking around, whether it's subconscious or not, for new fun things to put into those mixes because that won't work. One last pro tip and a word of warning. This really only works with established teams with good relationships, good communication skills, and maybe a little bit of self-deprecating humor, and it's this, give your team a safe word that they can use when they see you do this, when they see you introducing new thing upon new thing upon new thing and preventing them get to the point of completion on something that's very important.

The reason is they see it way before you do. For Visionary leaders, it's a little bit like the goldfish in water. Coming up with something new is just so natural that it can be a little hard to self-diagnose, so try it.

Give your team a safe word. Tell 'em that you're not necessarily always going to act on it, but at least it'll give you a canary in the coal mine. A little early warning signal that you might be doing just this.

The Joy of Completion

Let's talk now about the fourth of my tips for Visionary leaders, and that's the joy of completion. And what I mean by that is shifting the balance of your endorphin rush from a moment of conception of a great new idea toward getting that endorphin rush when you see it actually implemented.

Now we are talking about shifting a balance, not losing that joy of the new idea, because that's very much the core of who you are. But this really is probably the single biggest challenge that I see most Visionary leaders grapple with. It's a different kind of adaptive challenge and it makes it difficult. And so for that reason, what I suggest is you've got to view this as almost like gym work. It's something you have to stick at for quite some time to see a result, and the reason is that of all four Styles, it's the Visionary Style that gets irritated quickest at being forced to apply discipline to how their Style shows up.

All the Styles, Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist will ultimately begin to feel drained if they're being asked to act consistently outside their natural instincts. The Visionary is the type of leader that most gets irritated really, really quickly. So this is like gym work, and I suggest very strongly that you start in building the joy of completion.

Start small, pick the smallest, brilliant new idea that you had this week, whether it's let's get a new logo or let's get some greenery into the reception and make it more welcoming. Just something small, not your biggest new idea, because this is a muscle we're going to build and we want to start small, particularly so as to see results quickly. Pick something that's got a short period of time between thinking it and seeing it done. The reason for that is we want that delayed gratification. As Visionaries, we feel everything at the point of coming up with this great new idea.

We want to move some of that to the point at which we see it actually implemented. And at the start, we want that gap to be small enough that we can see it right in front of us. So something that's only going to take a couple of days, get those plants in. Greenery in reception. You can see it the next day and then revel in that sense of, hey, I didn't just think about this.

I saw it happen. Now, the examples that I've given, they're simplistic, but believe me, you want to start with these simplistic things and build up that muscle, that sense of delayed gratification. You will, I assure you, if you do this, I've proved it to myself, proved it with the people that I work with over and over again.

Once you get the sense of this, this joy of completion, you'll want to repeat it over and over and over again because it's no secret. This is not a zero sum game. You don't end up having 50% of your enjoyment of new ideas at the point of thinking about it, and 50% of it at the point of completion.

You get a hundred percent here and a hundred percent there. There's no, there's no way to lose in this, but it does take discipline to build a muscle of the joy of completion.

Find Your Sandbox

Let's look now at the final tip for Visionary leaders, and that is find yourself a sandbox somewhere that you can play and fly your Visionary freak flag.

Why is this so important? Because otherwise you're going to go crazy if you don't do this. You're going to lose patience with implementing the other tips that I've given you because there's discipline in there which feels constricted and you'll need to find somewhere where there are really very few constraints where you can color outside the lines, which is what Visionaries love to do.

Now, this needs to be something that's not related to your business or your organization. Something else, it might be a project outside of work, a person. It should be, you know, something that you feel strongly about, a cause. A passion. Let me give you some real world examples.

I polled some of the folks that I've worked with over the last year or so, and here are some of the things that came out. More than one Visionary leader. This seems to be something that correlates with being a Visionary. Really enjoyed participating, most of them with other people, in semi extreme, in some cases even extreme sports events, you know, the sort of thing that you're not going to catch me doing involving heights and things like that.

A one leader that whose work I got to know really, really well is that her world is in textile arts. That's where she flies her freak flag. Makes beautiful batik. Just really, really gorgeous work. Fantasy sports league management was another one.

Podcasting, YouTubing about lacrosse. Oh cake, what I call maniacally experimental home brewing with somebody else's. I have benefited from, benefited is maybe not the right word. I have consumed some of. Home gardening was another one.

So it doesn't really matter. These are just some examples. The important thing is that you find yours. Maybe something that you're already doing, that you're already engaged in, that becomes your Visionary sandbox, and maybe something that you know you've been messing around with for a while and now is a good time to reactivate it or accelerate it or invest a little bit more in it.

Whatever it is, think about what it can be for you. Now, work out where your sandbox is going to be, because trust me, if you don't have a sandbox, you're going to get very frustrated with implementing some of the other things that are recommended, and without that sandbox, what you'll end up doing is essentially inventing a sandbox within your organization, and that's going to undermine what you're trying to establish elsewhere. So get out there. Find your sandbox and fly your Visionary freak flag.