What are the challenges that Visionary leaders face in their day-to-day working lives?
The first one you'll probably be very aware of: this is Visionaries can get very bored with detail. It's very easy for a Visionary, as I said, who is at the peak of their enthusiasm at that aha moment when they saw it.
That's what we're going to do. To get into an arc, which I oversold a little earlier saying it's all downhill from there, but it can be a little like that. Once the detail kicks in, they can lose interest in being involved in that themselves. I'm not saying they can't do it. Very many Visionaries and Visionary founders, particularly of new ventures or Visionaries on a very small team, will get stuck into what I call the dirty fingernail work and can be perfectly competent at it.
That's not the issue. The issue is all the time, what are they scanning for? What are they looking around for? What are they waiting for? What are they secretly hoping for?
It's the next exciting new thing. It's the next squirrel. It's the next shiny new ball. That's where the boredom with detail comes from, not necessarily an inability to do the dirty fingernail work.
It's just they want to move on to the next thing. The second thing is this: something that comes with being someone who's had the vision for the solution or the next step, whatever it may be, is the need for ownership with that. Visionaries were just said might be people who get bored with detail. What does that mean? That means for implementation, they need to hand over to one or more other people, foreshadowing our Operators to go get it done.
And most Visionaries will, whether they know any of this terminology, whether they know to call themselves Visionaries, know what Operators are, they find themselves what we call Operators, people who just like to do things in order to hand off that implementation so they, the Visionary, don't get dragged into the dirty fingernail work instead giving it to someone, an Operator who craves that. That's what they want to spend their time doing. But here's the challenge. The Visionary has a huge need for ownership. It's their vision and they want it done the way they would do it.
They may not want to actually do the dirty fingernail work, but they want the dirty fingernail work done the way they would do it if they were, and that's going to bring challenges along as we'll see a little later. The third thing that people working with Visionaries find particularly challenging is - we've already talked about in and around this in our previous lessons - that they have extremes of commitment. A Visionary tends to be all in on something. Now think about this. And you'll know this as a Visionary: you get passionate about stuff.
So you can't get passionate about a hundred things, and you can't get passionate and get implemented any more than a small number of things. So you tend to move from one passionately committed project idea, next step, book, piece of software, particular individual you've just hired - you're passionate about those things, and if any of those things stop working out for whatever reason, if the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore, as a Visionary, you'll drop that at a moment's notice and move on to the next thing. That's how you're wired. This isn't working. Here's how we're going to do it.
Now the passion and the commitment goes into that next thing. That's how Visionaries show up. That's an asset to the team, but it's a challenge to the people who are working with the Visionary in the team.
The fourth challenge is the very thing that we started with when we talked about how Visionaries work: this whole question of talking to think. For you, a conversation is part of your process. It's one of the tools in your toolkit is a conversation or a brainstorming session or a group zoom call, just something where we can all get together, exchange ideas, push back.
Which for others, particularly on the Processor and Synergist side of the cab, can be very challenging to deal with because as we'll see, they think and work differently and in a way that finds your desire to talk to think confusing at least, and destabilizing at worst. Together with all of that, many Visionaries will be seen particularly by Processors as people who work with a lack of structure. Now this may not actually be true. You could well be someone who has a lot of structure going on underneath the surface. Particularly if, like me, you're a Visionary Processor.
I'm a big V, small P, so a lot of Visionary, but my second highest score is Processor. So I show up with all of this stuff that we've talked about. But because I've got a relatively high Processor score, I have systems out the wazoo, so I have a lot of structure.
But when I'm doing my Visionary thing, it really doesn't look that way. I don't bring the structure into the Visionary environment, when I'm brainstorming, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Other than bringing maybe a nifty piece of software that we might use for virtual whiteboards - that's a little bit of structure there.
That's it. After that, I'm just being a Visionary, hyperlinking, squirreling, all that sort of stuff. So bear in mind that often for your colleagues that you work with, they will see you as a Visionary as someone who doesn't bring a lot of structure to bear.
And that can be brilliant in some circumstances, particularly very difficult circumstances where a lot of triage is required. We need a lot of that flexibility that we talked about. But in regular day-to-day interactions, that can be a little destabilizing when working with other people.
The other point that we've already talked about is the shiny blue ball syndrome. Not going to talk too much about that 'cause we already have. We'll come back to it a little later when we look at our toolkit. But that randomization of your day is something that is a little challenging for everybody else on the team because how do they know when the next new thing is suddenly going to appear?
That's one of the reasons why, if you watch out for it over the next few weeks, if you work in a physical environment where you're next physically to the people that you work with, you may see that when you come back from a workshop or a convention or even a vacation, they're avoiding eye contact. They're scurrying past you in the corridor. They're not wanting to sit in one-on-one time with you because they know you got a whole bunch of shiny new balls that you've brought back.
And the final point that I want to flag up is that Visionaries take a very high level perspective, and that leads to what I call a time-lapse distortion. Now, let me explain this very specifically. So I want you to think of a mountain range: two big mountains and a deep valley in between. Our Visionaries, we like to think of ourselves as soaring eagles. You know, we're there to get the big picture.
We are there to stand on the mountaintop and see the vision, and here we are on this mountaintop with this vision that was maybe a shiny blue ball a few months ago, but here it is. We made the new product launch, right? We built the new factory. We've got a new mission going into a different demographic. We've achieved it.
We're up here on this mountaintop. Now as a Visionary, I see the next mountain top. I, as that eagle, I just take off and swoop, swoop, swoop. I'm over there. I'm here thinking, where's the next new product?
Why have we not opened the third factory? Why has the next coffee shop not been opened yet? I've just gone from one mountain top to the other with my big eagle wings. Now what about the Operators and the Processors, the Synergists who have to make this thing happen? Well, they got to go all the way down the side of the mountain, over and under the valley, and back up to the other mountaintop, all of which means that Visionaries get very, very impatient.
That impatience can be an asset if it's used correctly. If it's not used correctly, and if there isn't discipline brought to bear in how a Visionary uses their impatience, then they end up just getting totally and unnecessarily and unfairly upset with their colleagues because they can't break the time laws that you can as this eagle, 'cause you didn't have to do the dirty fingernail work. And so what happens is, in the worst version of this, the Visionary gets so upset they force people to cut corners in a way that makes the journey that must happen not work out.
And that sort of a Visionary is left on the mountaintop on their own with the thing that they thought was going to happen never achieved and a group of dispirited, broken high performers who feel we can never live up to the expectations this individual has. Now, I'm not saying that a Visionary's impatience can't be a really good thing. Of course it can, and we can all quote well-known leaders, business leaders, not-for-profit leaders. You can name them as well as I can, who are held up as icons because of the fact that they would not put up with mediocrity, they would not put up with dawdling.
They would not put up with people dragging their feet, and that is all right and good and correct. That's not what I'm saying here. What I'm saying here is a Visionary has to know what the reality is and help make that optimal and not rail against it.
So with that, let's move to the final part of our first module.