Understanding the Visionary Leadership Style

Introduction to Module 1 

What's a Visionary leader?

How Visionaries Work

The Visionary leader's assets and strengths

The Visionaries Challenges

The Visionary's Nemesis Style

Introduction to Module 1

So let's move straight into module one. 

I've got five lessons that I'm going to take you through. The first of those lessons is simply talking about what a Visionary leader is. Each of the four words that I've used to describe the Styles, Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist, they all at first glance, can mean different things to different people.

I want to share with you what it means in the context of your leadership Style. Secondly, we're going to take a look at how Visionaries work. How do they show up? What sort of things do they do? Then we'll look in the third lesson at what the strengths and assets are that a Visionary brings to any team, group, project, organization.

And then we'll flip the coin and we'll take a look at what challenges Visionaries face using their Style to best effect. And finally, I want to share with you the Visionary's nemesis Style. Now, what I mean by that is that for each of the four Styles, Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist, there is one of the other Styles that they find most particularly difficult to work with, and I'm going to go a little deeper with that so that you can understand and prepare yourself in working with that nemesis Style.

What's a Visionary leader?

So let's dive in to lesson one. What's a Visionary leader? The first thing is, obviously, as you've heard me say a number of times, and as you'll have picked up in taking our quiz, it's one of four leadership Styles, the Visionary, Operator, Processor, Synergist.

I'm not going to explain the other three Styles in detail in this course. We've got other courses about each one of them, but you are going to pick up the main thrust of how they each show up as we go along. Secondly, what I don't mean by a Visionary leader is that they're necessarily sitting on a mountaintop having visions, but that's not part of the package.

What I really mean is they're visual thinkers. They envision what they want to see happen. Visionary leaders are, in essence, creative. They like to find creative solutions to problems that they see. They don't like just patching something up.

They want to make it better. They want to improve it, and they want to make it contribute to something wider, as we'll see a little later. Next, Visionaries are essentially internally driven. They're not reactive so much as proactive. It's those visions that they have, whether it's an aha moment sitting in a conference somewhere, or a brilliant new solution to a problem that's been bugging them, that arrives in the shower in the morning, or a book they read that gets them going.

They are internally driven to make things happen, to make a difference, to make a change. Most Visionary leaders are natural communicators. Now I want to make it clear. I don't mean that they're necessarily great orators, that you know, they hold people, you know, in their grasp, uh, from the podium.

That may well be the case. And many Visionary leaders do. But what I mean at core is they have a way of communicating that vision that they have, that thing that they've seen in ways that make other people want to help them, want to join in.

And we'll see how important that is as we move through our course today. Most Visionaries, not all, but most Visionaries are either outgoing or they can fake being outgoing enough to get other people excited. Now, I know quite a few introvert Visionary leaders. And what they do is they learn how to emulate being outgoing to the extent that they know is necessary, because they want other people to help them realize their vision.

They're risk takers. Now this is a sliding scale as all of these are. All of these are a sliding scale. I'm not saying that everybody's way up at a 10 on all of these. It's just their characteristics that they tend to show.

But on the glass half empty, glass half full side of things, Visionaries are on the very much on the glass half full. They're prepared to take risks, whether or not that's a controlled risk or at times an uncontrolled risk is sometimes context dependent. But they're by and large people who are prepared to take risks to see their vision enabled. At their core, Visionaries are starters. They love to start things.

That's when their itch gets scratched. That's whenever they feel most excited is at the moment of realization when they have that vision of what could be. Now I'm tempted to say it's all downhill after that. That would be a gross exaggeration. But it is true to say that for most Visionary leaders, the height of their enthusiasm is at the point of realizing, oh, we could dot, dot, dot.

They are essentially starters, and that's going to impact how they work with the other Styles, as we shall see.

How Visionaries Work

Let's take a look at how Visionaries work. How do they show up? What do they look like? How do you recognize them?

Well, here's the first thing you should be very aware of, is Visionaries talk to think. Now, you are highly likely here because you are a Visionary. You took the quiz. Your base Style is that of a Visionary, and you may not be just so aware of this because it just comes naturally to you.

It really is, to take that old cliche, for you, it's like a fish being in water and asking what is water? But for you, it's just natural to talk to think. You'll chat and talk and work things out, and sometimes Visionaries will start 180 degrees the opposite direction from what they actually think might be the case because they want to test what they think might be an answer.

They want to test what they're going to do next. So they may often say something that's there to get others to push back. They're trying to work out a solution and the very first aha I'd like you to take away from this particular lesson, if you are a Visionary, is that can be horrendously confusing for other people, particularly if you're in a position of authority.

If someone is reporting to you and they show up when you're in talk to think mode, that can be really, really confusing. We're going to talk more about this a little later, so let me move on to the second way in which Visionaries show up. They start with yes. Their tendency is to say, of course we can. Could we ship 500 tons of our product?

Yes. Could we ship it by Thursday? Of course. Can we ship it to Hawaii? Uh, yes.

They have a tendency towards yes. Again, we're going to see the importance of that a little later on. Now, I've already alluded to this third point, but I want to pull it out separately because it has big implications for how other people working with you Visionaries see and process what you're sharing with them.

Visionaries have the ability to hold two entirely incompatible notions until the very last moment when a choice has to be made between them. In other words, the whole team could be talking about whether or not to build a new factory in location X, and if you have a Visionary boss, they can be holding yes and no to incompatible answers to that question firmly in their minds with no concern about holding each of them as firmly as the other right up to the point at which a decision has to be made. Now you add that to the talking to think, and you have a recipe for what might feel like a lot of confusion on the part of people listening to Visionaries.

Here's someone who's talking to think about two incompatible things. How could that be? But as, as is, again, very likely you're a Visionary. To you, this just comes naturally. This is just part of who you are.

And again, we've already talked a little bit about this fourth point, but I want to again pull it out and emphasize it. Visionaries tend to slide to positivity. That's their nature. They're prepared to take risks. We've seen that they're, they therefore going to interpret future circumstances, the way things will work out, the current situation more positively than negatively.

Visionaries tend not to be what my mother would've called a moaning mini. They tend not to be, to use a good Irish phrase, nippy. They don't moan a lot about things. In fact, they get irritated by people who moan a lot because Visionaries tend to see the positive side of most things.

Something to bear in mind. Visionaries say hyperlinking was invented by them and for them. Well, I made the by them thing up. I don't know whether or not the guy who invented hyperlinking, whose name I've forgotten, but did know Doug something.

We'll check it later. Was a Visionary or not. But certainly hyperlinking is absolutely the way in which Visionaries work. They'll go not from A to B, they won't even start at A. You'll know this.

You work with a Visionary, you are a Visionary. They'll start at Q, jump to Fred, back to green, over to Mars. They'll hyperlink, you know, not just within the topic under consideration, but to a totally different topic.

This makes meetings with Visionaries fun, confusing, bewildering, exciting, all sorts of things as we're going to see. A little link to that is that Visionaries have a high shiny blue ball syndrome. They love, as we've already seen, starting things. Newness means a lot to Visionaries. That's why I think about that Pixar movie Up, if you remember it, the little dog Dug, the Dug the dog.

Wants to be involved in everything but can't help himself. Every time he sees a squirrel, he's up a tree and Visionaries have a high squirrel factor. They read a book. It's the most exciting thing in the world. We've got to we've got to implement all of this.

They read another book, let's do this one. And don't forget, they could be incompatible, as we've already seen. The last time you want to meet with a Visionary, you listening to this as a Visionary, the last time your folks want to bump into you is Monday morning when you've come back from a vacation or a conference that you've attended, 'cause you come back with your tablet, your yellow pad, your notion database filled with squirrels, tons of stuff that we absolutely must do.

That's the nature of the Visionary. And finally, Visionaries tend to have one of two work modes: hyperactive or idle. Now, idle, I don't mean sitting around doing nothing and shirking, I mean idle. Just letting the batteries recharge, letting things process, going into the equivalent of sleep mode for a while in order to come back hyperactively.

And again, you can see how for you as a Visionary, that's natural. You get passionate about the things that you do, you invest an awful lot into it, and then you need to go and blow off a couple of hours at pickleball, whatever it is that you do to blow off a little bit of steam so that you can come back excited and hyperactive to the next thing.

The Visionary leader's assets and strengths

So all of these contribute to the picture of how most Visionary leaders work, how they show up. What are the assets that all of that brings to having you as a Visionary on a team? Well, the very first one is dead simple.

It's right there in the name. It's the vision for where we're going, for what we're going to do next. The good book says, well, without vision the people perish, and that's very, very true. Any organization, group, or team that doesn't have a vision ultimately they're going to die, they're going to stagnate, then they're going to die.

And the number one thing that the Visionary, above all else, more than the Operator, more than the Processor, more than the Synergist does, is they'll bring the overarching vision for solving this problem, fixing this next thing, growing what we're doing, expanding things, hitting our mission, hitting our vision, hitting our goals. That's not to say Operators, Processors, Synergists never contribute anything to the vision of the organization overall. Of course they do, but Visionaries bring it in spades. The other thing that all of those characteristics that I talked about in the list of how Visionaries show up, when you pull all of those things together, it contributes something huge, which is a degree of flexibility.

Visionaries tend not to be rigid in any sense in their thought processes. That can seem as a challenge and we'll see that it can be that, but it also is a major strength in that it means that they're not hide bound by how we've always done things. They're not going to go on rinse and repeat mode. They're going to think things through in a flexible, responsive manner. That means that the vision is going to change according to circumstances.

Visionaries aren't very good at just pinning something to the wall and then that's it. We're going to do nothing but that forever no matter what else happens. Visionaries bring the flexibility that's necessary in a changing world to move and shift as things are required.

Now, one of the things that's really needed for that to continue to happen and keep happening is something that most Visionaries bring with them, which is a combination of courage and resilience. I put those two words together because neither one on its own says exactly what I'm trying to share with you. And as a Visionary, you'll know this. One of the things that's a huge asset that a Visionary has is when they get knocked down, they tend to get back up again.

Why? Because they're driven by the vision. They want to see this thing happen. It's hard to crush a Visionary's vision. You can try very hard, and if you've got a lot of authority and status over the Visionary, then you may well succeed.

But once you give a Visionary the delegated authority to make sure that the thing they've seen happens, whether it's rolling out a new product, whether it's serving a different congregation, whether it's solving a particularly difficult issue that you're facing, once a Visionary has seen the solution they want to implement, they bring a lot of courage and resilience in getting it implemented. Notice that I said getting it implemented rather than implementing it, and there's a big difference there, which we'll talk about in a couple of minutes. The fourth thing that Visionaries bring, which is a massive asset in any team or group or organization, is what I call simplicity with passion.

Good Visionaries. I should just take a little detour here. When we talk about Visionaries, I'm not implying for a moment that every Visionary is brilliantly good.

Being a Visionary, just as not every Operator is going to turn out to be a brilliant Operator. Not every Processor is going to be a world class Processor. Not every Synergist is going to be particularly brilliant at being a Synergist. It's just each of them, that's who they are. But truly, game changing Visionaries have the ability to take the vision that they've got, the thing that they want to see implemented and express it in a way that's simplified to the point where others just get it.

They see it. Visionaries use terminology. They use words, they use pictures, they use metaphors to encapsulate what might otherwise be a complicated solution.

It's not to say they're wishing away the complications. Those still need to be worked with, but they have a way of communicating in a simple fashion with passion what it is that needs to happen next. Massive asset or strength for any group. And finally, Visionaries bring with them a sense of dispatch, a sense of let's get this done. Visionaries are not the same as dreamers.

Dreamer is a subset of a Visionary. True Visionaries are people who want to see it done. They want this to happen, so they have a sense of dispatch, let's do it. They want to ship the product. They don't want to just sit and noodle at it.

They're not mad inventors. Mad inventors, again, it's a subset of Visionaries. True Visionary leaders have an urgency that says, ah, I've seen it. Let's get it done.

The Visionaries Challenges

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, well, 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, we 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 an around this in our previous lessons, is 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 are 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 in to 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 is 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 camp, 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. And 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 like 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, whenever 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 prioritization 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 on 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 one on top 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 mountain top. 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 is 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've got to go all the way down the side of the mountain over or under the valley and back up to the other mountain top, 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.

The Visionary's Nemesis Style

Let's move to the final part of our first module, and let's talk about the Visionary's nemesis Style. Let me share a little bit about what I mean by that. To do that, let's start by just thinking about the four leadership Styles. So throughout the Visionary, Operator, Processor, the Synergist. Let's look at the possible combinations here and how they work together.

First of all, let's start with the Visionary and the Operator. As we've already hinted, Operators are in essence the finishers. They're the sort of other side of the coin to the Visionary. Visionary loves and wants and does start things. The Operator finishes them.

Visionary thinks, the Operator does. Now, that was gross generalization, but in essence that's true. And so Visionaries and Operators actually work together incredibly well. They're probably the tightest combo of all of the possible combos of these four Styles, and they're united by a sense of act fast, get it done.

That's who they are. That's how they show up. What that does is it builds a strong sweat equity. There's a real team bond between Visionaries and Operators. They'll spend time together, sometimes even outside of the work context because they understand what they each bring, and together they understand how much they get things done.

If we look then at the Visionary and the Synergist, they too have a bond. It's a looser one, but it's a strong bond nonetheless. And that bond is to motivate the team to achieve great things. So the Visionary with the Operator, it's all about getting the things done. The Visionary understands the huge importance of getting the team to share the vision, and the Synergist, who's the people person in all of this, is their biggest asset.

So Visionaries and Synergists tend to form alliances, not as strong teams as they form with Operators. They tend not to hang around just so much. Now, there are exceptions. They tend not to hang around together just so much, but they will consult and work together. They have a high degree of mutual respect and they understand that they each bring something important to the overall mission of the team or group or organization that they work for.

But when we look at the Visionary and the Processor, a whole bunch of other things is going on or rather not going on. What do I mean by that? As we've already seen, Visionaries act fast. That's their default mode is just thought it, let's do it. Processors, by definition, people who put systems and processes in place.

They're there to act slowly. That's the point of them being there, is to measure twice and cut once. The Visionary just wants to cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Let's do it. Let's do it.

Let's do it. The Processor, the one that's saying, hold on a minute, let's just check this before we do it. Secondly, the Visionary, as we've already seen, embraces risk. Most Processors' core job, what they're being asked to do is to manage and almost certainly reduce risk.

That's why a Processor gets involved. That's why most Processors get hired. Keep us out of jail. Make sure that we fulfill all of our industry regulations. Make sure that we file our taxes, make sure that we stay on the right side of the law.

Make sure that we don't kill anybody with our product. That's what the Processor role is typically there to do is to reduce exposure and risk. Visionaries bring dispatch. They just want to get things done. Processors much more invested in getting it right.

I want to make sure this is right. I don't want it just to be done in any slap dash manner. It should be done correctly. As we've seen, Visionaries default to yes. Most Processors, if they're uncertain, they will default to no.

As a Processor myself, I can be a little hard to hear, but it's the truth. You come to a Processor, somebody who's in charge of a whole bunch of systems and processes, and you say, Hey, can we do this new thing? They're going to default to saying no. And what they mean is not definitely, no, no more than the Visionary means. Definitely, yes.

All the Visionary means when they first say yes is Well certainly, let's explore it. That's what they actually mean. And the Processor, when they say no, they don't mean definitely forever. No, they mean no, not yet. Until I understand the implications and as we've seen and talked about many times, our Visionaries, they talk to think.

Our Processors will think and maybe they'll talk. If there's something that they have to contribute, they'll do that. And finally, our Visionary values aspiration. They just love to see somebody who tries to make something happen, goes out and gives it a good shove while the Processor values precision.

Now, the sum total of all of this is that the Visionary and the Processor, as you can see, are catty-corner to each other. They have very, very, very little in common out of the box. Now, that can be changed, but in their raw form, Visionaries and Processors are each other's mutual nemesis.

Visionaries feel Processors hinder them every step of the way, slow everything up and prevent them just getting this stuff done, getting their vision implemented, and Processors, and I'm exaggerating for the sake of emphasis, but sometimes it's not far from the truth, just feel that Visionaries are full of hyperbole. They'll say anything and they're going to get us all thrown into jail for that reason. It's the Processor Style that the Visionary typically finds the hardest to work with and with whom they have the most conflict.

And so with that, that's a great point at which to move into our second module, where we're going to look at the toolkit a Visionary needs in order to optimize the use of those assets and strengths and minimize the impact of those challenges.