Cultivating Visionary Leadership

A visionary leadership style is a key tool in your armoury as an effective leader.

Use a visionary leadership style as part of your overall leadership style to engage, align and motivate others to drive the key outcomes you intend to create.

The importance of vision

The capability to conceptualise, design and articulate a vision for what you want to happen in the future is a fundamental skill of a leader and one of the most powerful leadership styles. Without it, you will be severely limiting your ability to inspire and motivate others to work in the direction needed to achieve your outcomes, and they are likely to regularly feel confused and frustrated. 

If you develop your visionary leadership style and use it regularly in conjunction with other leadership styles, your organisation will feel inspired by you, clear on what you want to achieve and how they should approach it, and more aligned with each other creating less friction and more progress towards your intended outcomes.

“I’m just not seeing how this will work.” Chloe asserted. As the Head of Development for Commodities Trading, she was tasked with developing a new platform for trading energy derivatives aimed at the rapidly evolving energy market. The idea was ambitious: create a new platform that could handle the hard to predict and evolving complexities of energy trades, including renewables, which were increasingly influencing market dynamics and becoming more and more where the money was in the market.

The new product was still in embryonic stages and she and Josh, the lead Product Manager working with her at Volts Bank, had already encountered significant hurdles. Their initial model was too rigid and failed to account for the volatility and unpredictability of the increasingly refined pricing for renewable energy sources like wind and solar. During this tense meeting with the product team in the sleek, glass-walled conference room with views out across the city, Josh added his concerns.

"I agree. The initial design as it stands constrains us too closely with traditional trading models, and I just can’t see it remaining viable in a few years. It will hold us back. We need to innovate, not just replicate," Josh asserted, scanning the room for reactions.

Chloe added, "Our approach needs a serious shift. The market for renewables is not only about supply and demand; it's about rapid adjustments and real-time data integration, and not just market data but also supply infrastructure and industry demand data. We will need everything in there to make the appropriate decisions."

They had started off knowing that their existing platform wasn’t suitable for growing the current business and were taking advantage of this to secure funding to move a step ahead of their competitors, but to do this they needed a more flexible and dynamic model that could adapt to the rapid changes in energy production and consumption, and they were both struggling to work out what that could look like.

Design a compelling vision

To design a compelling and clear vision, explore the purpose of what you are planning to do. Why is it important, how will it benefit people, and then what will it look like to create these benefits and outcomes? The principles for creating personal visions for your life, health and family are the same as for new products, platforms and services in business. Understanding why you want to create it gives you the energy needed to invest time in the vision, adds this energy into the vision, which will enable it to motivate you and others, and helps you prioritise what to focus on when you explore the future state.

Then delve deeper and start to design and create a real understanding of what it will look, sound and feel like. What will others say about it, how will they see it? The clearer you can be on all aspects of the future state of what you intend to create, the easier it will be to get others on board and to ultimately get there. A lot of people struggle with this because they don’t want to constrain what they do in the future by making decisions now, and they feel that defining it in a vision does this. Remember most decisions are reversible, and there is no obligation for you to stick to your initial vision, even after sharing it widely. We rarely end up with the exact vision we started creating from; we tend to end up with something similar but with significant differences made from choices or realities we have learned along the way. This won’t impact the outcome or your credibility if you continue to share your evolving vision and an understanding of why it is evolving.

Determined to break away from traditional design patterns, Josh and Chloe spent the next few days researching advanced algorithmic trading systems in other asset classes, new technology design approaches and the specific challenges of the renewable energy market.

The weather was fine and over the next fortnight they took advantage of this to run several brainstorming sessions in a local park, away from the confines of the office.  They decided to integrate machine learning to predict market trends and automate trades, which would provide their clients with a competitive edge. Chloe proposed using a number of new technologies and design approaches including blockchain for transaction transparency and microservices and event driven architecture for flexibility, maintainability and scalability.

This renewed conceptual vision energised them. They returned to the office to outline and then delve deeper into their new approach, to get it ready to bring their teams on board with a clear and innovative vision.

They pored over high level options for bringing a combination of technologies, patterns and practices together and looked at the pros and cons of this from their understanding of how the renewables energy market could evolve. They delved deep into what advantages the new platform could create for the clients and the bank, and how the systems could provide a cleaner user experience for sales, trading and ops teams, and more easily and safely upgraded and maintained that most of the current platforms running in the bank today. They chose the most suitable looking options based on the current understanding they had, but kept notes on some potential alternatives in case their assumptions proved incorrect.

By the end of that week, they had a clear shared vision of what it might look like and how it would benefit the bank and its clients. It was simple, sleek, and scalable — precisely what they had initially aimed for before drifting away in their initial design and planning approach. It was ready to share and evolve.

Co-create your vision with others

The most successful visionary leaders also allow and encourage the people around them to have a hand in designing and refining this vision so it becomes a shared vision, owned by the people involved as well as the instigators and initial visionaries. This may take slightly longer, but it will take you further. 

Visionary leadership can be very powerful and a very ‘yang’ leadership style. By enabling others to co-create, you can soften this and lose some of the ego aspect (perceived or actual), which can make your leadership even more effective. The crazy dancing guy on the hill should let the first followers introduce some new moves. 

It helps to work even in the very early stages with someone you work well with; and this can be even more powerful if you have complementary expertise, as is the case with Josh and Chloe. It then helps to involve a wider group of people with other viewpoints at a relatively early stage, and particularly those who you are going to rely on to help you achieve the vision. When involving a wider group it benefits for you to have some initial high level aspects already defined, but still with flexibility for them to contribute, adapt and enhance the vision. This balance between providing them some direction and freedom to contribute and influence depends on the nature of the vision, and the characteristics of the people and the relationships involved. Allow them to have input to and refine the macro vision, and they can also really help you in another couple of ways: 

Think big and start small: Once you have designed your future high level vision, break it down into achievable stages and milestones, making the grand vision less intimidating and more actionable.

Refine for simplicity: Your vision should be easily understood and remembered. There is likely to be a fair amount of complexity, particularly in a future-proof cutting edge trading platform, but find a simple way to describe and articulate key aspects of the vision so it can be clearly understood by others.

With their exciting new vision in hand, Josh and Chloe led a series of workshops with their developers, testers and product owners to share, discuss and refine the vision incorporating the expertise of their teams. They shared their ideas, talked through their decision making process on some of the main design aspects, and asked searching questions which their team researched and fed back their views and suggestions for alternatives and refinement.

The team’s feedback was invaluable. Developers with some experience in blockchain outlined potential efficiency and cost concerns and proposed solutions, product owners brought in a number of new insights on potential future market trends and machine learning experts sketched out algorithms that could dynamically adjust their trading strategies based on real-time market and industry data.

Through these collaborative sessions, the vision for the new platform began to take shape. The team worked long days, fueled by the excitement of creating something truly innovative and the feeling of ownership that being involved in crafting this vision gave them. 

By involving the team in the vision refinement process, they ensured that everyone was aligned and invested in the product’s success. The renewed enthusiasm was palpable, with team members eager to contribute to a product they believed in.

Share your vision for maximum impact

In order to make your vision a reality, it needs to be communicated, understood and believed in by a range of different people. You’ve already started this by refining it with a group of people, but it is likely that it needs to be communicated much further to enable you to attain it. Here are a few tips on how to do this effectively:

Paint a vivid picture: Use powerful language that creates an emotional connection. Help your stakeholders, teams and customers see and feel the future you're envisioning.

Communicate constantly: Repetition is crucial. Embed your vision into meetings, presentations, and informal conversations.

Link it to reality: Show how your vision aligns with the organisation's broader mission and provide a practical understanding around how to get there.

Be enthusiastic: Your passion is contagious. Let your excitement for the future inspire your team.

Celebrate progress: Every achievement towards your vision is a win. Acknowledge these milestones to boost motivation and reinforce belief.

While the teams worked on further refining the vision and planning how to get started building it, Josh and Chloe were working on how to present the product vision and approach to Volts Bank’s senior management and key stakeholders. The ambition of the vision would cost significantly more than the initial budget discussed for the platform, so they really had to articulate how their new platform would stand out from traditional energy trading platforms and the value it could create.

The communication of this started well before the formal presentation; Chloe and Josh split the long list of key stakeholders, likely opponents and interested parties and planned what messaging they should share with each person to increase the chances of buy-in and reduce opposition. They kept in close communication with each other as they progressed through the coffee conversations, additional agenda items and casual drop-in meetings and refined their approaches based on what they observed. 

When they came to present the vision, they were much more confident than they would have been but still very nervous; it was probably one of their most significant pitches in their careers to date. The audience was too big for the boardroom, and the auditorium was awash with executives, stakeholders and interested parties. Josh led with an overview of the evolving energy market, the unique challenges it presented, and the opportunities this could create both for attracting new clients and for increasing trading profits. Chloe then took over, articulating the complex technical vision with elegant simplicity and demonstrating how the approach would allow for flexibility and scalability, both in how the platform could be implemented and evolve and in how it could be adapted for future changes to the market and scaled with volumes.

The response was enthusiastic. The stakeholders were particularly impressed by the adaptive approach to the design roadmap which would allow them to adapt the ongoing investment based on trading performance and the potential for the platform flexibility to give traders an edge in a volatile market. Their approval was not just a nod to a next phase of prototyping but a green light for a full-scale build and launch of the first release version of the platform.

Elated by the support, Josh and Chloe felt validated in their efforts and confident they had the support behind them and people involved that they needed. They knew they had a challenging road ahead to build and roll out the product, but the organisational buy-in was an important initial success. With it, they were ready to revolutionise energy trading at Volts Bank.

Questions to explore for developing your visionary leadership style

💡 What is your current vision for yourself? Creating a personal vision is a great way to become clear on who you want to become, and to practise your vision creation skills.

💡 What do you find hard about creating, designing and communicating a vision? What would you like to get better at, and what could you work on to practise and develop this?

💡 Who are good examples of visionary leaders that inspire you with their visions? How do they do it and what methods do they use that you could experiment with?

Design, share and refine your vision until you achieve it.

A visionary leadership style is a key tool in your armoury as an effective leader. Involve in and inspire others with your vision and you’re already moving in the right direction.

This content by James Carter is licensed under CC BY 4.0