VISIONARY LEADERSHIP

Visionary Leadership

Introduction

Leadership is about leading the organizations and organizational teams to go somewhere. If the leaders and its people don’t know where to go, then leadership means nothing. So it is important for leaders to have a clear vision. If we try to put the light on word vision, it may have different pictures and angels. 

According to Bennis and Nanus “vision is a mental image of a possible and desirable future of the organization” (Bennis & Nanus, 1985, in Lyerly, Maxey 2000, P 48) This mental image grows inside the mind of leaders and depends on the  competency to perceive the things accurately and use them intelligently for the betterment and sustainability of an organization. Bennis also describes that there are some practically proven leadership competencies that can affect the performance of an organization, which also includes “vision and goal setting”, “interpersonal skills and self  knowledge” along with some special characteristics which may be concerned with any specific businesses. 

Kotter states that the vision is the ability of a leader to look in to future while aligning the team with that vision, and then make them inspire to get the desired goals concerning that future: 

“Vision is a picture of the future with some implicit or explicit commentary on why people should strive to create that future” (Kotter, 1996, p 68)

 

 

  Source:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSypb559FA

Organizations are based on teams, and dedicated team work is required to make things happen. These people and teams need a clear picture of a future that motivate and inspire them to become an efficient part of an effort for getting that desired future. It is also important in the way that what the reason of their work and decisions is? It is the vision of a leader that makes it assure that actions and the decisions of organizational team are fit into the actual picture of desired future (Kotter, 1996) Kotter also discuss that without the vision of leaders the motivation level of organization people may go down and their activities become meaningless which can prove worst for an organizations at the later end. He further said that 

“Vision plays a key role in producing useful change by helping to direct, align and inspire actions on the part of large numbers of people. Without an appropriate vision, a transformation effort can easily dissolve into a list of confusing, incompatible and time consuming projects that go in the wrong direction or nowhere at all” (Kotter 1996, p7)

Though Bennis and Kotter, try to highlight the term “Vision” with different angles and describe it in different ways, but it can be easily understood from their claims, that vision is a ability of a leader to predict and perceive future, in a precise and accurate way along with defining the route map that how to get into this future successfully. 

Conclusion

While summarizing the leaders vision, a question can arise into minds “it there any leader without vision” the answer is no. Like every human being every leader must has some vision, but vision of two leaders could be different even while managing the same organization or same matter, because the vision is a perception of unseen things. Two leaders may perceive differently. Moreover as we can’t say that this leader is innovative or this is not, before we can see his action, decisions, steps taken and their results, for a certain matter. Likewise we can’t say that this leader is visionary or this is not before seeing the results of his perceptions. 

References

Attributes of Visionary Leaders available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwSypb559FA

Bennis, W. & Nanus, B. (1985), Leaders: the strategies for taking charge. New York: Haper and Row, Vol 24, No 4, pp 503-508

Kotter, J. (1990) A force for change, How Leadership differs from management, New York: Free Press, pp 1-177

Kotter, J (1995), Leading change: why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, Vol, 73, No 2, pp, 59-68

Lyerly.B, Maxey.C (2000), Training from Heart, American Society of Training and Development, USA 2000