Vision-driven leadership is essential because it helps us create goals and make plans. Vision is necessary to create motivation and inspire. It helps you choose partners and employees by sharing that vision so that they too will share that vision.
Leaders need to keep the end result in mind. Vision-driven leadership needs to be strong enough to carry them through to the end. A shared vision can hold a company together and provide an understanding of hard decisions during difficult times, like now with COVID.
1) Vision Helps Overcome Stumbling Blocks Along the Way
First, with a clear vision, minor setbacks and obstacles won’t appear as large. The motive to overcome is a natural and logical result of a clear shared vision. Vision helps leaders persevere. A good leader when sharing her vision must build the expectation of failure along the way in order to succeed.
2) Vision-Driven Leadership Provides Focus
Second, life is full of distractions. Vision provides a point of focus. Having a clear shared vision permits an organization to prioritize, as an entity and as individuals in that organization. If everyone has a clear picture of the long-term goals, they focus better on the short-term goals set before them. If you believe that you or your company are losing focus, review your vision, and see if you missed something along the way.
3) Vision Provides Meaning and Purpose
Of course, good leaders share their visions. A shared vision is essential to the proper function and survival of a company. Microsoft, for security purposes, does not let their coders know exactly what the whole of the project is about. The US government used the same strategy in developing the Atomic Bomb during WWII. (However, everyone knew they were doing really important work for the war effort.) But most experts believe that without a shared vision, work may feel meaningless and purposeless. If your vision is shared, then motivation and purpose are also shared.
“A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.” ~ Ralph Lauren
4) Vision-Driven Leadership Inspires and Motivates
So, you may have heard the saying, that where there is no vision, people perish. A vision shared equates to shared inspiration. Great leaders have the unique ability to share their vision and inspire others to accomplish both short-term and long terms goals. The vision motivates unified action and, at times, the often required sacrifice of individuals for the team to succeed. A good leader builds a team where individuals do not want to let down their teammates.
5) Leaders That Seek a Shared Vision Must Share Rewards
Finally, it is pure arrogance to believe that your vision, or any other vision, will continue to inspire team members day by day without recognition and rewards for meeting goals and milestones. Without such positive feedback when appropriate, team members are likely to lose interest over time. Rewards and recognition can single out individual achievements and may also be for the entire team. Such positive feedback, should at all times, seek to build positive relationships among team members.
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