Visionary Leadership Style – Meaning, Benefits and Challenges

Visionary Leadership is defined as an operation to influence others in order to create a better future and solve problems in an innovative way. Visionary leaders are those which have the ability to see the capabilities in others have the tendency to lead them. This type of leadership style creates a positive momentum and endurance in an organization. However, the visionary leadership style is most effective when an organization needs a new and clear direction to follow. Employees or people who performed under visionary leaders always enjoy working with them and truly want themselves to reach their full potential and find meaning in their work. Visionary leaders are somewhere different from other leaders as they always inspire, encourage, empower and equip their team members for a better outcome. Therefore, if businesses is looking for moving to a next high level and takes on new initiatives or re-evaluate their vision, then a visionary leader is likely the perfect person an organization should consider to be working with.

Benefits of Visionary Leadership Style

There are various benefits of visionary leadership style like visionary people could see the big picture and take ultimate responsibility i.e. as a visionary leader, by looking at the big picture you will be able to link various events with one another and take proactive actions before the problems shoots up which means you are always ahead and could see your final destination clearly. Moreover, these types of people are intelligent risk takers as moving towards achieving a new goal there is no guarantee that strategies will work, but visionaries are comfortable with the uncertainty and take as many measures possible to ensure the plan is successful. Another benefit of being visionary is their ability to focus on the worthy. When you focus your energy on what matters, you do not get distracted by extraneous forces. As a result, you always have your vision and ultimate goal in mind and you remind it to others as well no matter how difficult the situation becomes. However, this type of approach is best and successful with team members who have clarity on their goals about why they are doing, what they are doing and when they need a morale boost and celebrating their success on breaking down large goals via achievable minute steps and routines. Thus, such practices works best when employees are considered first and are invited to provide their ideas and work together with leaders to create improvements. In turn, this will make employees feel as if they are not only working to accomplish someone else’s goal, but they will begin to self-identify with it. Finally, their expertise in organizing and their skilled communications in a process which put together departments and operations that help them reach the new vision.

Challenges of Visionary Leadership Style

There are several challenges of visionary leadership style. Unlike others, visionary leaders also face the heat of its nature and commit mistakes. The primary factor which affects them is their single track mind i.e. there is a probability that visionary leaders could be too concerned with the vision to pay attention to necessary details. They keep on focusing on the future and lags in the present taking into account on situations that require their attention in the present. Sometimes such leadership failed and does not work as a visionary leader becomes so attached to a vision that they could risk missing out on future ideas which might also benefit the company. They might be unwilling to consider a change in the plan or abandoning the vision altogether if they have to seek another alternative leaving the team and an organization behind in a lurch with unexpected outcomes.  Another prime factor of this technique failure and its limitation is misaligned strategy, not having enough funding and lack of confidence. During startups, some visionaries fall short of funding to support the execution and thus misaligned the strategies of business and find themselves seemingly moving in hassle and teams experience the frustration of a lot of activity with no results and losing the confidence in the end. Finally, the most crucial factor is lack of coordination in teams and organization. There are instances when heads were not honest with each other which results in poor execution of projects or hanging the plans in between.