Visionary Leader

     Sashkin & Sashkin (2003) establish three contexts of visionary leader as: visionary leadership behavior; visionary leadership characteristics; and visionary culture building. Visionary leadership behaviors are described as: intelligence, persistence, patience, confidence, analysis, friendliness, energizer, sincerity, independence, creativity, honesty, and forcefulness. Visionary leadership characteristics consist of listening well, supporting, risks taking, communicating, mentoring, giving other credits, sharing feelings, consistently acting, giving feedback, coaching, explaining, and delegating. Visionary culture building comprise of involving the team, grabbing attention, committing to aims, having a vision, looking for info, understanding the system, having astute politic, viewing broader, and understanding environment.

     Throughout our life, we surely hope to work with someone who would be considered as a visionary leader and with special personalities; who would be able to move people and organization to success. According to the author, by the character, wisdom, and vision, the particular leader should be able to lead others to find their own inner greatness. This remarkable leader should be someone with unique personalities who could inspire us to live according to our own highest ideals. The leader should have a clear vision of the future state of the organization. The vision should be simple, understandable, beneficial, and energy creating. It should be an image of an attractive, realistic, and believable future. With the clear vision, it would be easier for the people within the organization to learn how to fit in with the overall direction of the organization. A leader is a social architect for the organization. A leader should be able to create a shape or form for the shared meaning people maintained within the organization. A leader should communicate a direction that would transform the organization’s values and norms. A leader should be able to create trust in the organization by articulating a direction and then consistently implementing the direction. A leader should give the organization a sense of integrity analogous to a healthy identity. A leader should use creative deployment of self through positive self-regard, and emphasize on strengths rather than dwelling on the weaknesses.
     A leader should model the way, able to inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. A leader should practice exemplary leadership, and always opens to new ideas, opportunities, and approaches. A leader should be a positive person, and not afraid to take risks. A leader’s optimistic approach has had a significant influence on the organization’s achievements and its organizational climate. The success of the organization should be resulted in many changes that have affected the leadership at the organization. A leader should always inspire employees to accomplish great things. A leader should be a change agent who is a good role model, who can create and articulate a clear vision for an organization, able to empower employees to meet higher standard, who acted in ways that make others want to trust the leadership, and who gave meaning to organizational life. A leader should be able to treat clients with respect, provided information when needed, and assured of immediate follow-up on the performance of the service. A leader should be able to teach subordinates to work longer hours without complaint, trust colleagues more, and have higher performance ratings by developing team royalty around ideas and shared values. A leader should encourage us to improve the knowledge and skills and build a higher-performing team. In order to make vision happen, a leader should be able to place the welfare of others first, and serve those others. A leader’s persistence and the determination to enlist others would be able to cause the vision to happen. Hopefully we would be able to have this leader……


                          References

Nanus, B. (1992). Visionary Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Sashkin, M., & Sashkin, M.G. (2003). Leadership that matters. San Francisco: Berrett-Koecher Publishers.