Nobody Believes You: Why Having a Vision is Important S5 EP8

In the eighth episode of Season 5, Jenni explores the concept of being visionary as one of the eight practices essential for credible leadership. She provides a definition of visionary and emphasises the importance of clear communication, passion, and the ability to inspire action.

Jenni also outlines three key steps to build this practice: inspiring others through courage and vulnerability, adapting communication to different environments, and maintaining consistency in storytelling. Tune in to the full episode to learn how to create purpose and drive through effective visionary leadership!

Episode Timestamps:

People will follow leaders that are able to paint a picture of the future, that are able to talk about their vision, and it’s that vision that will inspire those around them. It’s not about being a visionary leader, that’s different. You have to be able to articulate where you want people to go with you, because through your passion for where you want to go, there will be clarity around communication and people will gravitate to be part of that and they will be inspired by what you’re trying to achieve. – Jenni Field

Key Takeaways From This Episode:

Thank you for listening! 

Keep the conversation going, ask questions and share your thinking by joining the Redefining Communications community, and connecting with Jenni on LinkedIn, Instagram and X(Twitter).

Important Links & Mentions: 

Transcript for this podcast

Welcome to this episode of redefining comms with me jenny field. Today, I’m going to be talking about the practice that’s called visionary as part of the eight practices of what it takes to be a credible leader now in this episode I’ll share with you the definition I use for visionary the chaos that happens when you don’t have it and we’ll also go into three things that you can do to build this practice as well.

What does it mean to be visionary?

What do I mean when I talk about that as a practice of credibility? Now, I’ll often talk about the fact that you cannot lead if you cannot communicate well, and this is a big part of visionary. Is not about being a visionary leader like someone like Steve Jobs, who’s very well known for having a very strong vision, and people. Following that, but being visionary with that, he was incredibly future thinking. You know, thinking in ways that other people hadn’t thought about. 

That real visionary piece, that’s not really what we’re talking about here. This is more about the communication aspects, the clarity around where you’re going, and also that passion for what you’re doing. So people will follow leaders that are able to paint a picture of the future, that are able to talk about their vision. And it’s that vision that will inspire those around them. 

So it’s not about being a visionary leader; that’s different. But you have to be able to articulate where you want people to go with you because through your passion for where you want to go there will be a clarity around communication, and people will gravitate to be part of that. And they will be inspired by what you’re trying to achieve because they’ll understand where you’re going, the communication is clear that passion is felt and everybody’s kind of moving along behind that leader that’s able to articulate that vision. 

For leaders, communication has to have purpose. There has to be an element of influencing people to take action and inspiring them to do something, and this is what sits under the visionary practice. 

What’s the chaos that happens if you’re not visionary, if you’re not able to demonstrate and articulate that?

Now, when I’m working with teams to improve communication inside organisations, I’m often asking questions around where are you going as an organisation. And I’ll sometimes find myself asking, you know, to what end? What is the outcome that we’re looking for from this? What’s the impact that’s going to happen? 

Now, for some teams and organisations it’s really easy to answer. For others it’s really quite challenging, and we don’t spend much time looking at this depth around some of our activity because we can get stuck in a bit of a wheel of being very busy. 

But i recently found myself in a conversation with some directors and the communication function and we were talking about the fact that the organisation is strategically weak. Now, that’s not a sentence I say lightly but it was becoming increasingly clear that the visionary aspects from this leadership team were not there so the only way to articulate that for the team is to say that this is strategically weak. 

I said to them I can see the strategic pillars I think they had five different pillars but I don’t really know what they’re aiming for what they are designed to do what they’re enabling what they’re trying to achieve i also can’t see what activities sit within those pillars and I also can’t see any sense of ownership or accountability for them at a sort of senior leadership level. 

And as I said to them, you need to know where you’re going if you want people to follow you. And if you don’t know where that is, I don’t know how you can expect people to carry out tasks with any sense of urgency, purpose or meaning, because they just don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing or what it’s for. And at the end of this meeting, in this conversation, the directors that were involved did take an action to go back to the broader leadership team to discuss the points that we raised, because the impact of that gap was really making communication inside the organisation very difficult. Because when a vision is missing, when the anchor is missing, as I call it people are just swaying in the wind without purpose, guidance, or aim, you know. 

We’re not inspired to do the work or to think differently or to overcome challenges. We don’t have, you know, a passion or care. We’re not seeing that from the top, and we want that from the top because that would engender the same level of passion and care from people in the team, you know. People aren’t really talking about why they’re doing what they’re doing. The employees don’t know, and because nobody can really articulate why we’re doing things, it makes it very hard for people to really do anything. 

And that’s why when you don’t have any kind of sort of visionary, and that chaos that happens is simply apathy. People just don’t know why they’re doing something, so as a result they lack any enthusiasm or interest in the work, and the last place we want to be is apathy but if we don’t know where we’re going we cannot expect people to follow us

How do we build it? How do we build this sort of visionary practice as a credible leader?

Three things that I often talk about: 

1. Inspiring others to take action in the right direction.

Now, this is all about courage and vulnerability being that powerful combination for inspiring others. You have to be bold and honest about what you’re trying to do, and if you fail you fail openly. But you’re inspiring people to take action that’s striving for bigger goals with your team, making it manageable for them to achieve but that they can see that future goal. They can see what we’re aiming for, and they’re inspired by your action, by your communication, and how you’re explaining what needs to happen. You have to communicate to create movement, so that inspiring others to take action all comes down to your storytelling, your connection, your relationships.

2. Adapting to your environment. 

So, if you feel that you might not have this sort of visionary piece in your practice. It might be that it’s to do with the environment that you’re in and it might be harder to communicate in different situations. Sometimes you might need to speak in front of a lot of people and share your vision and other times you’ll need a different approach that’s more suited to a small team meeting. 

What’s important is that you’re adapting your style to those different situations and really to the outcome that you want and need. This is where your communication and the clarity of that communication is really important. You can’t communicate in the same way in every different situation and certainly when it comes to talking about the vision where we’re going the way we articulate that our behaviours how we talk about it is really important.

3. Don’t get bored of the story. 

Now, well, I think we can all be guilty of this when we’re trying to get messages across and we fill up. We’ve said it so many times, but people don’t hear us. I hear this a lot from leaders: you know, we’ve said this so many different ways, we’ve said it so many different times, but you have to stay consistent and repetitive. 

You can use different stories to bring messages to life, but that consistency and that repetition is really important because people won’t hear it as much as you, and they certainly won’t hear it amongst the noise of the day job. So it’s really important to not get bored of the story, to not want to change it too quickly, and to just stay the course, stay consistent, and keep bringing that story to life through different connections and different storytelling ways.

Thank you for listening!

Now, if you want to find out more about the research that we did to get to these eight practices or you might want to take our online credibility gap assessment or you might want to find out a bit more about the book you can access all of that information in the link in the show notes. 

Now in the next episode i’ll be looking at the practice of vulnerability what it means to be vulnerable and why that’s an important part of credibility and of course we’ll cover off how to build it as well.

Thank you for listening and if you haven’t already please do join my community by subscribing to my mailing list all of the details are in the show notes.