The Burden of Visionary Leadership

I should have been inspired. I had been informed; and I definitely felt impressed. But to my dismay, instead of coming away enthused, I was weary, worried, and weighed down with expectations I knew I could never fulfill.

I had traveled halfway across the country to attend the “In Visioning Leadership Conference.” The event had been simulcast from a 20,000-seat arena to hundreds of venues across the nation. But I had wanted to be there in person, for I needed clarity as a young, newly appointed senior leader, and what better way to muster vision than to sit and swoon in the wisdom of a dozen of the world’s most acclaimed purveyors of “get-it-done” productivity?

But as I shuffled through the throng and out to my rental car, my arms loaded with cure-all management texts and a notebook scrawled with axioms and references to cutting-edge research, I found my hopes evaporating into a familiar cloud of confusion. I still did not know how to lead as an “In Visioning Leader” or even how to innovate a picture of the future enticing enough to motivate those I was supposed to direct into actual action.

The Challenge of Vision in Leadership

Being visionary is all the rage in leadership circles. Most books on management position this quality as the linchpin of success: the leader must create an attractive portrayal of the future. James Kouzes and Barry Posner relay this in their pace-setting book The Leadership Challenge: the leader must “inspire a shared vision.” The ancient Hebrew book of Proverbs concurs: “Without a vision, the people perish.” All true! The question is never “if” vision is vital; the question is “how” can a leader come up with one?

The Crisis of Creativity: A Personal Story

Sourcing the vision is the puzzle. The pressure on leaders to “come up” with vision is often built on the assumption that the leader herself is that source. I believed this, and that terrifying expectation drove me to this conference. Yet when I looked within, I found no indigenous capacity to be genuinely creative. That was my crisis, and why I limped home deflated, close to the brink of despair. I had to “come up with” vision. I had to create, and to be creative, ex nihilo – the Latin phrase for “out of nothing.” I believed that the vision had to be novel and that it had to be mine. This presumption, instead of being the source of vision and ultimate success, was my source of ultimate failure. And yes, that’s the punch line of the anecdote: I returned from that conference and promptly crashed and burned from this, my first leadership assignment.

The disillusionment on the other side of failure, however, opened up a new vista for me, one from which I have discovered (not forged) an ancient philosophy of human influence that has become the conviction and practice that drives my work as a practitioner and advisor of leadership. Put squarely, I dissed the illusion that vision is created and embraced the reality that it must be discovered. Leaders, I contend, are not the owners of vision but stewards and caretakers of something older and wider than they themselves, something temporarily entrusted to be tended faithfully, then graciously passed along to another generation.

The Influence of Existentialism in Leadership

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre carries no small blame for the problem we’re addressing. Sartre is famous for flipping the world upside down with his contra axiom, “existence precedes essence.” Prior to Sartre (and his philosophic post-Enlightenment ancestors), the world’s great traditions of faith and reason had been grounded in the simple premise, “essence precedes existence.” The world “out there” is actual and real, and we can perceive it as such. All we think about the world, and all the ways we act upon it and within it, also assume that Whatever, or Whoever, caused the world into existence is actually there as well. In other words, there is such a thing as essence! But Sartre flipped this off and flipped the world off in turn. He denied anything before, above, and beyond his own existence, and took up his sole right and responsibility to choose his own reality and, so, to invent his own essence. He called this “vision” existentialism, and his revolution took the world by storm, making a storm of the world in the process. We’re living in the wake, and leading in the debris of Sartre’s audacious, Luciferian philosophy. The leader is free and utterly responsible. And that is our curse.

The Weight of Leadership: Everything Rises with the Leader?

But note carefully the assumption here. The essence of a leadership vision does not exist until it is invented within the leader. Bringing it into existence is the leader’s assignment. He/She precedes that vision, creating from nothing but within themselves what is being led and how those following must follow. The line “everything rises and falls with leadership” is mutated into “everything rises and falls with the leader.” But who can bear such a burden? Who can dare presume such a task? Leadership in this mode is impossible and disillusioning, an illusion I contend that must be “dissed.”

A Different Approach: Servant Leadership in Action

Mark Deterding is one of the most effective and joyful leaders I have ever met. Over the course of his impressive career, Mark has served as an executive in several of the most dominant companies in the printing industry. Today, in his “retirement,” Mark runs Triune Leadership Services, a consulting firm that advocates and teaches servant leadership principles, which stand in stark contrast to the leader-centric philosophy and practice we’ve been challenging above. Mark promotes servant leadership because he has lived it, and sees it as the one genuine, sustainable, and fruit-producing model of ethical influence—a model based on a simple virtue: humility.

“I’m the least creative person in the world,” Mark boasts. And for him, this is his boast. “I don’t come up with anything; I water the seeds already present!” Watching Mark lead and consult, this is precisely true. His approach is the opposite of novelty. Mark’s modus operandi is to identify and elevate others, and with them the vision they have discovered and are aiming to serve.

When Mark took over the helm of one of the largest printing companies in the world, he saw his first task as “articulating the mission, vision, and values” of that enterprise. But Mark didn’t claim the right to write this essence statement from scratch, out of his own conviction. He saw his role as discovering, then articulating, the indigenous mission, vision, and values. He went on a quest, watching his team work, listening to them communicate, foraging through the best of the company’s history, and sorting back through the stories of the challenges they had overcome. Mark began from an assumption of honor, recognizing that he had inherited something prior, and accepting that his role was to find that pre-existing essence, hone it, and call it back to life. His purpose was to reconcile those he led and what he led to the destiny that existed before he even arrived. This, Mark claims, is genuine servant leadership—serving not merely the individual people who make an enterprise work, but the inherent purpose behind the enterprise itself.

Today Mark works with organizations in every sector, helping their leaders “serve” the vision inherent in their entity. In this, Mark relieves leaders from the unfathomable burden of inventing vision, setting them free in the joy that all they need do is serve those they find before them, and what they find before them.

“I’m the least creative person in the world,” Mark reaffirms again and again. Leaders attempting to be creative, Mark believes, inevitably make a load of trouble for themselves and others. Their trajectory should be simply serving, which is a marvelous twist against the prevailing winds of impossible expectation on today’s leader.

The Danger of Reinventing Legacy

We’ve seen the folly of new leaders’ creative presumption play out again and again in our work in family business succession. Far too often, emerging generation leaders take up the reins with a burden built on an assumed right—a mandate to “re-invent” the family enterprise. Seeing the need to modernize technology, professionalize HR and finance systems, and synchronize the production and distribution in the operation, new leaders often presume that innovation must mean re-invention. These ground-up experiments almost always lead to tragic failure. I watched one young, zealous, and gifted leader—not one of our clients—inherit a well-tuned yet aging operation. Instead of beginning in honor, by identifying, discovering, and preserving the legacy values—and from there instituting necessary renovation, this poor chap assumed the right and the burden of “creating new vision,” fueled by an assumed ownership and a belief that this granted him the prerogative to start a revolution, which is exactly what he attempted. A year later, frustrated, burned out, bitter, and confused, he ran up the white flag and simply walked away, leaving the predictable debris in his wake.

Discovering Vision: A Saner Approach to Leadership

Yes, vision is vital for leadership. But instead of creating vision from scratch, what if we assume Deterding’s approach, and discover, honor, hone, and then re-frame existing visions long ago originated without us? This is the best and sanest course, even for a startup enterprise, and when the leader is founder and launching something utterly new. Because in fact, as Ecclesiastes cautions us, “there is nothing (entirely) new under the sun.”

Again, on the first page of the Bible (Genesis 1), we find two distinct words used for the process God leverages to bring new things into being. The word bara means “to create from nothing,” and indeed, some of God’s creative work is cast ex nihilo, “from scratch,” so to speak. But the word asah, which means “to make from what is created prior,” is used for other works from the hand of God. These things (and it is most of the world) are formed from what already is. Asah in fact describes all our human efforts. We never purely create; we form from what already exists into new expressions.

This is the charge of leadership. The weight of creating vision is not ours. We discover what is created on purpose and prior to our entrance onto the scene. We find this, then go to work honing and molding, making it into what it was intended to be all along. We are not the Source. But we journey to the Source and work from there, downstream to all the expressions and consequences of something not our own.

Conclusion: The Freedom in Discovering Vision

In later postings, we’ll expand on this theme, exploring how we actually discover and hone visions that live beyond and before us, that stay on behind once we ourselves have moved beyond. For now, it’s enough to know that we are freed from the burden of “coming up with" a vision. Instead, “we come up to” vision, to discover what is other and bigger than we are ourselves.

The true beauty and strength of leadership lie in this discovery process: uncovering the deeper purpose, the inherent vision that has been entrusted to us, and stewarding it well for those we lead and for future generations. This approach transforms leadership from a burdensome exercise of creating something out of nothing into an invitation to serve something far greater than ourselves.

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