Many of the organizations we work with are founded by visionary leaders—people who can identify important customer problems and have the creative spark to deliver a successful solution to those problems.

Visionaries can communicate their great ideas and get people excited about them. While demonstrating exceptional resilience and adaptability as market needs change, new ideas seem to magically strike! It is exciting to work for a visionary as they can bring out the best in those around them by encouraging creativity and abstract thinking. And they have a knack for inspiring others to action.

But, at some point, these unique and special abilities can start holding companies back and, even, push loyal employees away. An excellent example of a visionary leader, or perhaps a caricature, is Elon Musk. As one of his former employees said about Tesla, "it was incredible," and "I’d never work there again."[i] 

I am not going to speculate as to what it’s like to work for Mr. Musk. I can share, however, what I have heard from clients are the downsides from those who work for visionaries. Scope creep and turn-on-a-dime redirection, as the leader hops from idea to idea, is a common theme. They also talk about how visionaries get bored with the details and ignore the steps it takes to bring their ideas to fruition. Some around them start to feel defeated and exhausted.

Working with a visionary doesn't have to be a Jekyll and Hyde experience. If you’re someone who craves routine and order, and the constant barrage of ideas gives you a headache, you can still have a fantastic experience with a few simple tricks.

How to Work with a Visionary

1.     Share their passion, enthusiasm, and drive
First and foremost, you have to want to be on this wild ride. The energy pushed out by your visionary leader will either drain you or invigorate you. For it to do the latter, you have to believe in the vision and be committed to delivering on it by providing the structure that is missing, which brings me to tips two and three.

2.     Get clear on the criteria for moving forward
As discussed earlier, visionaries are the idea people, or more pointedly, they are often the LOTS of ideas people. While each one of their ideas could be a breakthrough innovation, rapidly moving from one idea to the next is not always practical or profitable. It’s important to have clear criteria on when to move forward with an idea and when to ignore it. To do so, you need to define how to prioritize the work, and then stick to it!

At Vecteris, we use a simple prioritization tool with clients that measures new product ideas in four areas:

• Volume: how many customers can we gain/retain with this new idea?
• Price: what kind of price point or price improvement can we expect?
• Confidence: How confident are we that we can get this done and to market successfully?
•  Effort: How much energy or resources will this take to be successful?

With a simple calculation, we prioritize the ideas and have buy-in on what is most important. And we don't waver from the results. We trust the process to keep us focused on what's best for our business, so we don't get side-tracked, bogged down, or de-energized.

3. Give actionable plans with specific steps, job responsibilities, and deliverables

People with big vision often see the goal, but the steps to get there are glazed over. They can get bored with or lost in the process. The end goal won't matter, though, if no one takes the project to completion.
Our leadership team has built an action planning process upon which we can all rely. [ii] During our weekly executive team meeting we:

• review our quarterly "rocks"—the mini-goals that allow us to achieve our annual priorities; and,
• check-in on weekly to-dos (our goal is 80 to 90% of our to-dos completed each week).

We do this quickly, using the standard green, yellow, red designation. Any problems get moved to the “issue solving” section of our agenda so we can brainstorm and decide upon a solution. 

Throughout the week, our CEO and any other team members add new ideas, suggestions, or problems to our weekly executive team meeting agenda. At that meeting, we take the time to discuss, prioritize, and plan as needed. 

This approach has brought about a couple of great results: first, our broader team doesn't get distracted by un-vetted ideas or frustrated by continually changing plans. Second, the executive team has the accountability needed to make sure we get the most important projects done without distraction.
Last but, definitely, not least is not so much a trick or strategy as it's a reminder: 

4.     Be comfortable being honest

In any healthy relationship, be it personal or professional, honesty is vital. Your organization should have a culture of psychological safety so that you feel comfortable being honest, saying no, and questioning an idea without confrontation. According to Amy Edmondson, Harvard Business School researcher and award-winning author, psychological safety “is the belief that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.”[iii]

We’ve worked hard as an executive team to build this safety with each other and with our team. We know each other, and each of our team members well. Some relationships started before Vecteris, but many did not. But we've purposefully built trust that is rooted in understanding.

Without this strength of relationship and psychological safety, we'd become, or we'd surround ourselves with, ‘yes, men' and ‘yes, women' who wouldn't be capable of helping us reach our goals.

Working with a visionary can either be the most rewarding or most damaging experience (or both, as that Tesla employee found). If you are working for one now, try these tips to make the most of the experience.
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If you would like a copy of our prioritization tool and/or the executive meeting agenda we to keep us on track just send me an email at nicole.merrill@vecteris.com. Happy to share!

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[i] https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2018/0423/956476-the-utter-hell-of-working-for-a-visionary/
[ii] https://www.eosworldwide.com
[iii] https://www.strategy-business.com/article/How-Fearless-Organizations-Succeed?gko=63131

When my partners and I launched Vecteris a year ago, our primary purpose was to create a place where we love to work. We wanted to create an environment that inspires innovation, fosters collaboration, and welcomes diverse working styles and talents. 

To build the culture we want, we’ve spent a lot of time this first year defining our core values and making a commitment to live them. 

Five recurring themes emerged: fearless, generous, creative, committed and inclusive. The most important value for us to embrace this first year has been fearless.

Why Fearless?

​Our mission is to help organizations successfully innovate.  And, to successfully innovate, the leaders that we work with have to overcome their own fears of failure and change.

Also, each of the co-founders overcame fear to start Vecteris. Personally, I left a rewarding job and a secure paycheck that provided stability for my family. I had to learn new skills associated with the day-to-day operations of running a consulting business, stretching me out of my comfort zone. I started tapping my network to land our first few clients, which could have put those relationships, and my professional reputation, at risk if we failed. The list of fears I have faced this past year is very, very long.  

The problem is that fear is a natural, fundamental human emotion. It is easy to say "face your fears." The hard part is learning the behaviors that help us face, and move through, our fears.

Yet, here we are, celebrating a year of facing fears:

Fearless Behaviors

Through my client work, my research and my personal experience, I’ve learned that the behaviors that help us successfully face our fears are different than what one might typically think. 

When you picture a leader who is “fearless” what do you envision?  Perhaps someone decisive, with a clear plan, hard-charging, competitive, risk-taking?
 
Maybe.

What I’ve observed, and personally experienced, is that we are better able to overcome our natural fears about the unknown when we do these four things:

1. Listen, especially to our intuition
2. Ask for help
3. Let go of perfectionism
4. Practice gratitude

Listen, Especially to Our Intuition

The most fearless clients I’ve worked with are fantastic listeners.  Not only do they listen to their customers and employees, they listen to their inner voice. Often times referred to as “gut instinct” or “founder’s intuition”, these leaders have an inner voice encouraging them to take the unknown path and these leaders are following that inner voice, not ignoring it. 

I’ve had a regular yoga practice for ten years and a regular meditation practice for two years. Both have helped me tap into my inner voice by quieting the chatter of my mind. Hearing, and following, my inner voice has helped me clarify my purpose, see opportunity, and ease my fears about venturing into the unknown. I firmly believe that without my practice of yoga and meditation, I never would have launched Vecteris because my fears would have been louder than the inner voice telling me to follow this path.

And the research supports this. Tibetan monks, who have mastered meditation, were found by neuroscientists to have abnormally high levels of gamma brainwaves, which are associated with our ability to synthesize disparate bits of data, solve problems, heighten perception, and boost consciousness.[i]The study found that meditation can actually rewire the brain to make better connections and generate ideas.

Other research confirms that some kind of meditative practice, such as yoga, prayer, running, even taking a nice long bath, aids the brain’s process of idea incubation which means these breaks are a key ingredient to productivity and creativity.[ii]

Ask for Help

I’ve found that fear is best overcome when we ask for help. I’ve observed that my clients who are best able to guide their organizations through fear of the unknown will often state an intention to innovate without also communicating a concrete plan to achieve their vision.  Instead, they ask others to help them figure out how to make the impossible possible. 

I recently had a conversation with one of my CEO clients about how best to help the senior leadership team embrace a new product innovation idea.  This CEO was frustrated that the team seemed resistant to the changes the innovation would require and was wondering how to proceed.  We discussed two options:

• asking the team to develop a business plan for the new product and risk ‘watering down’ the idea; or,
• delivering a concrete plan to them and asking them to implement.

The CEO chose the first approach – having the team own the plan – and, although it took longer, it ultimately ended in a more ambitious (and successful) product.

My personal leadership journey is similar to this CEO’s. For me, asking for help meant giving up the idea that I needed to have all of the answers.  As a classic ‘smarty-pants’ overachiever this has not been easy.

I’ve had to resist the urge to leap in with all of my ideas at every opportunity. I had to go back to listening (see above!) and opening my mind to others’ ideas. I’ve also had to get much more comfortable leaning into debate or discomfort and staying there. Gary Pisano wrote a great article for HBR that covers this topic. In it, he explains why healthy collaboration and comfort in debate is essential to innovation. “If people are afraid to criticize, openly challenge superiors’ views, debate the ideas of others, and raise counter-perspectives, innovation can be crushed.”[iii]

Let Go of Perfectionism

It is easier to face our fears of failure when we accept that what we do does not have to be perfect. 

Getting comfortable with ‘good enough’ has been a game changer for some of my clients who are trying to innovate. Brené Brown nailed it in her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, when she said,

“Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving to be your best. Perfectionism is the belief that if we live perfect, look perfect, and act perfect, we can minimize or avoid the pain of blame, judgement, and shame.It’s a shield. It’s a twenty-ton shield that we lug around thinking it will protect us when, in fact, i t’s the thing that’s really preventing us from flight.”[iv]

For me, this has meant launching our website, publishing blogs, and even delivering work to clients without endless rounds of editing and agonizing over typos or imperfect graphics.  I certainly do not want to deliver a crappy product (and we do have a few editing rounds!) but I try to model for my clients and my team that, especially when we are talking about digital innovation, we need to rapidly iterate, rather than taking months of research and development to perfect.  Again, as a classic type-A, this has been a hard lesson for me to internalize.

Practice Gratitude

I consciously started a regular habit of writing thank you cards and keeping a gratitude journal in 2017, around the same time I started meditating. Both the thank you notes and the journal have helped to shift my mindset to one where I see opportunity, rather than scarcity. It keeps me positively focused. I believe that mindset shift has helped me have more courage to try new things, take risks and tackle my fears. 

My successful clients do something similar. They have a very strong understanding of their assets and their strengths, and they focus on building on those strengths. When generating new product ideas based on a SWOT analysis, for example, they focus on their strengths and opportunities, rather than their weaknesses and threats. This helps them talk to their teams in terms of opportunity, rather than dwelling on the obstacles.

Recent research from Gallup shows that strengths-based workplaces are more productive, too: [v] “Organizations whose mission, values and processes are based on their strengths have:

• 15% higher employee engagement
• 7% higher customer engagement
• 29.4% higher profit
• 72% lower attrition”

Coming from a place of strength and gratitude helps to remind ourselves, our team, and our clients of the most important fearless act of all: believing that we are powerful beyond measure. Marianne Williamson' s wisdom below is still my favorite “face my fears” touchstone:

 “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be?  . . . as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
-Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love 

[i]https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2009/08/07/the-quiet-mind-and-innovation/
[ii]https://www.innovationexcellence.com/blog/2009/08/07/the-quiet-mind-and-innovation/
[iii]https://hbr.org/2019/01/the-hard-truth-about-innovative-cultures
[iv]https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7261277-the-gifts-of-imperfection
[v]https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247514/strengths-based-culture.aspx