Visual Leadership in a Complex World

In complex business environments, leadership cannot be off-boarded or outsourced. As leaders and executives, sometimes we blame the bad things happening around us on others, or the market, or circumstance.

Things like ineffective meetings, staff turnover, teams not hitting their goals, people holding back, lack of work/life balance, and not sticking to the strategy. These have nothing to do with other people and everything to do with the way you show up as a leader. 

It’s been said that “people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad managers.” The opposite is also true. People don’t follow ideas, they follow other people. Is your mission confusing and convoluted? Are there too many initiatives to remember? Have you made your vision of the future (and their role in it) crystal clear for the team? If not, chances are they will burn out. If they stop believing in your capacity to lead, you will no longer be their leader. No amount of bonuses or self-care days will undo it.

Executives and leaders experiencing complexity and overwhelm can do two things to establish leadership in complex environments: 

1. Simplify business principles and involve your team in the use of visual communication methods and practice. 
2. Align your teams around a cogent and balanced approach to short-term thinking (quick wins) and long-term thinking (innovation).

This alignment will look more like group storytelling than strategy. It will involve all of your people and involve them in visualizing things like retrospectives, journey maps, and cones of plausibility.

Consider how the diversity of voices, perspectives and competencies you convene and empower today will impact, amplify, drive, or disrupt your work in the future. Visionary leaders prepare for this long tail and are able to manage the business along multiple horizons.

The emotional benefits for leaders who can do this include: 

• The confidence of knowing they have involved their team members in the process of "painting done" (being explicitly detailed with their vision or expectations) and have set them up to do the same.

 

• The wisdom and clarity to know the difference between long-term innovation or development projects and short-term projects that will keep the team fired up and inspired.

 

• The strength that comes from a team’s ability to wield the superpower of visual vocabulary in concert – which accelerates the thinking and communication inside your business. 

Some measurable results we have seen in leaders and businesses that can enable this kind of thinking and behavior in those around them include:

• A global A/V integrator narrowing down a list of 13 strategic initiatives and “must-win battles” to three concise and memorable objectives that the entire organization could focus on over the next 90 days.

 

• A Fortune 50 software company providing their sales team with a Deal Journey Map that engaged more stakeholders during discovery, optimized coaching calls, and increased adoption of and adherence to the sales process.

 

• An increase in storytelling and visual thinking skills on an Agile coaching team tasked with training their clients how to build with speed and quality in the face of rapid change.

As mentioned in our book, Visionary Leadership, these types of leaders are able to do three things well:

1. Take ownership of the problem - Take a hard look at your communication, planning, systems, and processes. Does everyone have access to the tools and software they need to become visual thinkers? Have they been provided with the necessary training? Do they celebrate and debrief after a launch or finished project? Does everyone know what success looks like for their role? If not, it’s on you. Own it and start doing better.
2. Break the big thing into smaller things - Imagine you are cleaning out a closet. What are you keeping or tossing? How will you organize the work effort? Use a whiteboard, sticky notes or spreadsheet but start (visually) putting things into smaller and smaller buckets. You can then prioritize and start implementing.
3. Ask for help - Don’t let your need for control keep you from greatness. Don’t work too far outside of your Zone of Genius. Surround yourself with people who are more capable than you are. The art directors (those in black t-shirts and glasses) aren’t the only creatives in your organization. Scrum masters aren’t the only ones who can put stickies on the wall. Innovation teams aren’t the only people who can test and validate business ideas.

Raise more visual leaders. Celebrate them. Watch them shine.