The Importance of Visionary Leadership and why we need it

Updated July 27, 2022 by Carl Lindberg

In my job as a CEO, I see a constant need for visionary leadership, and I put great importance on it. You need visionary leadership to gather people to move in the same direction and feel a stronger purpose. Visionary leadership is important since it helps to address a fast-changing world and creates sizable long-term goals rather than small, short, and iterative goals. This article aims to help you understand why we need visionary leadership and why visionary leadership is so important. We start with brief answers and provide deeper and more meaningful explanations further down, including eight reasons why visionary leadership is important.

Why do we need visionary leadership?

Visionary leadership provides long-term goals and purpose. These visionary elements spawn creativity and cooperation since people innovate together to fulfill their common vision. Visionary leadership raises everyone’s gaze to see the bigger purpose beyond any mundane short-term tasks.

Why is visionary leadership important?

Visionary leadership is important since it adds dimensions of long-term development needs, including trends and transformations in the environment around the organization. Visionary leadership prevents leaders and team members from getting stuck with an iterative and reactive approach to development.

Visionary leadership, a brief introduction

The Visionary leadership style is one of the best leadership styles available today. I incorporate Visionary leadership in my job as a CEO as often as I can.

What is the Visionary Leadership Style?

Visionary Leadership is when a leader inspires others to pursue through the use of a long-term vision. The Visionary Leadership style builds on participation, communication, and goal setting. A visionary leader risks tunnel vision and losing short-term focus since all efforts are focused on the long-term results.

The Visionary Leadership style is also known as the authoritative leadership style and is one of the six leadership styles introduced by Daniel Goleman in 2000. It has substantial similarities with transformational leadership and some similarities with charismatic and servant leadership. Furthermore, in Goleman’s research, visionary leadership was found to have the most substantial positive impact on organizational climate. (Join our newsletter and get some of my secret tips for each of the Goleman leadership styles.)

Advantages of the Visionary Leadership Style:

A clear vision creates motivation, inspiration, and unity among team members
Innovation and creativity thrive under visionary leadership
Strong awareness of change drivers in the surrounding world increases the chance of successful adaption by the organization

Disadvantages of the Visionary Leadership Style:

The strong emphasis on the long-term can lead to overlooking short-term and operational matters
If the vision becomes too intertwined with the personality of the leader, it can turn into charismatic leadership, which has substantial adverse effects

Please take the opportunity to learn more about this great style in our article available here: the Visionary Leadership style.

Why do we need Visionary leadership?

We live in an ever-changing world, and the speed of change seems to accelerate further every year. We have seen technology steps, logistics change, and parts of our lives change radically due to disruption in certain businesses over the last few decades. Since 2020, we have also seen what a pandemic does to our lives and how it affects human life. Visionary leadership helps to counter some of these things, and it helps to enable other trends and events. (You can also use the transformational leadership style to address change and disruption. You can find articles on transformational leadership in our leadership styles portal.)

Here are five reasons why we need visionary leadership. Visionary leadership is needed because:

It gives us the ability to consider how our future fits into political, financial, and other macro factors in the world
It prompts us to think of what a glorious future could look like
It helps us to consider how that glorious future can be made a reality
It provides greater purpose to the team and its stakeholders
It helps to provide an answer to the question of why we do things

Those are examples of why we need visionary leadership in our lives. Let us take it one step further and look into why it is not just needed, but why it is important. We have put some areas into a list of reasons why visionary leadership is important.

Eight reasons why visionary leadership is important

Visionary leadership is important because of the following:

Visionary leadership ensures that we look to the long term and not only to day-to-day matters
Visions provide a greater sense of purpose to employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders that participate in reaching them
Long term common goals help to unity people and boost creativity
Unity and working in the same direction instills cooperation and reduces silos
Visionary leadership looks to more significant trends in technology, trade, economy, politics, etc., to gauge how an organization can adjust or drive these trends
Visionary leadership creates the opportunity to disrupt competition, as well as understanding the risks of being disrupted
It creates a context for team members who can now see mundane everyday activities as part of something greater
It builds engagement by involving and inspiring people

Remember the classic quote of the cleaner at NASA who stated that he was not mopping floors; he was helping to put man on the moon. That is an excellent example of how someone feels a greater and stronger purpose when understanding what context the day-to-day activities fit into. There are reasons by Daniel Goleman concluded that the visionary leadership style had the most positive impact on team climate, which in turn builds stronger performance. Read more about his framework and improve your leadership. We have some great articles for you in our leadership styles portal. (Join our newsletter and get some of my secret tips for each of the Goleman leadership styles.)

I hope this article gave you multiple reasons to learn more and start implementing visionary leadership in your team and organization. We have an article that explains the style in greater detail, including advantages and disadvantages, elements, examples, and how to become a better visionary leader. You can go directly to this article here: Visionary Leadership, or visit our leadership styles portal containing articles on the situational leadership model, transformational leadership, charismatic leadership, and more than 25 other leadership styles.