Leaders Need Less Vision, Not More
For a leader, how much vision is enough vision?
A lot of people, I just know, are rolling their eyes, ready to explain this to me like I’m five:
Dumb question, dude. There’s no such thing as too much vision.
<sigh>
I guess I can’t blame them. If you’re paying attention, there are a lot of signals out there telling us that vision is one of a leader’s primary jobs. Press, start-up accelerators, books, gurus… Most of all CEOs and founders will tell you how essential it is that they spend time visioning. A lot of time. Because vision is the root of everything. It gives meaning, purpose, direction to the team. They crave it. And there’s no one else who can do it.
I hear that. Vision is important (if ill-defined). A good product vision is a clear statement of the future you want to see. But the actual practice of work can often lose its context and path. You’re just following the directions, one Lego™ after another. Problem solving, improving, hitting bigger and bigger milestones, but as time goes on forgetting that what you’re really doing is building that sweet $900 model of the Millennium Falcon.
Vision solves for that problem. It tells you not just where you’re going but why. Vision inspires and helps set goals. By keeping you focused on the big picture, it reminds you why you’re working so hard, and how all those pieces fit together to make the Kessel run in 12 parsecs.
But after a long time working as a leader at companies like Yahoo!, Meta, and Airbnb, and a shorter time teaching about leadership at UC Berkeley, one thing is abundantly clear to me:
The focus on vision is misguided. It’s a small part of what makes leaders great or companies successful. Our collective obsession with vision is a trap that glorifies leaders grasping to maintain control for themselves.
The Problem with Vision
There are three big problems with our collective obsession with vision.
First, focusing on vision as a primary leadership job tells us that we ought to be spending a lot of time on it. But vision had better be an extremely part-time job, or things are going to get dicey quick. Reminding people of the vision you already have is important. But if vision statements are changing more than (super) rarely, then you’re creating a huge amount of thrash and chaos. We might be able to make an X-Wing out of all those legos, but not if we’re halfway through a Tie fighter {honestly I have no idea where this Star Wars theme came from, I’m just going with it}.
Second, when we tell leaders to focus on vision, we’re not really helping them succeed. Sure, you need vision, but by itself it’s not going to get you anywhere.
Vision is cheap, greatness is in execution.
Leaders need to be spending almost all their time focused there — enabling and growing people and teams, deciding, delegating, unblocking. Leadership success is almost entirely about translating vision into action through great process, and yet we tend to glorify the vision part and not the action part. We label process as overhead and bureaucracy, ignore it, and then get confused when we can’t turn vision into reality.
Last, and perhaps most importantly, telling leaders to focus on vision is giving them permission to glorify themselves. Vision comes from blinding flashes of brilliance, from intuition not from listening, data, or hard work. Vision is the product of intuition, the well-honed insight that can come only from a leader’s gut. So, necessarily, we can’t outsource it. If I’m a leader, focusing on vision feels great because it’s all about ME.
By putting vision at the core of a leader’s skillset, we’re glorifying self-centeredness. We’re encouraging the hero worship that’s so prevalent in Silicon Valley. We worship (usually white male) leaders like Jobs, Musk, Bezos. We ascribe brilliant essence to them, and put the success of their respective enterprises on their shoulders alone.
This model of leadership is old-fashioned, out of date, and counter-productive. An entire generation of startup founders have been lost to the media-fueled idea that the borderline toxic, ego centered, mercurial model of leadership from last generation is what makes businesses and products innovative and successful. These charismatic caricatures of leadership have given us a north-star that’s closer to the Death Star {sorry}.
Our obsession with vision is pushing leadership in exactly the wrong direction. In my leadership course at UC Berkeley, we’ve spent the semester exploring the skills that the contemporary generation of leaders really need to be successful. News flash — the research shows it has very little to do with individual talent, vision, or intuition, and a great deal to do with effectively facilitating other human beings to do great things.
I was struck by this study from a few years back which surveyed almost 200 leaders around the world to ask the question — what competencies to leaders really need to be effective these days?
Notice anything? It’s sort of hard to miss. Developing a vision isn’t anywhere on the list.
This is what the contemporary version of authentic, facilitative leadership looks like. Highly ethical, directive but not controlling, adaptable, focused on growth for self and other. And above all an outstanding communicator.
This is what winning looks like. And it’s why the more I learn the more I’m confident in stating that Leadership is a Research Project.
Just Enough Vision
Let’s not throw away vision just yet though. We still need it. Too much is really bad, but not enough might be worse. The thing about vision, though, is that a little bit goes an awfully long way.
“Vision without execution is a daydream. Execution without vision is a nightmare.”
— Japanese Proverb
As leaders, we still need to define a vision. We still need to adapt it as the landscape changes. The best way to do that is to hone those facilitation and collaboration skills. To drive a group of leaders to combine their perspectives into a vision that’s more than the sum of its parts.
But let’s stop talking about vision as a core competency. Let’s stop pretending that vision is a bolt from the blue, filling up the vessel of a great leader with the wisdom needed to succeed.
Vision isn’t what makes a leader great, and it isn’t what drives product innovation, user satisfaction, or company success. So it isn’t where we should be spending most of our time, even if it makes most of the headlines. Instead, we need just enough vision to give us direction, and then a huge amount of dedication to putting it to good use.
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