How Do Organizational Culture and Clear Goals Drive Its Success? The Role of Visionary Leadership
For a long time now, more and more organizations have realized that a leader’s emotional intelligence level impacts the effectiveness of their team management and performance. In this article, I will present why collaborating with emotions is crucial in team leadership, what the most common challenges for leaders are, what problems managers face when managing in conjunction with emotions, and what strategy can be applied to master one’s own emotions so that the team willingly cooperates with the manager and becomes more effective.
For a long time, companies have struggled to unite people around organizational ideas, grappling with issues such as a lack of responsibility, low employee motivation and engagement, and dispersed teams. These phenomena intensified even further during the COVID-19 pandemic, after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and amidst rising inflation.
As a result, in the current business landscape, more and more companies are choosing to develop their business based on a strong organizational culture, with vision, mission, and values as its key elements. To address the increasingly noticeable decline in employee identification with the company, leaders are more frequently focusing on management by aligning employee goals with organizational objectives and by managing based on their values.
Until now, vision, mission, and values were often treated as a “slogan” that merely hung on an office wall. Employees, including management, often did not take seriously the idea that defined the company and made it stand out in the market. After all, the most important thing is “profit – they said”. Yes, that’s right, profit is important, but now we achieve this profit in a slightly different way than before.
Any vision without an implementation plan, and the establishment and undertaking of specific actions and team practices, is a mere hallucination. It brings nothing or, at best, changes very little.
Visionary leadership is an approach focused on creating visions and goals that transcend the status quo. Visionary leaders operate based on higher purposes that surpass the needs and objectives of the organizations they lead. Their vision is crucial for motivating employees to achieve goals and contributes to the company’s development, but only when this organizational vision is translated daily into concrete high-level and low-level strategies.
Values, mission, and vision are crucial for visionary leadership. Organizational values form the foundation upon which vision and goals are based. The organization’s mission defines how and what a given company wants to achieve, while the vision outlines how the organization wants to appear in the future and what change it introduces to the world. Visionary leaders utilize values, mission, and vision as fundamental tools to motivate employees and achieve goals. They operate based on communication and coaching processes that align employee goals and values with the organization’s values and vision. These are often employee development systems that genuinely translate into organizational profits and growth.
Values, mission, and vision also constitute the fundamental elements of organizational culture. Organizational culture is another key element for achieving success in visionary leadership, because the way we communicate within the company, delegate responsibilities, serve clients, and what symbols we use speaks volumes about us as a community. It reveals who we are and what is important to us. The culture we represent distinguishes the organization from its competitors.
Creating an organizational culture that supports visionary leadership requires the commitment of both leaders at all levels of the organization and employees. Leaders must act as role models for others and demonstrate how the organization’s values, mission, and vision are crucial for achieving goals. Employees should feel that their contribution is important and that they are part of the process of creating the organization’s vision and goals.
Research conducted by Avolio and colleagues on a sample of managers in 2004 confirms that visionary leadership has a positive impact on employee engagement and productivity. The studies showed that vision-based leadership positively correlates with employee engagement.
Further evidence supporting our thesis is a study conducted by Sosik and Godshalk in 2000. In this analysis, carried out on a sample of employees from various industries, it was also found that visionary leadership positively correlates with employee productivity. Managers who were visionaries and were able to communicate their visions to the team had more engaged and productive employees.
In other words, visionary leadership, which refers to a clear and inspiring vision for the organization’s future, has a strong impact on the level of employee engagement.
Employees who feel that their contribution is important and that they are part of the process of creating the organization’s vision and goals are more engaged in their work. The team, as well as each individual, who have clearly defined goals, focus on actions that contribute to achieving the organization’s objectives. Clearly defined goals enable employees to concentrate on actions and, consequently, to take steps that contribute to achieving the organization’s goals. Furthermore, leaders who create an environment that fosters the development and achievement of organizational goals also empower employees to develop their skills and abilities.
Examples of successful visionary leaders include Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos. Steve Jobs created products that changed the way people use technology, while Jeff Bezos created Amazon, which became one of the largest online stores in the world. Both leaders had a clear vision and goals that contributed to the success of their organizations.
Visionary leaders create a vision and goals that transcend the status quo, contributing to the organization’s development. Visionary leadership requires the commitment of leaders at all levels, as well as all other employees. Organizational culture is crucial for achieving success in visionary leadership. It should align with the organization’s values, mission, and vision to ensure consistency in actions. Clearly defined goals and the entire system for implementing the vision, mission, and values of leaders and founders, combined with employee values and goals, are crucial for achieving success in visionary leadership.
