Balancing Visionary Leadership while Building a Sustainable Organization

Oct. 29th, 2007

Balancing Visionary Leadership while Building a Sustainable Organization:

Succeeding Past the Tipping Point from Start-up to Successful Entrepreneurial firm
Visionary leaders of successful start-ups often run into barriers to creating a sustainable, profitable business. What it takes to get a start-up off the ground is different than what it takes to make the organizational sustainable and successful over time. Visionary founders react quickly and decisively to ideas and trends in the market. They dedicate their resources, long hours and energy towards making their vision a reality. But often a business can remain stuck in this start-up phase, with the business driven by the personality of the founder, stalling the effective growth of the business. How do you know when you’ve hit a roadblock in making this transition?

Symptoms include:

Frequent turnover in the management team
Hearing the founder(s) say “I just can’t find anyone I can rely on.”
Having a culture of putting out fires or leaping from project to project.

Some survive for multiple years in this start-up culture – denying the business potential financial success and keeping the leadership and team in a constant state of stress.

One of the benefits and concurrent detriments of a visionary founder is their capacity for creating electrifying new ideas. How often does the founder send the company running after the latest, greatest idea while never allowing older projects to get completed? How often do you shift market strategies, never gaining the power from focused attention on one path? How do you filter which new idea to follow and which to set aside for another time?

In a personality-driven business, decisions are made based on the forcefulness or power of the plan’s proponent. Even if top leadership is replaced, the next generation of leader may also follow this personality-driven model. Then it becomes a battle for whose personality or power base is the strongest. This sets the stage for revolving door leadership or for a firm that is noted for turf wars. Either way, the business loses talent and profit through leadership turnover or poor decision making.

In an effective, mature business, new initiatives and project updates are measured based on strategic goals and fact-based decisions. The leadership works together to create a dynamic vision and mission for the company, upon which a strategic plan is built. That strategic plan has clear, measurable goals so that day-to-day decision making can be based upon the long and short term company goals. Great new ideas are not lost - they are measured against the strategies and resources of the company and then prioritized based on how much they will contribute to the forward motion of the business and what level of resources they will require to complete.

Now, it’s easy to say that this is how a business should be run. It’s another thing to implement such policies. From the top down, common barriers that you’ll run into include:

“Working on planning and process is just overhead that gets in the way of what really needs to get done.” Setting aside time in a retreat or blocks of time in participants’ work schedule is critical to making the shift happen. This is the purpose behind off site retreats and meetings.

“We have a vision/mission/strategic plan, but we only look at it once a year, it doesn’t really affect the management of the company.” During the planning process, real decisions about prioritization have to be made, otherwise the plans are so open and vague that they are not relevant. If this is the case in your company, bring in a qualified outside facilitator that can help your team see what is being glossed over, help the team engage in constructive conflict and move towards collaboration as the goal.

“We have a plan in place, but Steve (or George or Brenda) just ignores it and has us do whatever he thinks is the priority.” The plan needs to have measurable results and accountability. Each week or month and quarter the team should review and assess progress towards goals. With complete transparency of what is getting done, what is not, and why, you will be able to illuminate what (or who) are the barriers to moving the company forward.

By implementing an effective planning process, the visionary leaders can shift the business from a reactive, start-up mode to a proactive, sustainable business mode.

Elizabeth Weiland is the Marketing Director and Vice President of Shifting Culture, a Boulder-based consultancy specializing in building thriving organizations in times of crisis and change. Its unique approach integrates both cultural and business solutions through a team of highly experienced consultants that can guide leadership through the most difficult times. (www.shiftingculture.net 303-544-1941)

Back | View All