The role a visionary plays in the broader concept of a business is pivotal. According to the book Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters, a visionary is responsible for being the creative genius that comes up with the ideas that help the company keep and sustain growth over time. They are the ones that can see something beautiful when no one else can. Visionaries create chaos and use their counterpart, the integrator, to organize that chaos. The dichotomy of these two leaders is what makes a business great. The wild and out-of-the-box ideas that the visionary has will explode a business beyond its wildest expectations. However, 90% of the ideas the visionary has are counterintuitive and sometimes detrimental and it is the job of the integrator to sort it all out. However, that oh so juicy 10% of ideas is where all the magic happens. I myself am a visionary. I see a vision and an end-goal. I am starting to understand what gives me the most energy and what sucks the energy out of me. This is key to recognize when analyzing your own personal self. While the power of being a visionary is enormous, there are also many pitfalls this personality type can fall victim to. This is where the role of the integrator comes in counteracting the pitfalls of the visionary. Before we get into some of the pitfalls and a little bit about the visionary/integrator balancing act, let’s talk about visionaries and how they use their talents to enhance entrepreneurship!
Visionary qualities and traits and their benefits to business
Visionaries are the creative masterminds behind business empires in terms of the overall vision. They can see things others can’t and propose ideas to stimulate growth and opportunity for their company. In addition, they typically love to solve big problems. Pondering over some of the biggest problems the company faces and brainstorming endless solutions to these problems is what the visionary mind craves. While the majority of the ideas may be outlandish and totally unproductive, there are many of them that are the exact opposite of that. These solutions solve problems that no one else can solve and skyrocket business growth. Their ideas and creativity inspire other people around their vision. Ideas they have are magnetic in attracting talent to help see them through, namely, the integrator in which we will talk about later. At the end of the day, the visionary’s role is to envision and create the company forecast. Their energy comes from the exertion of the strengths mentioned in the above text. While all of these traits are amazing and absolutely essential to have in a business, there are many pitfalls of a visionary as well that need to be balanced out.
The pitfalls of a visionary
Day-to-day tediousness bores a visionary. Although they love creating the vision, implementing that vision is not their forte as this process exerts a lot more effort from the visionary compared to creating the overarching vision and new company ideas. Visionaries suffer from what Gino Wickman refers to in Rocket Fuel as “whiplash”. What this means is that the visionary is easily pulled in a million directions all at once and can rarely stay focused on one thing for a prolonged period of time. They inherently want to create and coming up with a million ideas will lead to them trying to pursue them all at once if left unchecked. This is something I’ve suffered from many times. I like to call it “shiny object syndrome”. The premise is that myself and other visionaries like me find it very easy to get excited about something new and innovative and chase it, throwing caution to the wind and leaving whatever I was working on in the dust. Visionaries need someone to hold this tendency in check. If not, this lack of focus on the day-to-day and systems can get a company in trouble pretty quickly. Visionaries are also notoriously bad at delegating and relinquishing control over aspects of their company. When they do, they tend to micromanage the people they bring on to fill out roles that their intention was to elevate out of. This can create a very negative workspace culture and influence a sometimes hostile work environment full of confrontational disputes. Visionaries are critical to business success, however, they need to be held in check so they can focus their attention on what really feeds their energy rather than getting sucked into the things they aren’t so good at.
The balancing act
While the visionary’s job is to create the vision, it is the job of their counterpart, the integrator, to see it through. This relationship between these individuals is a match made in heaven. Their traits and tendencies work harmoniously with each other to only help bring out the good traits in one another and negate the bad. Everything the visionary loathes the integrator lives for and vice versa. The visionary without the integrator would self implode their business over the course of time. In our next post, we will go through the strengths and weaknesses of the integrator and how they harmoniously sync in with the visionary to create a great entrepreneurial experience.