LEADING WITH VISION - WHY VISIONARY LEADESHIP IS IMPRTANT:

The world needs leaders who can create a compelling vision and engage others around it. We are in a time of exciting progress and extreme uncertainty. All of this change can make people feel anxious and fearful. However, great leadership can guide others through the fog of uncertainty and into the visionary light in the distance.

When vision is at the heart of strategic conversations, it's extremely powerful in gaining buy-in and creating the energy to move the vision forward. This kind of ownership is exactly what will help you engage those you lead toward your compelling vision.

There are two parts to visionary leadership:

• Creating a compelling vision
• And engaging others around it

We reach out to medium and large organizations to find out what they need in their leaders today and in the next few years. Then we track those trends over time.

#. How Visionary Leadership work:

We use it to help determine what we need to provide when we're developing leaders, and many organizations use the trends to benchmark their own leadership development programs. Some of the recent trends show organizations feel they don't have enough depth in their talent pool to handle the leadership needs of the future.

#. In our most recent research, we worked with 466 major corporations to understand the trends. Here are the top five trends:

1. Number one, we are living in a VUCA environment. VUCA is an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity, qualities that make a situation or condition difficult to analyze, respond to or plan for.
2. Number two, we need leaders who can create a compelling vision and engage others around it.
3. Number three, there's a disconnect between what we say we need and how we are spending our time. This is because leaders often find themselves focusing on the urgent instead of the important.
4. Number four, we need leadership to have cognitive readiness. That is the mental preparedness to deal with anything.
5. Number five, we continue to suffer from a lack of leadership bench strength.

In addition to realizing that we needed visionary leadership more than ever, the research also told us that this is the number one most lacking competency in next generation leaders. That means that we don't have it now and we're not going to have it in the future either if we don't do something about it.

As we dove deeper into the topic, we soon realized that visionary leadership is a struggle for many because it requires imagining the future, assuming some calculated risks to get there, and then figuring out how to bring others along for the adventure. It takes guts to lead with vision.