How Visionary Leaders Guide Their Organizations Through Change

 

As the pandemic transforms into a new normal, organizations will rely on visionary leaders who are skillful at navigating change.

What is Visionary Leadership?

Visionary leaders’ essential capability is being able to connect to their own north-star vision (a general direction or calling, if you will) and simultaneously being able to engage the larger organization in a change journey to find out what it will take to develop and manifest a shared organizational vision.

Because all change processes go through an “in-between” or liminal stage, often feeling like a crucible, visionary leaders’ early grasp of what is possible helps create a container for everyone else to contribute and join them in the visioning process. The key is to hold both their own vision as well as accept emerging ideas long enough that a synthesis emerges that is energizing to all.

Success Models in Practice

The Grove has a history of supporting visionary leaders in both shaping and realizing their visions. We looked back at some we have worked with to harvest learning.

Erik Rolland, who we have written about before, emerges as a classic example of a visionary leader. He has just accepted the presidency […]

2022-06-07T18:42:45+00:00June 7th, 2022|Change, Leading Change, Multi-Stakeholder, Organization Change, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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An Immigrant’s Perspective on White Privilege and Cultural Bias

Here is a picture of me, age 21, at a market near San Diego

Confronting racism and all of its expressions as an active process in our lives is long overdue. I have found that my early experiences of growing up in Germany in the ’60s and ’70s and then immigrating to the United States in the ’80s, put me at a different entry point in this exploration than many who have grown up here. I hope that sharing the following glimpses into my early experiences as an immigrant highlights how subtle and often insidious the undercurrents of racism, white privilege, and cultural bias can be. And, perhaps, these might trigger your own reflections of early encounters that have shaped the way you perceive or misperceive or advantage or disadvantage those who fall into categories of the generalized others.

I was prompted to think about all of this again recently when I was backpacking near the Anza Borrego Desert in Southern California, which I had visited numerous times in the late ’80s just after I arrived in the U.S. In my return to this desert, I reflected on earlier days when […]

2021-11-11T22:11:37+00:00March 5th, 2021|Culture, Social Change, Uncategorized|0 Comments
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Communitas: Hope and Belonging in the Midst of Disruption

“The pandemic and current social uprising changes everything we see, everything we write, and everything we read.”
Jane Hirshfield, Poet


Point of Departure

It is likely that the pandemic and its aftermath may constitute a point of departure from the way we have lived to a future that is very different from where we seemed to be heading just a few months ago. While many of us continue to be “sheltered” at home or work, whatever bubble of protection we feel is likely to dissipate. In times like this, when things fall apart, and a new direction is not really clear, a sense of intense community spirit can arise among those who find themselves traversing the turbulence of change together. This shared sense of community spirit is referred to as “communitas” by anthropologists and other social scientists. It is full of intense relatedness, aliveness and feeling. Especially now, when the prevailing feeling of uncertainty and instability is so pervasive, appreciating communitas can give us insight and hope.