Fred Noble
Are you a visionary leader?
I can envision the future.
Now before you dismiss me as a heretic or crazy, hear me out.
As a professional recruiter, I am able to see trends that most of my clients are not able to see. For example, one of my clients in Florida reached out to me to find him kitchen managers.
After placing ads, cold-calling and searching social media, my team found that the average age of the managers in the area are in their mid-40s and that they are primarily female. We can even look to more trends to see that most of these females are single moms. I am able to look at the entire environment and see the trends.
My client wanted to find a specific candidate. He was looking for military background and food service experience. He was looking for someone who was a professional. He was looking for specifics.
Benefits of visionary leadership
I reached out to him and asked him to expand his search criteria and gave him my information. He read through it, started targeting his recruiting dollars to other avenues, and ended up hiring a kitchen manager quickly, a single mom later in life. He listened to the advice of someone who had more information and changed his strategy and he has since promoted her to General Manager and is considering her for Director of Operations.
How often do we find ourselves having to make a decision when we are in the middle of a situation? Sometimes it is difficult to implement visionary leadership into our day-to-day tasks. However, visionary leadership is biblical leadership.
Do you really think you can make that decision with wisdom?
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice. (Proverbs 12:15)
The Bible clearly tells us that if we look to find our own way, then we are a fool. We are to find advice from those who are wiser than we are. It is the only way we can develop as people and as visionary leaders.
Implementing visionary leadership
Great leaders are people who develop great leaders. If we expect people to have us mentor them into leaders, they will expect us to have mentors in our lives. If we aren’t being mentored, then we cannot mentor others properly.
True mentors are mentored.
Mentors and people who hold us accountable can see us from a 30,000-foot view. They can pour into our lives as they see us making decisions that would hurt us or others. They can speak to us about how to make course corrections that would avoid problems.
They are visionary leaders ‒ who can see our future.
That is why God wants us to have these people in our lives. They direct our lives back to the right choices and the expectations that God places on us as leaders.
Next steps toward visionary leadership
How many people do you mentor?
But more importantly, how many people are mentoring you?
When you look at your success in business, ministry or life in general, don’t only look at that number of people you have trained as your gauge of success. Also, look at the readiness of someone to be mentored as a visionary leader as one of those key performance indicators.
It is that indicator that builds a teachable spirit and humility in the heart of a leader, two qualities that we expect from those we mentor.
If you don’t have mentors in your life, I suggest you quickly find a few. This will help build you as a visionary leader and human being.
This article originally appeared here.