When you articulate, communicate and sustain a vision for your school, you are practicing vision leadership.
While there can be a lot of positive benefits to practicing this form of leadership, there are also several bumps in the leadership road that you may stumble upon along the way.
"All public sector leaders must be able to set a meaningful direction through a clear vision for their organization. If you can't and won't do that, you shouldn't be a leader."
This was one of the Management Commission's recommendations for how public management in Denmark could be improved. Among other things, this recommendation was based on the fact that a clear vision can create a clear direction and help clarify the meaning of the management initiatives that are initiated and the decisions that are made.
At the same time, both Danish and international research suggests that vision leadership can be the campfire that leaders can warm themselves by when looking for a form of leadership that can contribute a wide range of positive benefits. For example, your practice of visionary leadership can lead to your employees becoming more motivated, more engaged in their work, more likely to see their work as meaningful, want to stay in the organization and perform better.
Finally, research on organizational reputation suggests that your external communication of your organization's vision can also contribute to citizens actively choosing your organization over other comparable organizations because they find the vision attractive. This is especially relevant when you are a leader in an organization that provides services where citizens are free to prioritize between different providers, such as public schools where parents are free to choose the institution they think is best for their child. Your external communication of your organization's vision can thus become a crucial competitive factor because the content of the vision can influence parents' perception of your school and thus potentially influence their choice of school.
The vision must create images
When formulating the vision for your school, it's important to be familiar with what exactly a vision is. A vision is your organization's picture of a desirable, long-term future. In other words, it tells you what you are particularly concerned with achieving - in two, four or six years' time, for example.
The word 'vision' comes from the Latin word 'videre', meaning 'to see'. This illustrates that a key characteristic of a successful vision is that it creates images of a desirable future for your school. It's important that you use imagery and words with recognizable characteristics when articulating the vision, because it gives your employees a "mental peg" to hang the vision on - and it helps them remember the vision and envision its realization.
For example, imagine a school that has a vision to be the school in the district that prioritizes student well-being and wants to embed this image in the minds of staff and parents. Which of the two visions below creates the clearest image for you?
We want to be a school where committed employees contribute to the children's well-being in their daily lives. This will support us in becoming the school in the district with the best student well-being.
We want to be a school where teachers and educators are on their toes to ensure that students go home with a smile every day. This will pave the way for us to become the school district's well-being spearhead.
I'd be surprised if it's not the last vision you can most easily "see" in your mind's eye. The lesson is clear: Remember to use visualizing language when you articulate the vision - this will increase the likelihood that the vision will stick with mental glue in the minds of those who hear about it.
The article continues in the next section.
Management in private companies
Create a link between the vision and your employees' daily tasks
If the vision is likely to come close to being realized, it is inherently necessary that you make sure your employees are aware of how they can contribute to the realization of the vision. This link between vision and day-to-day tasks isn't always easy. A study from the National Research Centre for the Working Environment found that 23% of employees surveyed "rarely" or "never" feel that their manager is able to clarify what the organization's overall goals mean for employees' daily tasks. When managers fail in this translation task, it can lead to employees viewing the vision as meaningless and disconnected from their daily practice, and it can lead to employees feeling that there is no clear direction for the work in the unit. So, what can you do to ensure this connection between the vision and your employees' work? You have several options here:
You can engage in a dialogue with them about how they believe they can contribute to the vision in their daily work - for example, by discussing what actions to take or what behavior supports the vision. You can tell stories about other employees who, in a specific situation, have acted in a way that contributes to the vision. Or you can express how you yourself believe you contribute to the vision. Only in this way does a vision become present for those who have to live it - rather than appearing as a lofty hot air balloon that seems disconnected from daily practice. And only then will it become clear which behaviors contribute to the vision - and which behaviors don't.
Your identity must support a visionary leadership style
In other words, there are a number of positive benefits associated with vision leadership. However, there are also many managerial pitfalls that you can risk falling into along the way, which can ruin your good intentions of leading with a vision.
Your identity is an expression of your basic self-perception and thus expresses your own answer to the question "who am I?". As a public manager, you bring a professional identity with you in your management job as a teacher or educator, for example.
Having a professional identity means that you see yourself as a person with a strong professional identity. Such a self-perception can, for example, be related to seeing yourself as a person with a high level of professional expertise, as someone who understands the development of professional quality or as someone who understands the role of your professional group in an organizational context where other professional groups are also present.
As a public manager, you shouldn't write off your professional identity, but often your professional identity needs to be complemented and balanced with a leadership identity. Having a leadership identity means that you think of and see yourself as a leader. Such a self-perception can, for example, be related to seeing yourself as a person with a special responsibility for the whole, as someone who can and should make the tough decisions and as someone who can ensure followership. We sometimes say that this is what managers are paid for. Underlying this is a normative expectation of what the role of a leader should entail.
In continuation of the above, a study of a representative sample of Danish public sector managers has shown that the stronger the leadership identity managers perceive themselves to have, the more visionary leadership they exercise. This indicates that it can be an advantage to have a certain degree of leadership identity when you as a leader want to succeed in vision leadership.
But what do you do if you find that you primarily identify with your professional identity and think that you might need to develop your leadership identity? There are several factors that affect how "strong" a leader identity leaders have. Seniority affects leadership identity. In other words, leaders with years of leadership experience generally have stronger leadership identities than relatively new leaders. And the level of management education also plays a role. Managers with formal management education, such as a diploma or master's degree in management, have a stronger leadership identity than managers without formal management education.
These results emphasize that leadership identity is something you can develop over time and as you gain more years of leadership experience. The results also highlight that leadership identity is something you can actively work to develop through leadership training. Overall, these findings highlight an important point: being a leader is not something you are necessarily born to do, or a role you invariably feel called to from day one in the leadership chair. Instead, taking on the leadership role is something you need to practice, for example, by working on your leadership identity. And developing your leadership identity can mean that you are more successful in setting a clear direction for your organization by formulating, communicating and maintaining a vision.
