Mark C Winters explains organizational whiplash: when visionary leaders constantly shift focus, their teams get whipped around. The fix is pairing visionaries with integrators who filter ideas, communicate stable direction, and run regular meetings to keep everyone aligned while leaders think big.
Great leaders gain the trust and attention of their people. The team wants to help their visionary achieve the vision. A great leader also constantly looks for ways to improve their organization, their idea machines and focus on the future state of things. Unfortunately, that generally means their attention is all over the place. They may be looking at a potential threat or want to learn more about a great opportunity. And when an organization is so tuned into a visionary's ideas, they follow them down every thought path. So if their visionary looks left, the whole organization looks left. When the visionary gets bored or finds a new interest and looks right, the entire organization looks right. As the visionary keeps following ideas in different directions, everyone else struggles to keep up. The trouble is, they can never keep up, which leads to a lack of consistency. And this can also have a very disorienting and frustrating effect on the folks in their organization. That's what we call organizational whiplash. So how do you solve that? Well, visionaries, you have to let the integrator serve as the buffer between your brilliant ideas and the rest of the business. Integrators, you have to be the steady force for the organization and help the visionary prioritize their ideas and let you communicate to the rest of the organization. Visionaries need an outlet for their ideas so they don't get frustrated and can use their gift for big thinking. Integrators, help them find that outlet for their ideas without making everyone else feel like they're on a tilt a whirl ride. We do this by helping filter their ideas through regular same page meetings.
