Exercises for Visionary Leadership

I was pleased to contribute my reflections to an article written for the BBC by Megan Tatum, exploring new research that shows Gen Zers are pulling especially long hours and pushing themselves to the brink of burnout.

You can find the article here: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230525-why-young-workers-are-putting-in-so-much-overtime

While we all appreciate a strong work ethic, constantly putting in overly long hours isn't sustainable. It will also inhibit your ability to be a visionary thinker and leader. When we're constantly focused on tasks relating to the day-to-day, we can't pull up and see the bigger picture.

Instead of being constantly on the grind, we need to find ways to intersperse our task-oriented work with experiences and exercises that ignite our creative spirit and stoke our innovative abilities.

Here are three tips for doing so:

1) Practice shifting into a learning mindset. I recommend that every quarter, you challenge yourself with learning a new skill. This could be anything from learning to greet someone in a different language to learning a new card game. Your new skill doesn't necessarily have to be related to your career -- this is simply a mechanism to get your learning mindset geared up.

2) Practice curiosity. To do this, go for a long, rambling walk with no agenda and no itinerary. Observe your surroundings, and when you see another person, ask yourself curious questions about that person -- where are they going, what are they doing, what are they thinking? (For a brilliant example of this exercise, read Virginia Woolf's essay 'Street Haunting'. You can thank me later.)

3) Practice courage. Give yourself the experience of taking small, manageable risks by doing something every once in a while that seems scary to you. This could be anything from introducing yourself to someone at work who intimidates you to picking up a new sport (my most recent one was learning to ride a horse at the age of 47).

Courage, curiosity, and maintaining a learning mindset are all characteristics of visionary leadership that we can all practice and strengthen.