Visionary or Integrator – which are you?

A Visionary often is the person who conceived the company, who had the original great idea and who continues to have ideas about how to expand the business and make it all he ever conceived it would be. Visionaries often focus on the big picture, culture, client relationships. An Integrator is the person who thrives on creating order out of chaos. She is the person who is naturally suited to setting priorities, solving conflicts, removing obstacles, getting the company from point A to point B. Its not that the Visionary couldn’t do what the Integrator does, its just that he would become bored. He would be cutting against the grain, to mix metaphors, and working far harder than necessary.

One of my EOS clients finds themselves in a very common situation in this regard. The founder is by type a Visionary and by fiscal constraint finds herself not able to hire an Integrator. Does this sound familiar? What to do?

The company has to live with this situation until they can afford to change it. So the leadership team in that company has created both seats on their Accountability Chart – Visionary and Integrator. The founder is in both seats. The advantage is that they very carefully defined the roles and responsibilities for each seat so that when the company can afford to hire a true Integrator it will be clear to the founder what her role as the Visionary will be from that point forward. It will also be a very useful recruiting tool, spelling out very clearly what the expectations are for the person who will be hired to fill the Integrator seat.

Maybe more founders would stay on in their companies if they were actually doing the things that they are great at and love doing, and not those tasks which they can do but don’t like doing? Strong Visionaries should hire strong Integrators.

Would this be helpful in your company?