What does it mean to be a verbal visionary? A visionary is an optimistic individual who can get others to focus on the future, or some meaningful, useful, positive goals, which they willingly contribute to achieving. A verbal visionary is someone capable of moving leaders through sensibly applied speech power, focus on the future and the ability to interpret their vision in ways that energize, mobilize, and inspire.

A true verbal visionary is also quite strategic. A strategist is one who is able to analyze effectively, forecast pragmatically, focus realistically on issues and problems, interpret events and ideas and their impact candidly, and generate ethically and morally appropriate options for decision-making, action, and progress. All top executives are the key strategists in their organization. Very few managers or senior executives are verbal visionaries.

• A verbal visionary understands people and what people value. We’re talking about health and safety issues, environmental issues, quality of life issues, work and employment issues, and truly personal values like honesty and integrity.
  
• A verbal visionary is a trustworthy person. You trust someone because you feel safe around them. They won’t hurt you or are unlikely to hurt you.
  
• A verbal visionary has judgment. A person who is trustworthy; a person with integrity, credibility, and a personal set of values and principles; and, in fact, someone with these habits who is likely to have better judgment than the staff person who just blurts out ideas.
  

What Does a Verbal Visionary Do?

1. Be a Counselor: An effective counselor is a pragmatist, a truth seeker and candid truth teller, a storyteller, and an inspiration and motivator to others.
   
2. Be a Storyteller: A counselor is also a storyteller, and storytelling is among the most powerful verbal techniques in any culture, especially for leaders. Even very experienced communicators often have trouble telling stories effectively. Successful stories are generally told in plain language. They are fundamentally positive. They are about people, animals, living systems, or some combination of the three. They are relatively brief and have a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. Most importantly, stories have a moral, a lesson, what we call a self-evident truth or reason for being told that is immediately recognizable to the listener. Stories help us learn from our own perspective, our own point of reference.
   
3. Be Memorable: Being memorable is a skill you need to learn. Take the time. Invest in the effort. Being memorable is the key to being a verbal visionary. Being memorable is up to you. No one else will remember unless you make them remember. If they fail to remember you, you’re wasting their time. One example of being intentionally memorable is verbally shaping ideas so as to be easily quoted by others. One test of your memorability is being quoted by others. Do people quote you? Talk in memorable language. Reflect your own sense of destiny to the sense of destiny of those you want to help.
   
4. Be Inspirational: Quite often helping leaders be inspirational is one of the expectations of the coach and counselor. One becomes an inspiration to others, and a motivator of others, on purpose. You have to work on behaviors, model your skills, and share what you say in ways that are motivational and inspirational. This is a skill that is learned, must be practiced, and requires that you pay attention to what moves other people and what other people want.
   
5. Be Thoughtful: A thoughtful person does four critical things routinely: Uses verbal contrast analysis to see the good and bad, bland and colorful, emotional and factual; asks questions that are open-ended, abstract, and complex; is a constructive skeptic with a focus on learning, illustrating, and gaining insight; and states the obvious at every turn for simplification and focus.
   
6. Be Ethical: A person who lives by a set of rules and personal command behaviors all of us recognize as predominantly in the interest of others. A verbal visionary is an advocate for honorable action, an individual who is morally assertive (minus the religious fervor) with passion for the right behaviors, ideas, and actions at every turn, especially in the face of ethical dilemmas.
   
7. Be a Coach and Mentor: Someone who is committed to helping others more than helping themself by usefully interpreting events and ideas, by illustrating new approaches, by exemplifying the very behaviors, the ideas, and concepts that will best help the individual being helped. A coach can forecast patterns, predict with a great deal of accuracy how organizations and individuals behave; and is the one who prepares everyone for the unintended consequences of their actions. A verbal visionary is also a mentor who starts from the other person’s point of view or reference, always.
   
   These are also key elements in the definition of a strategist. A strategist is someone who is focused on what is going to happen, what can happen, and what the possibilities are; someone who knows the lessons of the past as opposed to someone who is always looking backward; trying to re-analyze, re-live, re-define, or re-interpret history—the old should’ve, would’ve, could’ve analysis that helps no one, and backs one into yesterday.

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©2026, James E. Lukaszewski, “Influencing Leaders, The Seven Disciplines of the Trusted Strategic Advisor,” Wiley. Contact the copyright holder at jel@e911.com for information and reproduction permissions. Editing or excerpting forbidden.