How can leaders make their vision come alive for employees? Many organisations struggle with ensuring their employees feel connected to the company’s goals.
Research shows that visionary leadership can boost motivation and performance, but how do we turn that into daily leadership practice?
And how can we do so for an entire organisation with lots of leaders at the same time?
Our LEVO research project (Leadership Tools: Visionary Leadership and Organisational Performance) set out to answer this very question.
We investigated whether the combination of two days of leadership training and the use of digital leadership tools, including Evovia’s tools, could enable managers to practice more effective leadership – leadership that fosters employee well-being and organisational success.
The research experiment equipped leaders with a digital leadership tool that guided them in conducting structured development dialogues with their employees. These dialogues leveraged
coaching techniques to build a bridge between the organisation’s vision and employees’ basic psychological needs.
The goal was to help employees understand the significance of the organisational vision and to explore how their daily work could contribute to achieving the vision, while also supporting their own well-being.
LEVO is among the first research projects in the world to investigate the effect of digital dialogue tools, and the findings confirm that leadership training combined with the use of dialogue tools
significantly enhances ‘good leadership’. Leadership that increases employees’ fulfilment of psychological needs, vision valence, value congruence with their organisation, and work engagement.
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The LEVO project is a collaboration between Evovia and the |
The LEVO project found that combining leadership training with digital leadership tools significantly enhances visionary leadership behaviour. It also showed that goal-oriented development dialogues are a key driver of engagement, as they substantially strengthen the fulfilment of basic psychological needs.
How to strengthen visionary leadership
• Managers who received leadership training and digital dialogue tools were perceived by employees as exhibiting more visionary leadership.
• Just-in-time nudges – reminders, processes, and prompts integrated into the tools played a crucial role in reinforcing leadership behaviours.
• Digital leadership tools can provide just-in-time nudges that support the transfer from leadership training into managers’ daily leadership practice.
Why leadership impacts employee well-being
• Employees whose managers participated in the intervention reported greater fulfilment of psychological needs for autonomy and meaning.
• Work engagement increased significantly among employees whose managers participated in the intervention.
How structured dialogues drive engagement
• The study found that goal-oriented development dialogues mediated the positive effect of visionary leadership training and digital dialogue tools on psychological needs fulfilment.
• Goal-oriented development dialogues increased employees’ sense of ownership of the organisational vision, value congruence with their organisation, and employee engagement.
Coaching is a powerful tool for leadership. By guiding employees with structured questions, managers can help them set goals, improve performance, and feel more engaged at work. Coaching is basically about helping another person to use their abilities and resources, so they achieve their goals. When managers use coaching methods, it is naturally about supporting employees to achieve goals that somehow contribute to the organisation’s vision.
The emerging research investigating the effects of coaching indicates that managers can strengthen both employee well-being and achievement of results by using coaching approaches – by guiding employee development and everyday work with the help of questions.
For many managers, however, the use of questions as a management tool doesn’t come naturally. Not even in employee development dialogues, where a study from Aalborg University has found that managers spend barely 4% of their speaking time asking open and reflective questions.
This means that employees often lack the space to reflect and take ownership of their development. Making a habit of using a coaching approach in one’s management requires focus and practice.
One of the key figures in evidence-based coaching, Anthony Grant, has developed a model for goal-oriented coaching, which has formed a central part of the basis for the leadership training
and the dialogue tool in our research project, LEVO .
In short, in our adaptation of the model, through questions and dialogue, the manager must guide the employee to develop how they go about their work in a manner that increases the employee’s contribution to the organisation’s overall goals. The coaching dialogue process follows these phases:
• Reflection on the organisation’s vision aimed at achieving a deeper understanding and stronger sense of co-ownership of the vision.
• Identifying an area of development through reflection on how I as an employee can contribute to the vision through my daily work, and which changes to my work could lead to an even greater contribution. This can include new competencies, new ways of collaborating with colleagues, other methods or priorities on how I go about my work.
• Setting my specific development goals as an employee.
• Developing an action plan to achieve the development goals.
• Ongoing follow-up on the action plan, where the employee and the manager evaluate whether the action plan is followed and produces the desired changes and contributions
to the vision.
• Adaptation of development goals and action plan based on the evaluation
• – and then new action, new follow-up, evaluation, and adaptation in an ongoing process.
Three central mechanisms are crucial for such an ongoing dialogue process to succeed. Firstly, it is crucial that the dialogue is based on the employee’s perspective.
Employees are experts on their own strengths and weaknesses in their daily work and will not develop a sense of ownership over their development goals if the process doesn’t start from their perspective.
The process design in e.g., employee development dialogues is therefore important.
Secondly, the dialogue must lead to a goal being set. We know from extensive research in goal-setting theory that goals generally provide focus, persistence, and motivation. But we also know that the type of goal setting significantly influences how effective the goal will be.
Based on the insights about basic psychological needs, Grant points out how ‘self-congruent goals’ in particular are effective development goals. Self-congruent goals are objectives that are in accordance with the employee’s own interests and their need to experience competence, autonomy, relatedness, and meaning. And the manager’s task in the coaching-based development dialogue is precisely to guide the employee to set development goals that contribute effectively to the organisation’s goals, while also being in line with the employee’s own short- and long-term interests and needs in their working life.
This is true because this is the type of goal that will motivate the employee the most and will have the greatest positive influence, both for the employee’s well-being and performance.
The third central mechanism in the coaching-based development dialogue process is about insight – or self-insight: The ongoing follow-up on the action plan and the reflection on why
I succeed or fail to create the desired change and achieve my development goal creates self-insight. If an employee has a development goal to improve their working relationships with colleagues, for example, the manager can ask:
‘What have you done differently in working with your colleagues, what has worked well, what has seemed inappropriate? Also, what significance have the changes had for the well-being of you and your colleagues, and for the execution of your daily tasks?’
Through ongoing follow-up and reflective questioning, managers can contribute to increasing the individual employee’s insight into the connection between how they go about their work and the results they achieve.
A considerable number of research studies show how this kind of self-insight is crucial for how employees thrive and contribute to the organisation’s work.
A coaching process like this can consist of an annual thorough development dialogue of 1 – 1½ hours and then a series of follow-up dialogues at least once a quarter and preferably monthly. This should of course be adapted to the nature of the development goals formulated in collaboration with the individual employee.
Why digital tools make a difference in leadership
While coaching strategies were essential in facilitating structured dialogues, the study also examined the impact of different types of leadership tools. A critical component of the research was comparing the effectiveness of static and dynamic leadership tools.
The study found that dynamic leadership tools, interactive digital solutions, had a stronger impact than static tools (such as PDFs and email-based templates).
Dynamic tools provided more interactive support (e.g. process support and just-in-time nudges) for managers’ leadership behaviours and employees’ reflections and competence development, leading to significantly stronger positive effects on employees’ fulfilment of meaning and their self-assessed impact of their work.
How managers can apply lessons from the LEVO project
The findings from the LEVO project provide practical insights for managers who want to strengthen their leadership practices. Managers should focus on integrating structured development dialogues into their leadership routines, thus ensuring that conversations with employees are goal-oriented and aligned with the organisational vision.
Digital tools can support this process by providing structured prompts and reminders that help sustain leadership behaviours over time.
Additionally, coaching-based approaches can improve employees’ sense of ownership over their development and increase engagement.
Finally, the research suggests that adopting dynamic leadership tools, rather than re-lying solely on static resources, can amplify the positive effects of leadership interventions, making it easier for managers to foster long-term motivation and performance among their employees.
The LEVO project shows that leadership is not just about setting a vision – it is about making it part of everyday conversations. Managers who invest in structured dialogues and digital tools will be better equipped to engage their teams, foster motivation, and drive long-term success. Leadership development is evolving, and integrating digital solutions with strong coaching-based leadership can be key for organisations looking to create lasting impact.