If your vision is complicated or seemingly unachievable, you need to cultivate personal mastery at all levels of your organization. If you don’t, people will eventually become discouraged becuase they won’t be able to close the gap between reality and the vision.
In this structure [where people get discouraged from achieving their shared vision], the limiting factor is the capacity of people in the organization to “hold” creative tension, the central principle of personal mastery. This is why we say that personal mastery is the bedrock for developing shared vision—organizations that do not encourage personal mastery find it very difficult to foster sustained commitment to a lofty vision.