Flexibility in Your Leadership Style — Finding the Right Balance

Where do you find yourself along the continuum when it comes to leadership styles? Power holder or power sharer? A teller or a listener? Maybe a miner or a prospector? Each of us has interpersonal and intrapersonal awareness – yet our reactions to any given situation determine how effective a leader we will be.

Traditional “command-and-control” styles are considered outdated, while newer, more agile, and collaborative approaches have become de rigueur.

In their article Finding the Right Balance — and Flexibility — in Your Leadership Style by Jennifer Jordan, Michael Wade, and Tomoko Yokoi. They present their research, conducted with over 1,000 managers from around the globe. What they found was that the idea of a fixed leadership style was outdated, and leaders need to develop a broader, more curious outlook. While that finding isn’t necessarily new, the ideas they expressed about dealing with traditional and emerging leadership approaches were informative.

They offer this advice to the curious leaders. “rather than perfecting a leadership sweet spot, a leader needs to develop and broaden his or her “leadership sweet range”. The authors outline 3 key stages to help leaders begin to develop a better and more concise level of self-awareness.  It’s worth reading what they put forth for each stage.

Stage 1: Understand yourself

Stage 2: Understand your environment

Stage 3: Broaden your range

They express that it is okay to experiment with different styles. See which ones work for you to bring out the best behaviors and approaches with others. But give yourself time to learn which styles work best for a specific context. You aren’t tied to one leadership style.  I highly suggest you look over their visual graph on the “7 tensions today’s leaders must navigate”. it helps to break out a number of examples of leadership profiles.

“rather than perfecting a leadership sweet spot, a leader needs to develop and broaden his or her “leadership sweet range”

It’s a forward-thinking article that gives some sound advice and guidance to those who want to improve and are curious about developing a broader, and maybe just a little kinder leadership style to try out. Finding that balance, and being flexible doesn’t mean micromanaging, rather they offer a better term “practice micro-behaviors” instead.  Pushing yourself to look at your employees differently. Become more of a listener instead of a teller.

Good read.