Leadership Styles Miss the Mark
Matt Greenfield
Google Ads Strategist | Driving 10x ROAS for eCommerce Brands | Scaling Ad Spend Profitably
Eight, Four, Six, Several Styles of Leadership
Many leadership experts talk about different styles of leadership. Father of Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman, describes eight styles, Fast Company co-founder, Bill Taylor, describes four styles, and so it goes.
Early in my career, I would talk about six styles of leadership. Two common styles that are negative in their impact, and four styles that should all be mastered. The idea is that a leader identifies the right style for the situation at hand and then adopts the appropriate style, like a Barbie doll changing outfits and inheriting a different set of skills.
Whenever I taught this content, people loved it. There’s something engaging and powerful about the idea of adapting your leadership style to the current situation.
But I was wrong.
After teaching that approach for a couple of years, I found that as appealing the idea was in the classroom, switching leadership styles rarely worked in practice.
Leadership Styles In the Real World
I believe that leadership styles do a reasonable job of describing our ‘natural’ leadership style. Our ‘default setting’ is to be authoritarian, or connective, or guiding, etc. And that’s the style of leadership that feels comfortable to us, the one that we ‘naturally’ use.
But the problem with viewing leadership styles as a set of skills to be mastered is that they are a kind of learned behavior that are incredibly difficult to internalize. We might occasionally fight against our natural style to be guiding and take a more democratic approach, but we will be doing just that – fighting against ourselves!
Fighting against our natural way of doing things, like swimming against the current, takes great effort, is exhausting, and rarely as effective as we would like. And so, any learning we have done about leadership styles falls by the wayside as we default back to our natural leadership style.
In some rare cases, I do think that people are able to make the consistent effort to change their leadership style over time. Authoritarian leaders can learn to become more democratic, for example. The leopard can sometimes change its spots. But this is the result of a very deliberate effort over a period of years. For most of us, this isn’t a realistic or effective strategy for improving as leaders and so seeking to master multiple styles of leadership is a red herring.
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Board Director | Advisor | Investor
6 年I agree one should not try to change one's natural style - that is stressful and ultimately will result in a return back to the one's nature especially in critical situations where the change will be an unwanted surprise for your team and peers. It is far better to stay true to your nature but adapting situationally to the needs of individuals and teams is critical.
CEO Focus Secure Video, Inc. Active Shooter solutions for Schools and Businesses
6 年Hmm, so I have had the opportunity to work under a variety of leaders that had very different styles. I have also read a bit on the subject in an effort to improve on my skills. What I seem to have missed here is the *salt to taste* component. At the end of the day we can all be put into buckets. In fact, this is probably one of the issues with our exposure at the executive level. The bigger the buckets the more we have to allow for wiggle room. When it comes to leadership, I think , some very different leaders extracted the best out of me in very different ways. As I think about this, the adaptability of a given person or leader's persona salting (if you will) with appropriate complementing norms could yield better results. Lord knows we are striving for it, but our ability to digest that which made others great and weave that into our own style could be a way forward. my .02
Chief Technology Officer at KlariVis
6 年I agree with the idea that people have a natural leadership style and that while you may be able to drift into other styles for a situation, it is not your forte and is not sustainable. It's far better to understand your natural style and adjust for situations rather than attempting to master something you're not. That's not to say you shouldn't learn concepts, but master YOUR style.