Leaning into Leadership: Navigating the Complex Terrain of Modern Workplace Leadership Styles

Personally, becoming a leader has been a difficult journey for me. I confronted many insecurities and navigated through the plethora of leadership bibles. I’ve had to take a deep look at what leadership means. What am I creating with my style of leadership? What is the ‘best’ method of leadership? This is why we are kicking off with LEANING into LEADERSHIP this month.?

With all my experience working with elite professionals and teams, I thought I had it dialled, but the longer I lean into leadership, the more complex it seems to become. When I’m tired, my leadership ideals can quickly get hijacked by a more transactional approach, and when I’m busy achieving my own tasks, again, the idyllic leadership principles that I often talk about quickly become conceptual and not practical. So, over the last several years, I have become obsessed with understanding how to lead in an optimal manner, regardless of whether I’m tired or busy.

Whether helping my kids navigate their friendships or leading a team of coaches to bring out the best in people who are already performing to great heights, I have learnt that there is always a short-term and medium-term impact of what I say and do. Often, what seems like the easiest thing to say in the moment to get a quick response leaves me frustrated hours or days later.

In examining leadership styles, history would dictate that preferred methodologies have moved from instructional and more dictatorial styles to more transformative and empowering leadership approaches. Yes, being clear and precise in our directions (transactional leadership) is important. Yes, it is important to encompass the person’s needs (humanistic approach). Yes, it is important to give people the space to learn, grow, and become empowered (transformational leadership). But nowadays, this is not enough.

These styles have offered an important shift in how we interact with people to meet the issues of their time, but modern-day workplaces have moved on:

Whether it's accounting for traditionalists, baby boomers, generation X, millennials, and generation Z all in the same team or dealing with the situation of constant, unpredictable change that is now the norm in certain industries and markets (VUCA), finding a leadership style that is as adaptable as it is a pillar of strength is complex.

People’s well-being needs to be central to achieving sustainable performance, visions need to be clear but not set in stone, and collective goals need to be aligned with individual aspirations.

Safety to explore, make mistakes, and learn is paramount to creating innovative and creative solutions, and younger generations need to feel like they are ‘coming home’ rather than ‘going to work’ so as not to question why they are giving so much of their life to one entity. Perhaps even more important is the day-to-day challenges level individuals face. Too much challenge and we create anxiety-driven cultures that lead to stressed communication, corners being cut, and burnout. Too little challenge and we create presentism and disengaged workers. No more are workers happy to be treated as a resource and embody the corporate sheep jacket that society has relied on for decades. It is too easy to jump ship and test if the grass is greener.

People want it all, security, stability, flexibility, enactive learning, excitement (but not too much excitement), and opportunity to create their own jobs that match their strengths. So, how do we meet these demands whilst steadying the ship and evolving the business?

At the Flow Centre? we work with Flow Leadership as we believe it stands out as a beacon of innovation, offering a fresh perspective perfectly aligned with the challenges of our times. It advocates a transformation of organisations into dynamic performance systems, where leadership is not a centralised authority but a distributed capability and nurturing growth is a priority for all. If you are interested in learning more about our approach to Flow Leadership, have a look here: https://www.flowcentre.org/flow-leadership