Why Leadership Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All (And How to Find Your Sweet Spot)

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DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES REQUIRE DIFFERENT APPROACHES

I've been wanting for a while now to address a question from Virginie Hoareau, one of our dedicated listeners, and a Leadership Beyond the Theory alumna. Virginie asked if I could discuss the different stages of a business, and whether a different type of leadership is required for each.

How critical is it to match a leader's style to a business phase? Can any leader be successful in any stage of an organization's life cycle?

Even though I often talk about different leadership styles and how they affect your ability to achieve results, I've never really addressed how different styles could be matched to different situations. In this newsletter, I do just that.

I start by examining the conundrum between the need to be authentic and the need to adapt to your circumstances; I then explore each of the three main phases of a business, and the skills that are required for each; and I finish with a couple of practical tips for understanding which phase best suits your style, and how to develop the leadership capabilities that will make you wildly successful, no matter which business phase you find yourself in.

YOUR LEADERSHIP FINGERPRINT

When I talk about leadership styles, the underlying principle is that every individual's style is unique.

The expression that best conveys this is that you have a unique leadership fingerprint. Your leadership style is a factor of a lot of different things, some of which you simply can't change, like:

• Your personality;
• Your upbringing;
• Your previous experiences and life choices.

Then, of course, there are some factors which you absolutely can change:

• Your education;
• Your risk tolerance;
• Your confidence;
• Your resilience;
• Your emotional intelligence;

… and probably a dozen other factors.

Just think about the number of different permutations and combinations here, and you'll get a sense of how varied different leadership styles can be.

We've all seen this play out over the course of our careers. Most of us have worked for a number of different bosses, and we've experienced the fact that their styles can be chalk and cheese.

Importantly, there is no right or wrong style of leadership. There's just your style, and no matter where your leadership style is at the start of your career, it's going to inevitably evolve over time. It has to.

Leaders are learners, so if you apply yourself to personal and professional development, you can improve fairly rapidly—if you do, then over time you’ll become an infinitely better leader than you were when you started out.

But even if you don't proactively do anything to improve, your environment is going to shape you over time—you will change. Some people might call this “wisdom”.

The things you learn and the choices you make every day (in your life and your career) are going to help you to evolve, hopefully for the better. It won't fundamentally change who you are, but if you do it consciously, you'll certainly become better over time.

This is why I dedicated my book No Bullsh!t Leadership, “To every leader with the courage to be better.”

TWO SITUATIONS REQUIRING ADAPTATION

It's important to understand your style, and act in a way that's consistent with who you are. Trying to be someone else simply won't work. Your people are going to smell it a mile away and eventually it'll end up destroying trust.

You have to try not to stray too far from your leadership fingerprint. Having said that, the very best leaders also know how to read the play, and they adapt skillfully to the situation at hand.

There are two situations in which you'll need to adapt:

1. Altering your style for different individuals; and
2. Altering your style for different business phases.

The focus for this newsletter is on the different styles that are best suited to the various phases of a business. But first, I just want to say a few words about adapting your style to suit individuals.

Although you have a distinct style that won't fundamentally change, the individuals in your team are going to require different levels of support.

I've mentioned Situational Leadership Theory several times on the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. This model dictates that your style should be different based on the capability and maturity of the individual you are leading.

Some people, when they're new in a role, or they've just joined the team and don't understand the context as well, are going to require more support. Others, who are very experienced, confident, and capable, require only minimal input from you to perform to an exceptional standard.

The four styles prescribed by situational leadership theory are: telling; selling; participating; and delegating. You can see how much you might have to adapt your natural style to meet people's needs. Every individual requires a slightly different emphasis from you, based on their ability to work and achieve results independently.

Your job as a leader is to be clear on the standard you're setting and to help each individual successfully meet that standard. You want to support your people—in an appropriate way—so set reasonable expectations for their performance, and help them to develop (within reason, of course). This is done by applying the Challenge, Coach, Confront framework.

Remember, every relationship you form is as unique as your own leadership fingerprint.

WHY DOES STYLE MATTER?

When it comes to adapting your style to different business phases, it's important to understand what those phases are. I'm going to concentrate on the three main phases:

1. Growth;
2. Turnaround; and
3. Steady state.

You might hear people also talk about other phases like startup, or reinvention, or decline. These phases aren't quite as prevalent and, when they are, they share common traits with the main three, which are easily adaptable.

By the end of this newsletter, you should be able to identify which phase of business your style and capability are most suited to.

Interestingly, very few leaders can excel in every stage of a company's evolution. Some leaders thrive in one phase but may struggle in others, for example:

• A turnaround leader might be way too aggressive for a steady-state company (Yeah, that might be me!).
• A growth leader may struggle with the continuous improvement and efficiency measures required in a turnaround.
• A steady-state leader may not have the strength to make the changes required in a turnaround, or to take the risks required to grow a company quickly.

Great leaders recognize the business phase they're operating in and they adapt accordingly. But they also know their sweet spot, and they're really clear on which phase of a business they're most equipped to excel in.

This is why, in my humble opinion, the primary function of any board is to hire the right CEO to lead the business through the phase that it's currently in.

THE TURNAROUND LEADER

I'm a turnaround leader, so I'm going to start there – I know it well.

Turnaround describes the phase of a business where some sort of intervention is required.

The business is generally in trouble in some way: declining revenue; shrinking market share; baked-in inefficiencies and waste; previous failures of leadership – and a host of other ailments that can plague a business.

In this case, there's an urgent need for radical change to prevent further losses, and to ensure the ongoing viability of the business.

Imagine being a personal trainer and you walk into a living room where a person has spent the last 10 years sitting on the couch, subsisting on a diet of cookies and beer. To bring that person back to health, you'd have to take a fairly radical approach: a multi-dimensional lifestyle change involving nutrition, exercise, and mental health. You know that half measures would have little impact.

I've had roles where I've been that personal trainer. In these cases, employees feel as though they're living in a deeply uncertain environment although, often, they're strangely in denial about the urgency of their situation… morale is incredibly low.

This requires a leader who's strong enough to fix what's broken. It's as simple as that:

• They need to be decisive and uncompromising;
• They need to bring new levels of accountability;
• They need to break through the conventional wisdom that's holding the organization back;
• They need to act quickly, while still understanding the risk of doing so; and
• They know instinctively that they can't bring everyone along for the journey – most often, the people who are determined to hold the business back have to move on to their next adventure.

Turnaround leaders have a relentless focus on value. They root out and kill low-value work. They remove bottlenecks, and they focus on the things that are most going to contribute to the recovery of the business.

The danger is that the obvious urgency can drive an element of short-termism, which is why the very best turnaround leaders are mindful of the hospital emergency room metaphor:

• When a patient comes into the ER, you may simply have to place your finger on an artery to stop the patient from bleeding out;
• Survival is the only name of the game, and unless you get through that, the long-term recovery of the patient is completely irrelevant;
• Once the patient is stabilized, though, you can move them to the intensive care unit (they're no longer in imminent, life-threatening peril, but they're not out of the woods yet either);
• Once the patient is well enough to leave the ICU, a plan can be devised for their long-term recovery.

Turnaround necessarily requires a willingness for a leader to make tough calls. This may involve layoffs, or product cuts, or major operational shifts. In turnaround, employees need clear, authoritative communication.

So, if you’re a leader who tries to please everyone, you'll fail.

If you're a leader who can't make tough decisions quickly, you'll fail.

If you move too slowly when action's required, you'll fail.

If you don't communicate clearly and transparently, you'll fail.

The challenge of turnaround is exciting, but it takes a certain style of leader to excel in such a demanding environment.

THE GROWTH LEADER

The growth phase typically sees a company scaling, expanding, and dominating its markets. The company is winning… revenue is increasing… new customers are coming in… the team is growing.

This is an exciting place to be, but new hires, new systems, and market expansion all create complexity. Like turnaround, speed is everything. Teams need to execute quickly and to capitalize on the momentum that they're building.

Growth requires a leader who's an empowering visionary:

• Someone who can first scale the business in their head, so that they can imagine the target state before they get there;
• Someone who's great at delegating — they can shift from the doing to enabling, so they don't create bottlenecks;
• Someone who can empower their teams to execute at speed;
• Someone with big picture thinking;
• Someone who can mold the fast-moving, competitive strategy to deliver on the investor's long-term vision.

Just like turnaround, they have to make decisions quickly and avoid a build-up of bureaucracy that might stall growth… and they need to be really good at hiring and retaining talent.

But growth is hard and it's really easy to stuff it up. The biggest trap I see growth leaders falling into is chasing revenue without maintaining the company's profitability. Remember: revenue is vanity; profit is sanity; but cashflow is reality.

It's not uncommon for growth leaders to get caught up in the explosive growth and to neglect their cashflow position, creating dire circumstances for the business. It can get out of control really quickly if they don't ensure that scalable systems are put in place along the way.

But, paradoxically, letting go can be hard, and many growth leaders simply can't. They micromanage their people instead of stretching them to bring out their peak performance.

The other big trap that growth leaders fall into is not protecting the company culture as the business grows, and this can lead to diluted values and poor hires.

You can see the similarities between growth and turnaround leaders, but I'm sure you can also see the distinctive characteristics that better suit each of those phases.

In the last five years or so, I've developed a real growth leader's mindset, as I've worked intensively with our clients who are scaling their businesses. But in my heart of hearts, I'm still a turnaround guy.

THE STEADY STATE LEADER

Steady state is a phase of maturity, of gentle optimization. It’s characterized by a lack of urgency—and this is absolutely not me. There is no way I could work in steady state. I'd be bored sh!tless in less than six months.

This is a phase where a company is established, and it's profitable. It's comfortably maintaining its market share.

In steady state, growth eases, and the focus shifts to long-term sustainability. Efficiency improvements slow because there's no sense of urgency. Without an imminent threat, people instinctively relax and, just like the boiling frog, they don't realize until it's too late.

The goal in this phase is to prevent decline while maximizing profit.

A steady-state leader needs to be:

• Process-driven and risk aware;
• They need to be able to refine and optimize;
• They need to focus on making existing processes more efficient;
• They need to balance stability with innovation.

But too much status quo kills growth and, equally, too much risk can break the business, which is why steady-state leaders tend to be risk averse: If it ain't broke, don't fix it, right!?

Steady-state leaders tend to focus more on team alignment than they do on business performance. In steady state, it's easy to become overly risk averse, and this leads to stagnation.

What's worse, it creates blind spots. Market shifts are easily ignored, and innovation opportunities are easily missed.?

When a company falls into this malaise—and I do believe it's a malaise—it starts to bleed talent because the work environment feels rigid… it feels uninspiring. Steady state businesses are not where stars go to develop and excel.

One of the great truths of business is that you can never stand still. David Yoffie, the strategy professor at Harvard Business School, talks about the Red Queen Effect, a term drawn from Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking-Glass: You have to run faster and faster just to stay where you are.

If your business isn't improving every day, you'll find it's going backwards and, eventually, you'll need to look for a turnaround leader like me to come in and fix it.

PREPARING FOR THE RIGHT PHASE

I want to give you two practical tools, which I think are going to massively increase the likelihood that you'll put yourself in the right context:

First, I'm going to give you a tool that will help you work out which phase of a business you are most suited to.

Based on my descriptions of the three phases, and the style and capability required by each, you should find it easier to identify the phase that you’re best suited to. This starts with the timeless piece of wisdom—know thyself!

To understand who you are as a leader, it's worth taking the time to explicitly define your leadership style and to clearly articulate it. In Ep.257: Your Leadership User Manual, I outline a clear process for how to do this, and I give you a free downloadable PDF to guide you through the process.

Once you have greater insight into your leadership style, it's going to help you to seek out the jobs that allow you to operate at your best… to be in your sweet spot.

You could easily spend an hour or two on this exercise, and I promise you it will have an exponential payback for your effort. Knowing where you excel is going to help you to make better choices, and this can be the difference between unparalleled success, and deep frustration.

The second tool is all about your core leadership capability. There are some universal skills that are going to boost your confidence and performance—in any environment.

They'll enable you to navigate complexity; to overcome cultural resistance; and to eliminate poor performance in any business phase.

They'll help you to seek out and optimize value, regardless of how unstable the leadership above you might be.

Your ability to communicate with confidence, to chart a way through ambiguity, and to execute flawlessly comes from years of dedication to the disciplines of strong leadership. These skills are going to serve you well, no matter which phase of a business you may find yourself in.

This is why we created Ep.186: Your Personal Leadership Audit. It includes a free downloadable PDF with a short quiz that's going to help you to identify your strengths, and uncover any blind spots you might have.

I'd really encourage you to spend a few minutes doing your personal leadership audit and a little more time in thoughtful reflection about your unique style by constructing your own leadership user manual.

UNLOCKING THE VALUE IN EACH PHASE

Think of your organizational fit like a key being inserted into a lock.

The key (that's you!) has a specific shape. Its grooves and notches represent your leadership capability, your experience, and your style.

The lock (that’s the organization) has its own internal mechanisms, which are shaped by its current challenges, its culture, and the state of evolution it's in.

If the key and the lock align well, the door unlocks smoothly, but if they don't align, the key simply won't work. The only way to solve this mismatch is to either adjust the key, or to change the lock.

But, in most cases, it's way easier just to get a new key!

This is from Episode 341 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on your favorite podcast player.