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Adaptive Leadership … Do You Have It in You?

Whether all is going well with your business or you are in the middle of a fight for survival, your team looks to you for leadership. How you seize this challenge and opportunity—passively, aggressively or not at all—might affect the very core of your ongoing business success. Your chosen leadership style will say as much about you as anything else you will ever do in business.

While we might wish it to be otherwise, leadership is not a “one size fits all” proposition. Rather, each situation requires its own style of leadership. And, perhaps to confuse the issue further, each individual member of the team might require a different leadership style as well. That’s why an adaptive leadership style is so important.

In these times, I am reminded of Daniel Goleman’s March/April, 2000 Harvard Business Review article titled “Leadership That Gets Results.” In this article, Goleman succinctly captures the essential qualities and challenges of true leadership in a way that can help leaders learn how to summon their strengths through an adaptive leadership approach.

Goleman wrote that there are six fundamental leadership styles, and that truly great leaders are adept at more than one of them. Furthermore, Goleman suggests that these leaders are instinctively able to adapt their leadership style to the needs of the situation and individuals at hand.

Goleman’s six leadership styles and their corresponding hallmarks are as follows:

• Coercive—“Do What I Say”
• Authoritative— “Come With Me”
• Affiliative— “People Come First”
• Democratic—Collaborative
• Pacesetting—Set high performance standards and exemplify them through the actions of the leader
• Coaching—Personal development of the team members

Let’s consider the first part of that equation. We often hear about people who are able to successfully lead during a turnaround, but fall flat when things are going well. In the turnaround situation, it is likely that there is not time for discussion, and the coercive style is appropriate. But once the turnaround is complete, can the leader change his stripes and employ one of the other styles? Is he capable of credibly moving from dictating to inviting people along for the ride? In either case, the employees need to march in lockstep toward the goal. It’s critical that the leader is able to get them to begin and continue that march.

Think about each of the members of a team that you lead. I have been fortunate to lead a number of high performance teams through the years. In each case, the members of the team understood and drove toward the goal. Their job was to understand the goal. My job was to recognize that a variety of leadership styles would be needed based on the individuals and specific situations. For example, I tended to use a pacesetting style for our group discussions, while in private I was a coach to some team members, a collaborator with some and authoritative with others.

I’ve found that “winging it” doesn’t work. The better approach is to begin with some self-analysis around your leadership style and the needs of your business and its employees. Ask yourself questions such as:

• Do I understand the need to adopt my style to the situation?
• Do I understand how the various styles I employ might lead to very different organizational results?
• Do I know the individual members of my team well enough to know what style will work for each of them?
• Do I engage my team as a whole, individually, openly and often enough to help shape future direction and determine if any midcourse corrections are needed?
• Do I help others understand why I might approach different situations and personalities differently?
• Do I listen more than I talk?

This is your time to lead—seize it—but remember to be flexible along the way.

This publication is part of Blackman Kallick’s marketing of professional services, and is not written tax advice directed at the specific facts and circumstances of any person and/or entity. Contents of this publication are of a general nature, and you should not act on this information without obtaining professional advice from your business advisor that is appropriately tailored to your individual needs and circumstances. This written advice is not intended or written to be used, and cannot be used by any taxpayer, for the purpose of avoiding penalties that may be imposed under the Internal Revenue Code.