Our leadership style comes from our own instinct and inclinations, as well as what we see from the bosses around us. Our field of study is actually quite limited. There are researchers, however, who go beyond those limits to conduct studies that allow us a more scientific assessment of what works and what doesn’t for leaders and managers.
Leadership consultants Jeffrey Hull and Margaret Moore have extensively studied that research and pulled out nine facets of leadership that they believe we must all be attuned to.
“A good deal of leadership science concerns the relationship of leaders with followers and how those relationships support followers’ performance. Your success as a leader depends in large part on the high-quality relationships that you have cultivated,” they summarize in The Science of Leadership.
They observe that what makes being a leader challenging is leadership capacities operate simultaneously at three levels: Leading yourself, leading others and leading a system, such as a team or an organization. Reflecting that delineation, they divide the nine capacities into three: Self-oriented, other-oriented and system-oriented capabilities. They suggest as you ponder the approaches you score yourself on each from one to nine on your strengths; what’s important in your current context; and, from those rankings, your priorities for getting better.
The self-oriented leadership capacities are:
- Conscious leadership: This is about managing your ego, to stay calm, stable and objective. That helps you to see things clearly – including yourself. It helps you to handle agitated emotional states, turning your noisy ego into a quieter one, allowing for more strength and calm. “Quieting a noisy ego is your path to leading better,” they say. This capacity and another they identify, agile leadership, so far lack significant studies but they say still merit our attention given related findings on emotional intelligence, mindfulness, cognitive ability and well-being.
- Authentic leadership: This involves caring about excellence in character, quality and outcomes. “You model integrity, genuinely walking your talk in communications, action and decisions. You help an organization align around a shared purpose that fulfils shared values. Being open and sincere, you create high-quality work relationships and inspire the work force to fulfil the team’s or organization’s purpose,” they explain.
- Agile leadership: Agile leaders move flexibly and gracefully across many tasks, perspectives and conflicts. “You zoom in and out, zip up and down from detail to big picture, from adversity to opportunity, from knowing to not knowing, from deep focus to mind-wandering, from rest to driving forward, from stability to disruptive change, from conflict to resolution, and on and on,” they write. That may feel familiar in today’s chaotic times. The concept of agile leadership is actually drawn from the 2001 Agile Manifesto signed by 17 software developers and is widely used in that field, as well as spawning agile coaching; given its newness, there is a lack of studies showing how and whether its effective but the authors believe it meets today’s needs.
The three other-oriented capacities to cultivate are:
- Relational leadership: This requires you to shift from task focus controlled by your prefrontal lobe to heart-centred connection, as you develop high-quality relationships. A key element is building rapport, trust and psychological safety by empathizing with others through careful listening. Top relational leaders seek to understand others’ perspectives and emotions and what is meaningful and important to them. They also accept and forgive others’ limitations and mistakes.
- Positive leadership: These leaders mobilize followers by helping them cultivate their psychological strength and well-being. Five key elements they focus on helping others to feel are autonomy, confidence, positive emotions, optimism and meaning or fulfilment of values. The two leadership consultants share a quote whose author is unknown: “What you appreciate, appreciates.”
- Compassionate leadership: As a compassionate leader you understand the everyday stresses and strains of the people around you and organizational life. “You combine the warmth of concern – the desire and ability to make work life better, for example less distressing and more rewarding – with a focus on accountability, being tough on performance,” they say.
The final three capacities are system-oriented:
- Shared leadership: This is also known as collective or distributed leadership and at the core involves a shift from “I” to “we.” Leadership roles are shared and distributed throughout the unit or organization and everyone is empowered to lead in their own contexts. That requires leaders to move away from authoritarian styles and adopt coaching, mentoring, teaching and training others to lead better. Overall direction is developed through an open and inclusive approach.
- Servant leadership: “The servant-leader is servant first,” in the famous words of Robert Greenleaf, who wrote the pioneering book on the field in 1977. Servant leaders are humble stewards of their team and organization. They focus on giving autonomy and developing others, to increase motivation and engagement. The servant capacity develops with psychological maturity, the two leadership consultants note.
- Transformational leadership: The most studied leadership topic, this asks leaders to be an inspirational visionary and influential role model, enabling creativity, motivation and confidence in others. “You stimulate others intellectually to challenge, expand and diversify their perspectives. And as a transformational leader, you model courage, a virtue in short supply,” they write.
That can seem an overwhelming list, but Mr. Hull and Ms. Moore ask you to consider it a gift from the researchers developing the science of leadership. Re-reading the nine items and scoring can help you figure out what fits most in your current situation and what you ought to experiment with improving.
Cannonballs
- If you are struggling to balance a desire to be supportive to team members you lead with the reality of feeling overwhelmed by your own to-do list, consultant Elizabeth Lotardo advises you to stop solving the team’s problems for them. When they come to you with problems, begin with “What have you tried?” Over time, that will change their approach.
- Former Rotman School of Management dean Roger Martin often finds himself receiving questions about what people “should” do in strategy, such as “should start-ups do strategy or just get to work or how often should we do strategy?” He says there is only one universal, generalizable “should”: You should start from and focus on reality. Don’t start with an idealized abstraction.
- Change consultant Greg Satell says you never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people enthusiastic about it. Even a small initial cadre is enough to deliver a successful keystone change that gets the ball rolling. Then it’s just a matter of building the scale of change.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.