Get Beyond Your Natural Leadership Style: Learn to Flex

August 7, 2024

https://triplecrownleadership.com/get-beyond-style-2/Get Beyond Your Natural Leadership Style: Learn to Flex

Though you have a natural leadership style, to be effective and masterful you need to learn to get beyond it. Now, that may sound difficult. After all, people have their natural personalities. People enter leadership roles with a disposition that drives them to be either commanding or collaborative, introverted or extroverted, cautious or decisive, relationship-oriented or task-oriented.

You can’t change your DNA, and you should be authentic, as leadership author Bill George has written, avoiding the trap of trying to lead like someone else. But you can change your behavior.

For decades, managers have relied on a battery of tools, such as the Myers-Briggs personality type and the Insights Discovery System, to understand their natural personality profiles and obtain insights about their preferred leadership style. These are useful starting points, but only a beginning.

Triple crown leadership requires getting beyond your natural leadership style. Just knowing yourself well and following your personality instincts is insufficient. In an interview for our book, Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations, Chip Baird, CEO of North Castle Partners (a private equity firm), told us:

“Leaders have dominant genetics. They can lead with people skills, technical skills, or formal authority—sometimes ordering, sometimes inspiring, sometimes cajoling, sometimes placating. I think an effective leader has to be able to use all those skills, regardless of what their core leadership genetic is.”

Mike Critelli, former chairman and CEO of Pitney Bowes, told us about how hard it was for him to get beyond his natural leadership style. By nature, he was fast-moving and aggressive:

“I was very comfortable blowing up existing systems, but I realized that only a small percentage of the population could function that way. There were many decisions that I consciously did not make. Before I arrived, there was clearly a preference from employees for the CEO to make decisions. But building organizational capability requires a CEO to bite his or her tongue. That was a hard change for me.”

What we call “triple crown leadership” (i.e., the kind of leadership it takes to build an organization that’s excellent, ethical, and enduring) requires stepping out of your natural behavioral box:

The shy foreman must speak up in front of large groups.
The quiet administrator must be a courageous “voice of one” in a staff meeting, even when others resent her for making waves.
The reflective thinker must make a quick decision when circumstances demand it.
The dominating vice president has to learn to shut up and listen.

Cheryl Dorsey, president of Echoing Green (a nonprofit funder of social entrepreneurs), phrased it this way:

“I’m a natural mover, not a bystander. If nobody talks, I talk. I’ll jump in if there’s a pause: that’s my natural behavior. I need to rewire myself, but people have to help me. Sometimes entrepreneurs need to be coached out of their instinctual behaviors.”

Some people object, saying people are who they are and can’t change. We disagree. Leaders can change their behavior. And they must learn to do so if they want to succeed.

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. It will help you develop self-awareness and identify ways to improve your leadership.

Examples: Flexing Between “Steel and Velvet”

In this process, the key is to understand the context and people, judging each time whether to move toward the hard or soft edge of leadership (what we call “steel and velvet”). There’s continual movement back and forth. Call it leadership “flex.”

Four-Star U.S. Air Force General Jack Chain oversaw much of the U.S. nuclear arsenal as Commander in Chief of the U.S. Strategic Air Command (SAC). When he learned about a minor security violation at an air base, he had the officers in charge of security on every SAC base flown into the Omaha headquarters. He stood them all at attention and “chewed their asses.”

Even though a single sergeant in the field blew it, Chain reminded them that they were in charge of all the sergeants. He said they were part of a larger team, the team had failed, and they had brought great discredit on SAC. Then he walked out.

“When you have a nuclear weapons mission,” he explained to us, “there is no tolerance for error.”

More often, though, Chain relied on velvet leadership. He also told us:

“You can’t just stay at the hard edge. You will not earn any support. You have to take care of your people and care about them from your heart and soul. You’ve got to love them. If they are screwing up, you have to discipline them, but you still have to love them. You have to know about their spouse and children, how they are doing at home. You have to worry about all your direct reports and whether they are taking care of the next level, and the next level, all the way down.”

Chain was able to flex between ramrod steel and soft velvet, in the process earning the respect and best efforts of his air corps.

Similarly, Dr. Andres Alonso, former CEO of Baltimore City Schools, learned to flex across this spectrum artfully. When he took over, the district was in trouble. Enrollment was down from 190,000 students in the 1960s to 81,500, decimating the district’s budget and morale. Many parents, teachers, and experts viewed it as a failing system. Amid all those challenges, Alonso had to flex often:

“It’s necessary to veer between hard and soft because we are constantly dealing with different situations and different people. I have been incredibly hard. We terminated almost five hundred positions in the central office in two years. But the daily work requires far more of the soft, because most people want to do what’s right. There has to be versatility. It can mean being tremendously hard in conversations with the city council, and twenty minutes later being in a parent meeting, listening for an hour, acknowledging everything that is being said.”

Triple crown leadership is not about a steel leader with a velvet colleague, or the reverse. Such a pairing can be schizophrenic, creating confusion and slowing it down. You have to do both yourself.

As a leader, can you really be decisive and resolute while at other times being light in your touch, deferring to others, and letting others lead? Elizabeth Crossman, former board chair for Habit for Humanity International, told us:

“As a board, we have confidence that our CEO has a balance between the soft and hard edges of leadership. If leadership is too far on the hard edge, you’re going to stifle creativity; too much on the soft side, you can flounder. Balancing between directing and empowering is an art.”

How do you determine when to flex your leadership approach?

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

Steel and Velvet Judgment

“With good judgment, little else matters; without good judgment, nothing else matters.”
-Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis, leadership authors

There are two primary considerations for when to flex your leadership: the nature of the situation and the types of people involved.

1. Situation.

Does your organization need more discipline and controls on its cash burn rate? (More steel.) Is it a nonprofit with good programs but a creeping complacency and broken business model? (More steel.) Is it a government program demoralized by budget cuts and a need to reengage its workers? (More velvet.) Is it the ordinary course of business with meetings, assessments, and feedback loops? ( Judicious blend, but mostly velvet.) Each situation has different leadership demands.

Philip Soucy, CEO of Modern Technology Solutions, told us, “For me, 90 percent of the time is mentoring, coaching, understanding what’s stopping people from being successful. Ten percent is ‘No, don’t do it that way; do it this way.’”

Generally, you should use velvet leadership much more than steel.

Lorrie Norrington, the former president of eBay Marketplaces, told us:

“Leading in wartime is different than leading in peacetime. Peacetime leadership is about nurturing people and co-creating with them, gently pushing them along at times, while difficult circumstances call for a more directive style. Leadership is very situational.”

2. People.

The second consideration for flexing your leadership is the type of people involved. Are you dealing with software coders, tenured university faculty, political campaign volunteers, investment bankers, or migrant workers? Is there homogeneity and physical proximity among workers, or are they dispersed globally?

According to Norrington, “Understanding where people are—who needs to be creatively challenged, and who needs to be more directed—is an art.”

Alignment Scorecard

When organizations aren’t aligned, it can reduce performance dramatically and cause frustration and dysfunction. With this Alignment Scorecard, you can assess your organization’s level of alignment and make plans for improving it.

Anchoring Your Leadership Flex

As you flex your leadership approach, how can you avoid the perception of inconsistency and the damaged credibility that can flow from it?

The key is to always operate in accordance with the organization’s shared purpose, values, and vision. Such anchoring builds organizational character.

Author James O’Toole says, “Leaders must . . . adapt the unnatural behavior of always leading by the pull of inspiring values.”

To avoid confusion, you should take the time to explain, especially when you’re invoking steel, why you’re taking those actions and how the decision remains consistent with the purpose, values, and vision.

Leaders beware: Even while you’re flexing your leadership approach, sometimes conflicts in values may arise. Classic values conflicts are truth versus loyalty, individual versus community, and short-term versus long-term.

When that happens, be sure to encourage spirited dialogues about the shared values and their different interpretations. Recognize that the quality of decisions improves when there is active debate. Just raising the issue about how a proposed action stacks up against the triple crown standard of excellent, ethical, and enduring leads the group to examine the decision creatively, often finding a better way that’s more consistent with the values and strategies.