Situational Leadership

Situational Leadership

Part 2: Personal integrity in leadership

by Andrew Grant

The first article in the three-part ’Situational Leadership’ series highlighted the need for direct connections to be made between what is taught and what is experienced in order to bridge the ‘synaptic gap’ between intention and implementation. This second article examines the need for recognizing personal styles for contemporary varied environments – and shows how leaders can lead in a way that is meaningful and relevant for them in their particular context.
The new rules for playing the leadership game

My tennis coach once told me a secret about how to best approach the game when playing against other males. “Just get the ball over the net 3 times in a row and then your opponent's testosterone should kick in, making him go for a big winning but high risk shot.” I have continued to use this strategy and have discovered it works every time.

There is a lesson I have taken away from this experience should someone now try this tactic on me. For 20 years, like most males, I would try to make every shot a winner - meaning I would hit the ball as hard as I could. It would not matter if it was my forehand or backhand, if I could, I would thrash the ball and hope it hit the mark. What I have learnt now is: If a ball comes to my forehand (my strongest and most consistent side) I should go for a winner, but if it goes to my backhand (my weakest side) I should just keep the ball in play.

Knowing my strengths on the court has changed my mental game, helping me achieve much more with much less frustration. This new strategy is especially useful when I play tennis doubles, as my partner and I are continuously monitoring the situation by utilizing our strengths and covering for each other's weaknesses as a team.
But how easy is it to translate this into the work situation? How many leaders fail to recognize their personal strengths and weaknesses, and are unable to 'play the game' well as a result? Self awareness and a knowledge of how to maximize signature strengths develops a secure foundation for personal integrity in leadership, and is fundamental for authentic situational leadership.

Starting with signature strengths

Having established the need to find meaningful connections in order to trigger relevant actions in the first article in this series, the next area that needs to be addressed is learning how to make those connections. Understanding themselves and their signature qualities is essential for leaders to build an awareness of how they typically approach situations. This self awareness then enables leaders to make links with the circumstances they face.

Behavior profiling is a useful tool in self analysis and, ultimately, situational connection. By considering the different behavior profiles of leaders and the diverse styles that they utilize, it is possible to examine the application of these styles for specific situations individual leaders may face. There are a number of different profiling tools that can be used to help make sense of leadership styles. With over 1.2 million Google articles on ‘leadership profiles’, it’s not difficult to learn about what profiling methods can be useful and how profiling can be applied.
Behavior profiling works by identifying specific qualities and patterns of behavior that are unique to individuals. Once aware of their typical behavior patterns or styles, leaders can adopt a proactive approach to leadership.

Leading from a position of strength

It is possible to lead from your individual personal strengths rather than feeling you have to fit into a specific behavior profile.
The average leader will only lead by using their natural default leadership abilities without really maximizing these. Because they are not aware of their strengths and weaknesses, average leaders will have limited ability and can only perform in a fixed environment.
The greatest asset you can have as a leader is the ability to recognize your default leadership style and to recognize your specific strengths and weaknesses so that you can lead from your strengths while minimizing your limitations.

The situational slide

Another useful outcome of leadership style analysis is that once you know your specific position in terms of leadership and have identified the specific values that underpin that position, you can learn to slide to work from a different perspective depending on the situation without losing authenticity.

Gandhi, for example, was capable of being strong when it was required and supportive and caring when that was the greater priority. He knew his own personal strengths and the demands of the particular situations he found himself in well enough to be able to remain true to his core values yet still adapt as needed. This flexibility built on the foundation of a strong awareness and clear self-knowledge meant that Gandhi was able to deal with the changing situations he faced with a real integrity that commanded great respect.

The complementary coordinator

The other way to effectively lead is to recognize individual strengths in different people and utilize human resources to their fullest by ensuring there are other people with different behavior profiles surrounding them to complement their skills. This means the leader does not need to be all things to all people, but rather effectively coordinates a complementary leadership team. This takes the pressure off the individual, and empowers the team to achieve far more than any single individual could.
The leaders of Everest expeditions have a style of leadership that is contrary to that which has been advocated for many years in corporate culture. The leaders utilize team members’ strengths to ensure the group gets to the top. This includes allocating a huge responsibility entirely to the Sherpas. Sherpas will walk with the group or even guide from behind, and they often don’t go to the top themselves.

Although a leader may have the wisdom and experience they do not necessarily have all the skills, so their role is to find complementary people who are able to achieve the goal as a team. The effective leader recognizes the team’s individual expertise and their own weaknesses. They do not need to lead from in front as the all-knowing expert.
Authentic leadership

Integrity as a leader is about remaining true to your core strengths and values. We all have something valuable to offer as a leader, and by recognizing individual leadership strengths and maximizing these we can bring an authentic style of leadership that will inspire real loyalty and commitment.

Jim Collins in ‘Good to Great’ and Martin Seligman in ‘Authentic Happiness’ both talk about finding signature strengths and building on these. And Collins says that when a team of people are all doing what they do best, then there is no need to motivate them.

This positive energy created by leaders who know themselves and their roles and are true to their strengths flows through an organization and ultimately creates an authentic culture of passion and commitment.
And for the leader themselves and for the organization, that can only be a good thing!

Thanks to Andrew Grant of TIRIAN for the permition to post this article in Weblog IHKA Bali

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Situational Leadership

Part 3: The Marshmallow Leadership Principle Situational leadership for the long term

by Andrew Grant

The first article in the three-part ’Situational Leadership’ series revealed how direct connections need to be made between what is taught and what is experienced in order to bridge the ‘synaptic gap’ between intention and implementation. The second article then examined the need for recognizing personal styles for contemporary varied environments – and showed how leaders can lead in a way that is meaningful and relevant for them in their particular context. This final article in the series focuses on situational leadership for the long term – how to ensure this sort of flexible leadership style can last.

The marshmallow temptation

Imagine you are 4 years old and participating in an experiment. A nice adult gives you a marshmallow and then says they have to leave the room to get something. Just as they leave, they say that if you can wait until they come back before eating the marshmallow, they will give you two marshmallows. When the nice friendly adult leaves the room it’s just you and the marshmallow…

Now imagine you are watching the results of this experiment (which is an actual experiment) – you are watching the faces the children pull and the way they squirm as they fight the temptation and to try to hold back from eating the marshmallow until the researcher returns. Some will eat the marshmallow straight away, caring nothing for the instructions or outcomes – others will stare at it as an internal battle rages between long term rewards and instant gratification. In actual fact, some even lick the table around the marshmallow trying to get as close as they can to eating it without breaking the rules, or cover their eyes to try to banish it from their minds.

Which type of child would you have been?

The performance connection

Now imagine 14 years later. The nice friendly adult (who turns out to be an undercover researcher) locates you and everyone else that sat in that room 14 years ago. The researcher interviews you to find out about your life, your successes and failures, and tries to see if there is any connection between those that ate the one marshmallow and those that waited and received two as a reward.

As it turned out in this experiment, the one-marshmallow kids (now young adults) – the "grabbers" (34%) – suffered more from low self-esteem and were viewed by others as stubborn, prone to envy and easily frustrated. The two-marshmallow kids – the "waiters" (66%) – were better copers, more socially competent and self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable and more academically successful. This group even scored about 210 points higher on their SATs.

Marshmallow leadership

The character traits highlighted by the ‘Marshmallow Test’ persist in adult life. They affect our performance in every area. In the area of leadership, leaders can also end up working from the one- or two- marshmallow principle. They can be guilty of looking for short term gains at the expense of potential long term outcomes.

In their role, leaders are required to both set and reach goals, and manage people to help a group reach those goals as a coordinated team.
A simple way of understanding the basic defining leadership roles comes from Jay Conger, who follows John Kotter's lead by defining leadership with three dimensions. We have summarized these into describing leaders as individuals who:

Establish direction and a goal in a working group of individuals
Gain commitment (Kotter: "aligning") from these group members to this direction and motivate these members to achieve the organization's outcomes.

Before this (in the late 1960s), Hersey and Blanchard came up with what they saw were the 2 key areas of successful leadership: Task Focus & People Focus. Establishing direction is related to the task focus, while gaining commitment and ensuring motivation is related to people focus. This model revealed that most of us have a bias to one of these areas, and this shapes our leadership style.

The problem can be that leaders can end up spending time managing short term needs and crises related to dealing with people at the expense of reaching the long term goal. For the situational leader – who is true to his or her own unique leadership strengths – there can be a natural bias that is difficult to overcome.

By knowing their specific bias and being aware of how this can affect their performance, and by knowing the goal ahead and understanding how to stay on target and self-correct, the situational leader is able to face the different needs and demands of each new situation they will face.
Getting to that goal

For those who tend to focus on keeping people happy rather than trying to reach a goal, the desire to please everyone can be an instant "marshmallow" gratification. To get those immediate smiles or words of praise, one-marshmallow leaders spend the better part of each day responding to random requests to do this or that, help this person or that one -- and never get around to pursuing his or her own projects or helping the group focus on reaching their projects.

Obviously aiming for a long term goal and being disciplined about reaching it without gaining group support and commitment will be a disaster. A leader can’t afford not to make the people in the team a priority. But there needs to be a balance. In the end the goal will both define and be defined by the relationships, but without being disciplined enough to aim for a goal in the first place a leader’s actions are worthless.
The situational leader who has a clear goal in mind to reach for the long run, even if that goal needs to be adjusted along the way due the specific circumstances they face, will be able to both meet the needs of the people working with him or her, and finish the task.
And that is a truly satisfying and enriching experience.

Thanks to Andrew Grant of TIRIAN for the permition to post this article to weblog IHKA Bali