Conquering Your Paradoxical Leadership Challenges with the eXpansive Leadership Model

The test of a first-rate intelligence is
the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind
at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Dimensions of Leadership
As complicated and difficult as your job as a leader is (at work or home), it has only two primary dimensions:

I. What you do – task-oriented behaviors.
II. How you interact with others – relationship-oriented behaviors.

Each of these dimensions can be subdivided into two sides as seen below (examples are in parentheses):

I. What you do:
A. Major Tasks                         B. Minor Tasks
(contemplate strategic issues)   (focus on project details)

II. How you interact with others:
A. Direct Others                       B. Support Others
(confront a poor performer)      (celebrate team accomplishments)

Defining the leaders’ job in this manner is not new. The pioneering research at Ohio State University and the University of Michigan identified the importance of task-oriented and relationship-oriented behaviors back in the 1950s and 1960s.

Paradoxical Challenges Require Paradoxical Thinking
Professor Richard Farson writes in his challenging book on paradox that, “There’s nothing as invisible as the obvious.” (1) What is obvious, yet not done until now, is to place the two sides of each dimension in opposition to each other and in an interdependent model, as seen below:

This general model summarizes what you need to do (Minor and Major Tasks) and how you need to interact with those doing the tasks (Direct and Support People) as you pursue your goals. Each of these four sides is also ways of thinking about your leadership responsibilities. How you think about what you do and how think about your interactions with others is fundamental to your success. This is because the quality of your thinking dictates the effectiveness of your decisions, which determines your actions, thereby creating your results. (You might want to read that last sentence again. I’ll warn you when I’m being profound!) If you want better results, you need to think better about your challenges and goals. And since we have already concluded in a previous blog that many of your challenges are paradoxical, so too must be your leadership thinking – your process of unleashing the energy of others toward worthy goals.

These four ways of thinking represent four fundamental leadership styles that I have labeled Rational, Visionary, Commanding, and Empowering as seen in below in the eXpansive Leadership Model (XLM). Notice that the styles are in opposition to each other. This enables you to begin thinking about issues paradoxically. The research predicts that you can produce eXtraordinary results when you apply this model to the mountains you scale every day.

How can you use this model to think paradoxically?

Keep eXpanding,

Dave

P.S. Click on this link (or paste it into your browser) to read about or take the XLM assessment. http://xlmassessment.com/

1. Richard Farson; Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1996.

Are You a Leader or Manager?

When I worked for the global giant Siemens many years ago, I reported to a boss who thought he was leading us, but Don was only managing us. He provided little inspiration, cross-functional collaboration or innovation. While he thought of us as followers, we felt like subordinates. Don didn’t realize that subordinates comply with marching orders, whereas followers commit to pursuing worthy goals. Lunch with Peter Drucker helped me understand this distinction.

The purpose of my luncheon meeting with management guru Peter Drucker, whom Harvard Business Review considers the “father of management,” was to discuss the overall strategy for a new organization we were building at UCLA. After soaring with Professor Drucker’s illuminating ideas, I found myself back on earth in my office reviewing budget details. These two experiences summed up my responsibilities as the chief administrative officer of this organization. One minute I was thinking big picture and developing long-term goals, the next I was clarifying objectives and managing operations. I was answering YES to the question, am I a leader or a manager? If I wanted to have followers, instead of just subordinates, I needed to be a leader and a manager. The same is true for you.

How often do you find yourself engaged in what some call “leadership” activities, such as developing long-term goals or strategies, collaborating with others across divisions or departments, inspiring change or innovation among your team members? Do you also engage in what many would label traditional “management” behaviors, such as clarifying objectives and expectations, developing plans, managing operations, or monitoring your environment? Whether you consider yourself a leader or a manager, success in today's flat, complex and interdependent work environment demands that you use the complementary skills of both. Of course, there is a difference regarding the amount, nature, and exact mix of these skills depending on your level of responsibility in the organization. Never-the-less, if you are going to unleash the energy of your team toward worthy goals (the very definition of a leader), research says you need to be a leader and a manager.

In his review of approximately 1,300 scientific studies on leadership, Professor Gary Yukl states, "most scholars seem to agree that success as a manager or administrator in modern organizations necessarily involves leading." (1) To which I add; success as a leader also involves managing. Integrating the latest research on leadership  and management skills to help you conquer your daunting challenges and unleash the energy of people toward your worthy goals is the objective of this blog.

Where do you see an unbalanced practice of leadership and management skills?

Keep eXpanding,
Dave

P.S. Dave Jensen is a Senior Lecturer and leadership coach at Emory University’s School of Business and president of his own training/coaching firm. He and his team transform proven leadership tools into your success stories. Dave is also a popular speaker at conferences, meetings, and workshops. He can be reached in Los Angeles, CA at (310) 397-6686 and http://davejensenonleadership.com/index.html

1. Yukl, Gary; Leadership in Organizations, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2006, page 6.)

How Leadership Books Kill People

It’s 9AM at 35,000 feet. The captain requests that we fasten our seat belts as we fly over the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I’m flying to Atlanta to teach another five-day leadership class with my colleagues from Emory University. As I gaze at the endless snow-capped mountains stretching toward the heavens, I am struck at how brief my small life is on this planet.

Oh my God, I think! Tears well up as suddenly I feel the weight of the mountains on my slumped shoulders. The leaders I teach this week are going to actually use their brief time on this planet applying my ideas. What an enormous responsibility! Dear Lord, please help me make sure that what I teach this week improves their lives when they get back to work.

As I write these words, tears well up once again. The sands of time are slipping through your hourglass. You have chosen to spend them reading this article and, if I do my job well, use these ideas with others. I feel a huge responsibility to share only those leadership tools, tips, and techniques that will actually work for you.

Most leadership books and articles do not take this approach. They are written opinions of coaches, consultants, or former executives. Of course, there is nothing wrong with reading their opinions if you want to spend your brief time on this planet trying untested ideas.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely how most leadership books and blogs kill people, and put organizations out of business.

How Leadership Books Kill
Imagine your boss invites you into her office and asks you to find a great book on leadership. She tells you that she is going to use ideas from them to teach a new leadership class on “how leaders conquer today's tough challenges and reach their goals.” She explains that just as a physician must find the best treatment to cure a sick patient, you need to find the best resource to help her leaders.

Where would you look? If you searched books on Amazon.com, the word “leadership” would yield 381,556 titles. How would you decide which one to recommend to your boss? More importantly, what criteria would you use to select a great book?

If we stay with your boss’s medical analogy for a second we might ask ourselves, how does a physician decide which treatment is best? Having conducted medical research for several years and been a healthcare executive, I can tell you that the best physicians base the majority of their decision on ‘evidence’ - what research says really works. Why? Because the essence of science is prediction. When an excellent physician recommends a treatment or writes a prescription, he is predicting that the patient will get better based on the evidence from years of scientific research, filtered by experience. Spending your precious time and money on leadership books or articles that are not fact-based is like going to a doctor who prescribes medication that he cooks up in the back room. The medication may help, but it also may kill.

It’s the same with most leadership books. They are usually based on the experiences of the author. They lack the facts to predict that you and your organization will get better if you take their “prescription.” Of course, you can read books that don't have the research to back up their prediction and see if what the author recommends produces results for you. That's called experimentation (via trial and error). Yet that’s how leadership books and blogs kill! How much time, energy, and resources do you and your people have to conduct experiments? What if your competitors are applying proven, fact-based ideas with high predictive value while you spend time trying the next ‘flavor-of-the-month’ fad?

There are in fact two things, science and opinion;
the former begets knowledge, the later ignorance.
Hippocrates

A Fact-based Blog That Gets Results
In their excellent book Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, Professors Pfeffer and Sutton cite numerous examples of the high cost of not using research as you lead others. They recommend that you base your leadership practices on the best evidence (i.e., facts), not what is in vogue. (1)

I’ve taken their advice in order to make the best use of the grains of sand slipping through your hourglass. My articles are a summary of hundreds of scientific studies and well-researched books on leadership that gets results. I’ve combined these academic findings with stories about my successes and failures as a leader (I’m a former chief administrative officer) and educator (I’ve taught and/or coached about 10,000 global leaders over the past 15 years). Reading these articles is like embarking on a journey where only predictive and practical leadership tools that have been studied under the microscope of science and confirmed in the corridors of the corporation are revealed.

Have you seen anyone killed by leadership books or articles?

Keep eXpanding,
Dave

1. Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton; Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business School Publishing, Boston, Massachusetts, 2006, page 41.

How eXceptional Leaders Achieve eXtraordinary Results Under Pressure

Greg was organized, likable, and communicated well. He was promoted to director of finance after three years as a mid-level manager. Team meetings ran like a Swiss watch. His managers told me that Greg included them in decision-making and that he delegated well. He also fostered an environment of creativity and openness to change. Unfortunately...

The economy worsened and the CEO demanded more productivity. That’s when cracks in Greg's leadership armor began to show. Three of his middle managers failed to perform under the increased pressure. They missed project deadlines, were unresponsive to their colleagues service needs, and failed to engage their own team members in dealing with the difficult times. Employee morale plummeted and turnover skyrocketed. Craig finally counseled his three managers, but they didn’t improve because he failed to hold them accountable for implementing an improvement plan. A year after Greg was promoted... he was fired.

How Often Are You Strong to a Fault?
Greg’s problem was “lopsided leadership” – the tendency to overuse a strength (i.e., to be strong to a fault), especially under stress. Leaders who over-focus on their strongest style(s) are like muscle-bound bodybuilders who don’t stretch. They’re inflexible, rigid, and unable to adapt to changing circumstances. How often does this happen to you when you’re under pressure?

In his book, The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman states, “It’s a world that demands constant adjustment and does not tolerate leaders who are unable or unwilling to build up their weak muscles—or who overuse their strong muscles.”

Based on my review of hundreds of studies that included more than 171, 000 leaders, I discovered that relying on your strengths is not enough anymore. What got you here won’t get you there! You need to avoid overdoing your strengths (and shore up your weaknesses), especially when you’re feeling stressed. Before we discuss how four leadership styles can eliminate lopsided leadership, let’s take a quick look at today’s challenges...

Do These Challenges Look Familiar?
Listed below are the top challenges leaders face in today’s whitewater work environment based on a survey of 1,600 global leaders and my analysis of the issues affecting thousands of leaders who have attended our courses (1) How many of these are affecting you and your organization?

1. Control costs
2. Grow the business
3. Motivate others
4. Hold others accountable for results
5. Meet short-term objectives
6. Innovate for long-term growth
7. Get more done with less
8. Take time to coach/mentor others
9. Increase teamwork/collaboration
10. Achieve your own performance goals
11. Beat global competition in a turbulent economy
12. Address local and increasingly fragmented customer needs
13. Use the advances of the Internet and other technologies
14. Focus on your core competencies
15. Manage generational and cultural differences
16. Adhere to uniform policies and procedures
17. Embrace the accelerated pace of change
18. Provide stability to keep others from overwhelmed by change
19. Meet the increasing demands of work
20. Have a fulfilling home life

As you identified your challenges, did you notice that these challenges actually pull in opposite directions? If you read the list again with the word and at the end of each odd-numbered statement, you’ll spot today's critical leadership challenge.

“The problem, of course, is that… management is complicated and confusing. Be global and be local. Collaborate and compete. Change perpetually and maintain order. Make the numbers while nurturing your people. How is anyone supposed to reconcile all this?” (2)
    Professor Henry Mintzberg

Conquering Your Paradoxical Challenges
Leadership scholar Henry Mintzberg, the top challenges, and even Greg’s true story, teach us that leaders at all levels are being stretched by issues that pull them in opposite directions (i.e., “paradoxical tensions”). According to research by OnPoint Consulting, and many others, the most successful leaders conquer their challenges by managing these paradoxical tensions effectively. (3)

If paradox is the essence of your leadership challenge, shouldn't it be essential to your leadership thinking?

In a word, YES... based on my extensive research, experience as an executive, and decades of coaching/teaching 10,000 leaders. Being strong in one style or two styles is no longer adequate. If you want to consistently conquer your paradoxical challenges and achieve your goals, you need to dynamically juggle four leadership styles throughout the day. Let me explain...

The Four Interdependent Styles of Leadership
eXpanding your leadership effectiveness begins by recognizing that leadership consists of two primary dimensions:

I. WHAT you do - the tasks that need to be done.
II. HOW you work with others - how to interact with those doing.

Each of these dimensions has two distinct sides:
I. WHAT you do:
- Major Tasks (e.g., conduct a strategy retreat)
 - Minor Tasks (e.g., review details of a project plan)

II. HOW you work with others:
 - Take Charge (e.g., confront a poor performer)
 - Take Care (e.g., mentor team members)

Research tells us that today’s paradoxical challenges requires leaders to juggle both sides of both dimensions simultaneously throughout the day. The eXpansive Leadership Model (XLM) expresses these four "requirements" as four fundamental leadership styles. The Rational and Visionary leadership styles represent the task dimension (I). The Empowering and Commanding leadership styles represent the relationship dimension (II). Each style is described below:

RATIONAL – Focus on the Facts
The rational leadership style is the left-brain, logical thinking side of leadership. Leaders who are highly skilled in this style clearly define their and their team members’ roles. They excel at setting short-term objectives and generating detailed plans with milestones. Performance expectations are plainly spelled out. Because they actively seek feedback, effective rational leaders understand their strengths and weaknesses, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of those around them. They also stay in touch with their team members, peers, their boss and their customers.

VISIONARY – Imagine the Future
The visionary leadership style is the creative, dreamer aspect of leadership. Those highly skilled in this style create flexible approaches to solve problems, make decisions and achieve strategic goals. They bring new products, services or processes to fruition primarily because they are effective in launching cross-functional experiments. Visionary leaders also inspire others to question the status quo by embracing change, creativity, and open-mindedness. They enjoy reflecting on global issues, thinking about long-term consequences and pondering future possibilities.

EMPOWERING – Take Care
The empowering leadership style is the servant side of leadership. Those highly skilled in this style enable others to do their best every day by delegating well, as well as coaching and involving team members in decisions. They are masters at orchestrating diverse individuals into high-performing, energized teams that work well across the enterprise. Empowering leaders build trust and empathy by patiently listening to other perspectives and beliefs without prejudgment. They also demonstrate fairness, honesty, integrity, and humility in all their interactions.

COMMANDING – Take Charge
The commanding leadership style is the strong, forceful side of leadership. Those highly skilled in this style work extremely hard to fulfill commitments and execute strategies. They push to accomplish tasks, projects and goals on time. They are not afraid to solicit opposing views when making important decisions. They are also comfortable with ambiguity; they don't need all the data in order to move forward. Commanding leaders control their emotions and moods under pressure. In addition, they refuse to allow themselves or their team to be the victim during adversity. They take personal responsibility for their choices and consequences.

The Core Competencies in Each Style
Each of the four fundamental styles is comprised of four core competencies. Taken together, these competencies describe the essence of what you must develop to master each style.

The XLM blends all four styles, and their competencies, into a holistic leadership model seen below:

There is an avalanche of evidence confirming, “One leadership style is not enough” if you want to conquer your challenges and reach your goals. Your job as a leader is to first identify your (and your team's) strengths and weaknesses, then develop a focused plan to lead with your strengths and manage your weakness. (The XLM assessment is a great, inexpensive tool to help you do just that. Click here for more info: http://xlmassessment.com/ )

Does Leadership Development Pay?
Of course, you might ask if organizations that develop their leaders to rise to the challenge actually perform better. A McKinsey survey found that companies scoring in the top quintile of talent-management practices outperform their industry's mean return to shareholders by a remarkable 22 percentage points. (4) In addition, Laurie Bassi and her colleagues measured the effect of spending on employee education by following the stock prices of 575 publicly traded firms. They found that companies that invested the most in their employees outperformed the S&P 500 by 17 to 35%. (5). Finally, Bob Eichinger and his colleagues reviewed the research on effective human resource interventions and reported that training does indeed pay. (6) They cite a four-year study by Morrow and Rupinski, which found a mean ROI of 45% for managerial training and 418% for sales/technical training. (7) The moral of the story is that development does pay if it's based on research-proven tools.

What’s next?
Let me know how I can help you or your team conquer your paradoxical challenges and reach your goals.

Sincerely,
Dave
Dave Jensen, Author
XLM Assessment and Profile

P.S. Dave Jensen is a Senior Lecturer on leadership at Emory University’s School of Business and president of the training/coaching firm S3, Inc. He and his team transform proven leadership tools into your success stories. Dave is also a popular speaker at conferences, meetings, and workshops. He can be reached in Los Angeles, CA at (310) 397-6686 and http://davejensenonleadership.com/index.html

1. MWorld, Winter 2006, pages 21 – 26.

2. Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg: The Five Minds of the Manager. Harvard Business Review, November: 54 -- 63, 2003.

3. Richard Lepsinger: How Top Performing Companies Get Ahead of the Pack and Stay There. American Management Association, MWorld, Summer 2007, 3 – 4.

4. http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/The_war_for_talent_part_two_1035.

5. Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer, How's Your Return on People? Harvard Business Review, March, 2004, page 18. Reprint F0403B.

6. Robert Eichinger, Michael Lombardo, and Dave Ulrich. 100 Things You Need To Know: Best People Practices For Managers And HR, Lominger Ltd., Inc., Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2006, 207 -- 212.

7. Morrow, C. and Rupinski, M., An Investigation of the Effect and Economic Utility of Corporate Wide Training, Personnel Psychology, 50 (1), 1997, 91 -- 120.)