THE SPECTACULAR RISE of EMC, the data storage systems company, from nonentity to world leader illustrates classic entrepreneurial zeal. For years, the company’s top management led its sales force on an intentionally frenzied race to outdo the competition. In fact, CEO Michael Ruettgers said that he selected sales managers based on that drive to win, and he attributes EMC’s success to the aggressiveness of its marketing force. As one EMC sales executive told us, “We’re like pit bulls—but the difference is pit bulls let go.”
That tenacity reaped enormous returns: In 1995, the first year EMC shipped open-storage systems, sales reached $200 million. By 1999, EMC—the company that hadn’t been on anyone’s radar—was one of only four U.S. companies earning top ratings for shareholder return, sales growth, profit growth, net profit margin, and return on equity. 1
Ruettgers and his management team embody the pacesetting style in action: leaders who expect excellence and exemplify it. This style can work extremely well, particularly in technical fields, among highly skilled professionals, or—as at EMC—with a hard-driving sales team. Pacesetting makes sense, in particular, during the entrepreneurial phase of a company’s life cycle, when growth is all-important. Any time that group members are all highly competent, motivated, and need little direction, the style can yield brilliant results. Given a talented team, the pacesetting leader gets work done on time, or even ahead of deadline.
Even so, while the pacesetting approach has its place in the leader’s tool chest, it should be used sparingly, restricted to settings where it truly works. That advice runs counter to common wisdom. After all, the hallmarks of pacesetting sound admirable: The leader holds and exemplifies high standards for performance. He is obsessive about doing things better and faster, and asks the same of everyone. He quickly pinpoints poor performers, demands more from them, and if they don’t rise to the occasion, rescues the situation himself.
But if applied poorly or excessively, or in the wrong setting, the pacesetting approach can leave employees feeling pushed too hard by the leader’s relentless demands. And since pacesetters tend to be unclear about guidelines—expecting people to “just know what to do”—followers often have to second-guess what the leader wants. The result is that morale plummets as employees see their leader as driving them too hard—or worse, feel the leader doesn’t trust them to get the job done in their own way. What’s more, pacesetters can be so focused on their goals that they can appear not to care about the people they rely on to achieve those goals. The net result is dissonance.
Our data show that, more often than not, pacesetting poisons the climate—particularly because of the emotional costs when a leader relies on it too much. Essentially, the pacesetter’s dilemma is this: The more pressure put on people for results, the more anxiety it provokes. Although moderate pressure can energize people—the challenge of meeting a deadline, for instance—continued high pressure can be debilitating. As people shift away from pursuing an inspiring vision, pure survival issues take hold. The pressure constricts their talent for innovative thinking. Although pacesetters may get compliance—and therefore a short-term upward blip in results—they don’t get true performance that people will sustain.
Take, for example, an executive we’ll call Sam. Academically, Sam’s career began brilliantly; he graduated at the top of his class. Then, as an R&D biochemist at a large pharmaceutical company, his superb technical expertise made him an early star: He was the one everyone else turned to for technical advice. Driven by high standards of excellence and achievement, he was almost obsessive in his search for better ways to do his job.
When he was appointed to head a team developing a new product, Sam continued to shine, and his teammates were, by and large, as competent and self-motivated as their new head. Sam’s métier as team leader became setting the pace, working late, and offering himself as a model of how to do first-class scientific work under tremendous deadline pressure. His team completed its task in record time.
But when Sam was picked to head R&D for his entire division, he began to slip. His tasks had shifted to the larger mission of leadership—articulating a vision, delegating responsibility, and helping to develop people—but Sam didn’t trust that his subordinates were as capable as he was. He often refused to delegate real power, becoming a micromanager who was obsessed with details, taking over for others when their performance slackened rather than trusting they could improve with guidance. Finally, at his own boss’s suggestion—and to Sam’s relief—he returned to his old job as head of a product development team.
Sam’s story demonstrates the classic signs of a pacesetter: exceptionally high standards of excellence, impatience with poor performance, an eagerness to roll up his sleeves to get the job done, and a readiness to take over for people when they get into difficulties. This is not to say that the pacesetting approach can’t work well. It can—but only in the right situations, namely, when employees are self-motivated, highly competent, and need little direction.
Effective Pacesetting: The Ingredients
What does it take to be a successful pacesetting leader? The emotional intelligence foundation of this style lies in the drive to achieve by continually finding ways to improve performance—along with a large dose of initiative in seizing opportunities. The achievement competence means pacesetting leaders strive to learn new approaches that will raise their own performance and that of those they lead. It also means these leaders are motivated not by external rewards, such as money or titles, but rather by a strong need to meet their own high standards of excellence. Pacesetting also requires initiative, the go-getter’s readiness to seize or create opportunities to do better. But if it arises in the absence of other crucial EI competencies, this drive to achieve can go awry. The absence of empathy, for example, means such leaders can blithely focus on accomplishing tasks while remaining oblivious to the rising distress in those who perform them. Similarly, an absence of self-awareness leaves pacesetters blind to their own failings.
Other competencies such leaders often lack include the abilities to collaborate or communicate effectively (particularly the knack for providing timely and helpful performance feedback). The most glaring lack is emotional self-management, a deficit that manifests as either micromanaging or impatience—or worse.
By and large, pacesetting can work well in tandem with other leadership styles such as the passion of the visionary style and the team building of the affiliative style. The most common problems with pacesetters emerge when a star “techie” gets promoted to management, as happened in our example of Sam, the gifted biochemist who failed as head of research. In fact, Sam exhibited the classic symptoms of the Peter Principle, promoted beyond his competence. He had all the technical skills he needed for his old position, but too narrow a slice of the leadership ones he needed for his new one. So he became a leader who takes over for people when they falter, who can’t delegate because he doesn’t trust that others can perform as well as he, and who is all too quick to condemn poor performance but stints on praise for work well done. Another sign of Peter Principle pacesetters is that they excel at the technical aspects of the work they manage but disdain the cooperative bent that leadership demands.
When leaders use the pacesetting style exclusively or poorly, they lack not just vision, but also resonance. Too often, such leaders are driven by numbers alone—which aren’t always enough to inspire or motivate people.
The computer company was hemorrhaging: Sales and profits were falling, stock was losing value precipitously, and shareholders were in an uproar. The board brought in a new CEO with a reputation as a turnaround artist, and he set to work chopping jobs, selling off divisions, and making the tough, unpopular decisions that should have been executed years before.
In the end, the company was saved—at least in the short term—but at a high price. From the start, the CEO created a reign of terror, most acutely among his direct reports. A modern-day Genghis Khan, he bullied and demeaned his executives, roaring his displeasure at the least misstep. Frightened by his tendency to “murder” the bearer of bad news, his direct reports stopped bringing him any news at all. Soon his top talent defected—and the CEO fired many who remained. Throughout the company, morale was nonexistent, a fact reflected in another downturn in the business after the short-term recovery. Eventually, the CEO was fired by the board of directors.
To be sure, the business world is rife with coercive leaders whose negative impact on those they lead has yet to catch up with them. For instance, when a major hospital system was losing money, the board hired a new president to turn the business around—and the effect was disastrous. As one physician told us, “He cut back staff mercilessly, especially in nursing. The hospital looked more profitable, but it was dangerously understaffed. We just couldn’t keep up with patient demand, and everyone felt demoralized.”
No surprise, then, that patient-satisfaction ratings plummeted. When the hospital began to lose market share to its competition, the president grudgingly rehired many of the people he’d fired. “But to this day he’s never admitted he was too ruthless,” the physician reported, “and he continues to manage by threat and intimidation. The nurses are back, but morale is not. Meanwhile, the president complains about patient-satisfaction numbers—but fails to see that he’s part of the problem.”
The Commanding Style in Action
What does the commanding approach—sometimes called the coercive style—look like in action? With a motto of “Do it because I say so,” such leaders demand immediate compliance with orders, but don’t bother explaining the reasons behind them. If subordinates fail to follow their orders unquestioningly, these leaders resort to threats. And, rather than delegate authority, they seek tight control of any situation and monitor it studiously. Accordingly, performance feedback—if given at all—invariably focuses on what people did wrong rather than what they did well. In short, it’s a classic recipe for dissonance.
Not surprisingly, of all the leadership styles, the commanding approach is the least effective in most situations, according to our data. Consider what the style does to an organization’s climate. Given that emotional contagion spreads most readily from the top down, an intimidating, cold leader contaminates everyone’s mood, and the quality of the overall climate spirals down. And although someone like the coercive hospital CEO might not perceive a connection between his leadership style and the downward direction of patient satisfaction, the links are there. His interactions with nurses and doctors spoil their moods, and they in turn are less able to exhibit the cheery playfulness that lifts the moods of patients and makes all the difference in how patients experience their medical care.
By rarely using praise and freely criticizing employees, the commanding leader erodes people’s spirits and the pride and satisfaction they take in their work—the very things that motivate most high-performing workers. Accordingly, the style undermines a critical tool that all leaders need: the ability to give people the sense that their job fits into a grand, shared mission. Instead, people are left feeling less committed, even alienated from their own jobs, and wondering, How does any of this matter?
In spite of its many negative effects, however, coercive leaders thrive the world over in surprisingly large numbers, a legacy of the old command-and-control hierarchies that typified twentieth-century businesses. Such organizations adopted a military model of leadership (top down, “I order you”) that really was most appropriate to the battlefield. Yet even in today’s more modernized military organizations, the commanding style is balanced by other styles in the interests of building commitment, esprit de corps, and teamwork.
The medical community offers another example. In America today many medical organizations face a crisis of leadership in part because the culture of medicine has favored pacesetting and commanding styles. These styles are, of course, appropriate in, say, the operating or the emergency rooms. But their predominance means that many medical people who rise to positions of leadership have had too few chances to learn a fuller repertoire of styles.
In most modern organizations, then, the “do-it-because-I-say-so” boss has become a dinosaur. As one CEO of a technology company put it, “You can beat people into the ground and make money, but is that company going to last?”
When Commanding Works
Despite its negative inclinations, the command-and-control style can hold an important place in the EI leader’s repertoire when used judiciously. For example, leaders managing a business crisis such as an urgent turnaround can find the commanding style particularly effective—especially at first—to unfreeze useless business habits and shock people into new ways of doing things. Similarly, during a genuine emergency, such as a fire in the building or an approaching hurricane—or when facing a hostile takeover—leaders with a take-control style can help everyone through the tumult. Moreover, when all else has failed, the style sometimes works when dealing with problem employees.
One executive in our research used the commanding style artfully when he was brought in as division president to change the direction of a money-losing food company. He began by acting forcefully in his first weeks to signal the changes he meant to engineer.
For example, the top management team met regularly in a very formal, rather intimidating conference room and sat in gigantic chairs around a marble-covered table that “looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise” from the television show Star Trek, as the new division president put it. The distances between people stifled spontaneous talk, and the meetings themselves were stilted—no one daring to ever rock the boat. In short, the conference room symbolized the lack of dialogue and true collaboration among the senior management team. To signal a shift toward openness, the new president had the room demolished—a clear command-style move—with positive effects. From that moment on, the management team met in an ordinary conference room, “where people can actually talk to each other,” as the new president put it.
He used the same approach regarding a set of very detailed decision-making manuals that specified who had to concur before a management decision was made. The new caveat: no more manuals and endless paper passing. “I want people to talk to each other,” the president explained to us. “Anyone who needs to can come to the executive committee meeting to tell us, ‘here’s what I’m working on—I need your help and ideas.’ I want us to be more of a resource to people than merely a rubber stamp.”
In sending these messages, the new president was forceful and strong. But his strong tactics worked because he attacked the old culture—not the people. In fact, he made it clear that he valued their talents and abilities; it was their way of doing things that he felt needed to change dramatically.
What It Takes
Such an effective execution of the commanding style draws on three emotional intelligence competencies: influence, achievement, and initiative. And, as with the pacesetting style, self-awareness, emotional self-control, and empathy are crucial to keep the commanding style from going off track. The drive to achieve means a leader exerts forceful direction in the service of getting better results. Initiative, in the commanding style, often takes the form not just of seizing opportunities, but also of employing an unhesitating “command” tone, issuing orders on the spot rather than pausing to ponder a course of action. The commanding leader’s initiative also shows up as not waiting for situations to drive him, but taking forceful steps to get things done.
Perhaps most important in the skillful execution of this style is emotional self-control. This allows the leader to keep his anger and impatience in check—or even to use his anger in an artfully channeled outburst designed to get instant attention and mobilize people to change or get results. When a leader lacks the self-awareness that would enable the required emotional self-control—perhaps the most common failing in leaders who employ this style poorly—the dangers of the commanding style are greatest. Coercive leaders who display not just anger but also disgust or contempt can have a devastating emotional impact on their people.
Even worse, if a leader’s out-of-control outbursts go hand in hand with a lack of empathy—an emotional tone deafness—the style runs amok: The dictatorial leader barks orders, oblivious to the reactions of people on the receiving end. Executing the commanding style effectively, therefore, requires the leader “to be angry with the right person, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reason,” as Aristotle put it.
That said, the commanding style should be used only with extreme caution, targeted at situations in which it is absolutely imperative, such as a turnaround or impending hostile takeover. If a leader knows when conditions demand a strong hand at the top—and when to drop it—then that skillful firmness can be tonic. But if the only tool in a leader’s kit is a chainsaw, he’ll leave an organization in shambles.
Despite the evidence that unduly commanding (or pacesetting) bosses create a disastrous dissonance, everyone can name a rude, hard-hitting CEO who, by all appearances, epitomizes the antithesis of resonance yet seems to reap great business results. If emotional intelligence matters so much, how do we explain those mean-spirited SOBs?
First, let’s take a closer look at those SOBs. Just because a particular executive is the most visible, is he the person who actually leads the company? A CEO who heads a conglomerate may have no followers to speak of; rather, it’s the division heads who actively lead people and affect profitability most. It’s been said that Bill Gates and his company, Microsoft, run in this kind of fashion. He can be an effective pacesetter because his direct reports are technically brilliant, self-motivated, and driven. In turn, his direct reports tend to employ resonant leadership styles within their own divisions, where such a repertoire is a must to foster the teamwork the company depends on for results.
Then there are leaders whose success rests on an illusion, such as a high market capitalization or too-drastic restructuring, that hides a ruinous turnover of key people that will cost the company severely in the future. Often, those executives turn out to be ego-driven narcissists who are actually terrible leaders.
Take, for example, Al Dunlap, who boasted in his autobiography, Mean Business, that his leadership as CEO of Scott Paper would “go down in the annals of American business history as one of the most successful turnarounds ever.” Although Dunlap exalted toughness, even meanness, as a tool of leadership while he fired thousands of employees, later analyses saw his cutbacks as too excessive, damaging the company’s ability to do business. And his apparent short-term successes, at least in his subsequent position at Sunbeam, seem due to other tactics: Within two years after being fired as CEO of Sunbeam, Dunlap and other executives were indicted by the Securities and Exchange Commission on a charge of “orchestrating a fraudulent scheme to create the illusion of a successful restructuring of Sunbeam and facilitate the sale of the company at an inflated price.” 2
Leaders with such gargantuan egos typically have a blinder-like fixation on immediate financial goals, without any regard for the long-term human or organizational costs of how they achieve those goals. 3 And too often, as with Al Dunlap, the companies they leave behind may show all the signs of steroid abuse: pumped up for an intense period to show high profitability, but at the expense of the long-term human and economic resources essential to sustain those profits. 4
Finally, the boss in question might have one or two highly noticeable weaknesses in EI abilities, while still having enough counterbalancing strengths to be effective. In other words, no leader is perfect, nor does he need to be. Our idealizations of leaders can lead us to set unreasonable standards, wanting them to be paragons of every virtue.
When examining the SOB question, we need to consider as well whether the leader has important strengths that counterbalance the caustic behavior but that might not get as much attention in the business press. In his early days at GE, Jack Welch exhibited a strong hand at the helm as he undertook a radical company turnaround. At that time and in that situation, his firm, top-down style was appropriate. What got less press was how Welch in subsequent years settled into a more clearly EI leadership style, especially in articulating a new vision for the company and mobilizing people to follow it.
Clearing Away the Smoke
In short, it’s all too easy for a skeptic to make a specious argument against the utility of EI by telling an anecdote about a “rough and tough” leader whose business results seem good despite his abrasiveness. Such a naïve argument—that great leaders succeed by being mean-spirited and ruthless (or in spite of it)—can be made only in the absence of hard data about what kinds of leadership truly gets results.
A scientific study of leaders begins by clearing away the smoke, leveling the playing field to make systematic comparisons. Such objective methods control for the false or transient successes a mean-spirited leader may seem to be able to claim credit for but which are actually due, say, to the luck of an entire industry’s high-growth period or to such short-term maneuvers as cutbacks or fiddling with accounting methods.
In a rare spirit of open inquiry, for instance, a trade association of U.S. insurance companies commissioned a study of the leadership qualities of CEOs and the business performance of the companies they led. A research team tracked the financial results achieved by nineteen CEOs of major insurance companies and split them into two groups—“outstanding” and “good”—on the basis of measures such as their company’s profit and growth. 5 Then the team conducted intensive interviews to assess the capabilities that distinguished the outstanding CEOs from those who merely did a good enough job. The team evaluated each CEO, and also sought candid (and confidential) evaluations from their direct reports.
The singular talent that set the most successful CEOs apart from others turned out to be a critical mass of emotional intelligence competencies. The most successful CEOs spent more time coaching their senior executives, developing them as collaborators, and cultivating personal relationships with them. Of the abilities conspicuously absent in the SOB-style leader, of course, high on the list are empathy, artful collaboration, and caring about developing the best in people. Moreover, when the company’s CEO exhibited EI strengths, profits and sustained growth were highest—significantly higher than for companies where CEOs lacked those strengths.
Who Wants to Work for an SOB?
Another little secret about those SOBs: They drive away talent. The best people in any field—the talented few who contribute greatest business value—simply don’t have to put up with the misery perpetuated by a bad boss. And, increasingly, they leave for other jobs. The number one reason that people cite for quitting is dissatisfaction with the boss. In a tight labor market, when people have the ability to get an equivalent job easily, those with bad bosses are four times more likely to leave than are those who appreciate the leader they work for. 6
Indeed, interviews with 2 million employees at 700 American companies found that what determines how long employees stay—and how productive they are—is the quality of their relationship with their immediate boss. “People join companies and leave managers,” observes Marcus Buckingham of the Gallup Organization, who analyzed the data.
The conclusion from the data seems all too clear: The SOB leader must reform or go.
By expanding their repertoire of leadership abilities, dissonant leaders can indeed reform. Remember that Harvard professor David McClelland found that leaders with strengths in a critical mass of six or more EI leadership abilities were far more effective than peers who lacked such strengths. 7 He also found that various kinds of star leaders fostered resonance from uniquely different sets of leadership competencies. For example, one leader might excel through self-confidence, flexibility, initiative, the drive to achieve, empathy, and a knack for developing the talents of others, whereas another leader’s strengths might be in self-awareness, integrity, staying calm under pressure, organizational awareness, influence, and collaboration.
Having a larger repertoire of emotional intelligence strengths can make a leader more effective because it means that leader is flexible enough to handle the wide-ranging demands of running an organization. Each style draws on different emotional intelligence abilities; the best leaders are able to use the right approach in the right moment, and flip from one to another as needed. People who lack the underlying abilities have a narrowed leadership repertoire, and so are too often stuck relying on a style that’s ill matched to the challenge of the moment. Consider again that study of nineteen CEOs in the American insurance industry. The research, as we saw, found that the most successful companies were led by CEOs with a critical mass of emotional intelligence capabilities—such as the drive to improve, an ability to catalyze change, the capacity for empathy, and a talent for developing other leaders. But that research went one step further: The research team asked key employees what it was like to work at the companies these nineteen CEOs led, focusing on areas that directly affected people’s ability to do their jobs well—not just how “satisfied” they were.
There was a marked difference between the feel of organizations led by those CEOs whose business results were outstanding and those who had less sterling results. The organizations led by the outstanding CEOs did better on every measure of climate, from clarity in communicating standards to making people feel flexible and free to innovate in getting their jobs done. The high-performing CEOs encouraged workers to feel ownership and responsibility for their work, they set higher performance standards, and they mobilized people to meet more demanding “stretch” goals. In short, these CEOs created a climate where people felt energized and focused, had pride in their work, loved what they did—and stuck around.
Leadership drives performance in organizations of every kind—not just businesses. In the United Kingdom, the government commissioned a study that analyzed leadership styles in forty-two schools and discovered the styles that drove students’ academic achievement. 8 In 69 percent of the high-performing schools, the school’s headmaster exhibited four or more resonance-building leadership styles as needed. But in two-thirds of the low-performing schools, the head relied on just one or two leadership styles—typically dissonant ones. The hidden link was climate: When school leaders were flexible in their style repertoire—able to take a teacher aside for a one-on-one, or to articulate inspiring goals for the whole group, or to just listen, as needed—the climate among teachers was most positive. When the leader’s style was rigid—stuck in the command-and-control mode—teachers were most demoralized.
The more of the six styles a leader can deploy, then, the better. Leaders who have mastered four or more, our data suggest—especially the resonance-building styles—foster the very best climate and business performance. Moreover, style switching was used both by seasoned veterans, who could explain exactly how and why they led, and by entrepreneurs who claimed they led by “gut” alone.
Consider how such fluid leadership looks in action.
Leading with Style—The Right One at the Right Time
Joan, the general manager of a major division at a global food and beverage company, was appointed to her job while the division was in deep crisis. It hadn’t made its profit targets for six years, most recently missing by $50 million. Morale among top management was miserable; mistrust and resentments were rampant. Joan’s directive from above was clear: Turn the division around.
Joan did so with a nimbleness in switching among styles that we find marks the performance of star leaders. From the start, she realized she had a small window to demonstrate effective leadership and to establish rapport and trust—and that she urgently needed to learn about what wasn’t working. During her first week on the job, therefore, she had lunch and dinner meetings one by one with each member of the management team. Joan sought each person’s understanding of the current situation from a business and organizational standpoint. But her focus was not so much on how a given manager diagnosed the problems as on getting to know each as a person. Employing the affiliative style, she explored their lives, their dreams, and aspirations.
She also stepped into the coaching role, looking for ways she could help each get what they sought for his or her career. For instance, one manager who often received feedback that he was a poor team player confided his worries to her. He felt he was actually a good team member, but was plagued by persistent complaints that he knew he had to dispel if he were to succeed at the company. Recognizing that this was a talented executive and a valuable asset to the company, Joan made an agreement with him to point out ways he undermined his team abilities. She sensed that he could sometimes be abrasive, inadvertently saying something that would anger someone—and she promised she would take him aside after a meeting where she saw this happen, to help him get better at recognizing the behavior himself.
Joan then followed up these one-on-one meetings with a three-day offsite meeting for the management team. Her goal was team building, so that everyone would own whatever solution emerged for the business problems. Using an initial stance of the democratic leader, she encouraged everybody to express their frustrations and complaints freely in, as she put it, a “kind of cleansing of everything that’s wrong.”
The next day, Joan felt the group was ready to focus on solutions, and she asked each person to propose three specific ideas about what should be done. As Joan clustered the suggestions, a natural consensus emerged about priorities for the business, such as cutting costs. As the group came up with specific action plans for each priority, Joan got the commitment and buy-in she sought.
With that vision for the future in place, Joan shifted into the visionary style, assigning accountability for each follow-up step to specific executives and holding them responsible for their accomplishment. For example, the division had been dropping prices on products but getting no increase in volume; one obvious solution was to raise prices a bit. The previous vice president for sales had dithered, letting the problem fester; the new sales vice president now had specific responsibility to adjust the price points to fix the problem.
Over the following months, Joan continued to lead mainly with the visionary style, continually articulating the group’s new mission in a way that reminded each person of how crucial he or she was to achieving it. Still, especially during the first few weeks when the plan was put in place, Joan felt that the urgency of the business crisis justified an occasional shift into the commanding style should someone fail to meet his or her responsibility. As she put it, “I had to be brutal about this follow-up on what we had to do. It was going to take discipline and focus.”
Seven months later, when our research team interviewed Joan, the division was $5 million dollars ahead of its yearly profit target—up from lagging $50 million the year before Joan stepped in. It was the first time the division had met its target in five years.
The Right Tools for the Job
How do you know when to apply which leadership style?
The most resonant leaders go beyond a mechanical process of matching their styles to fit a checklist of situations; they are far more fluid. They scan people individually and in groups, reading cues in the moment that tip them to the right leadership need, and they adjust their style on a dime. This means they can apply not just the four sure-fire resonance-building styles, but also be pacesetters or even exhibit the positive side of the commanding style—with strong, urgent direction—as appropriate. But when they lead through these more risky styles, they do so with the requisite dose of self-discipline so that they avoid creating dissonance by acting with anger or impatience or by giving in to the impulse to attack character. As a result, these leaders not only get performance results, but also build commitment and enthusiasm in those they lead.
Given the crucial importance for effective leadership of a wide repertoire of leadership styles, one immediate lesson applies to hiring, promotions, and succession planning. Simply put, when it comes to filling a leadership position, it pays to find someone who has the flexible repertoire of four or more styles that marks the most outstanding leader. Failing that, ask whether the person you’re considering for a given leadership slot at least has mastered the specific style or styles that are most obviously salient to your business reality.
For example, a leader required for a turnaround needs the skills of a visionary—the ability to articulate a new vision that will drive change. If the position demands emergency steps, such as quick and radical surgery of incompetent people, the person will need to step into the commanding style for the time being—and then step out again. When the business need requires getting consensus from employees, building commitment, or just generating new ideas, the person will need to lead democratically. If what’s required is simply guiding a highly competent and self-motivated team—say of lawyers or research pharmacologists—the leader’s repertoire should include judicious use of the pacesetting style.
Whatever a leader’s repertoire of styles today, it can grow wider tomorrow. The key lies in strengthening the underlying emotional intelligence abilities that drive a given style. Leadership is learnable—as we shall see in the next part of this book. The process is not easy. It takes time and, most of all, commitment. But the benefits that flow from leadership with a well-developed emotional intelligence, both for the individual and the organization, make it not only worthwhile but invigorating.