The Impact of Style on Effectiveness – Why Leaders are Telling Too Much | Featured Article of the Month

Home

The Impact of Style on Effectiveness – Why Leaders are Telling Too Much

EZINE_Header

Inside The Edge

About
The Featured Article

PEN_to_Paper95

If you want the best insight into a diverse range of business topics, then our Featured Article is for you. Every article addresses a key contemporary issue that plagues the modern workplace and seeks to provide you with a practical and easily applied solution. Staying on the leading edge of today’s best business practices is crucial for success in any state of the economy; our Featured Article can help you not only get to this leading edge but stay there with confidence heading forward.

The Impact of Style on Effectiveness – Why Leaders are Telling Too Much

Leader: “People have no initiative anymore. Nothing happens if I am away – everything stops until I put a burr under their saddle and get things moving again!”

Getting things done through others is the single greatest challenge for leaders – at all levels of the organization. The answer to increased employee motivation and initiative lies in the leader’s mirror.

The thought that a title or authority will automatically get people to listen to you and take action is a myth. More than anything, the higher you climb as a leader the more you need to exercise influence – rather than direction – to be successful.

A leader’s style needs to match their audience based on their competency and development needs and not on their own approach.

In our recent leadership research study, Leadership Communication: The Power to Connect, we found a big surprise! The more senior a leader, the more likely their approach is to be directive. Say what you will about collaboration and participation, it seems telling them what to do is the quickest way. It is also the reason we are seeing deteriorating engagement

A key insight that supports effectiveness as an influential leader is to develop awareness of yourself and other people and be aware of the impact of your behavior on others in real time. Not everyone responds to the same approach and leaders needs to be adaptive to their audience to gain results.

Situational leadership model is about matching the leadership style to the developmental and competency needs of the audience. Effectiveness is a function of whether or not you make the right choices at the right time. When you see the need to develop your ability to adapt, you can then develop strategies such as situational awareness to increase your effectiveness as a leader.

The style of communication can have a tremendous impact on the ability of a leader to connect with the audience. The message may be perfect but if the delivery is not adapted to the audience, the connection may fail completely. The key point of communication style is that no one way is right and there is a need to adapt the style to the audience. However, leaders need to first be self-aware of their style to be able to match their audience.

The four fundamental leadership communication styles are telling, selling, participating, and delegating. Telling is about giving direction of what to do and when - it is highly tactical and low on relationship. In terms of selling, the style is about promoting the end result and persuading people to take that course of action. A selling style is high both in tactical and relationship terms. Participating is high on relationship and low on tactics being based on collaborating, involving and including others to gain commitment. The delegating approach is low on both the tactical and relationship fields where the style is to let others get what they need.

No one style of communication is right and each may be a better fit depending on the audience. Each person generally has a dominant style and a tendency to apply that in every situation. This default method of style probably does not fit 75% of the leader's audiences.

When someone is new to a role (even if they have been experts in prior roles), they need direction and a lot of information. Taking on a new role is more about the task and less about the relationship – just tell them what to do until they get their feet under them to start thinking and contributing. At the apprentice level, people have made progress in their knowledge and are starting to make an individual contribution with a need for feedback and input on continued growth and development – show them the way. They need both relationship and task focus. Further on, people can work without supervision and take greater ownership with more attention on relationship and much less on task. At this level, people want to participate and do not want any form of direction. They want to be involved and included. Finally, people develop expertise and become masters in their roles. They work in collaboration with very low attention to task and, as well, low focus on relationship. People at this level want delegation and independence.

Our style is a combination of orientation to relationship and task. Do we focus our communication and interactions mainly on the task (what needs to be done) or on the relationship? Where we focus has an incredible impact on the people around us and our ability to influence others to get things done. A further aspect of the impact of our leadership style rests with the competency level of our audience – how competent are they in their roles. We need to adapt to their level of competency – the newer a person is to their role the more they will need direction and telling – using delegation at this point will result in anxiety and not knowing what to do. Similarly, taking a directive approach with someone who is a master at their role will hit a brick wall quickly in engaging action – en expert needs full delegation. We have to adapt our approach to our audience.

The following table outlines the distribution of leader communication styles as assessed by their employees. The key point of communication style is that no one way is right and there is a need to adapt the style to the audience. However, leaders need to first be self-aware of their style to be able to match their audience.

Analysis of Leader Communication Styles

	Telling	Selling	Participating	Delegating

Overall	30%	12%	34%	12%

Gender:
Female	31%	3%	43%	11%
Male	29%	18%	28%	12%

Age:
25-39	7%	33%	33%	20%
40-54	33%	11%	33%	10%
55+	30%	11%	36%	12%

Level:
CEO	41%	15%	30%	2%
VP	28%	13%	34%	18%
Manager	26%	9%	36%	15%

Points of interest from the analysis of leader communication styles:

Overall, leaders are still telling more than is thought. Telling is a method that works well with employees new to their role when they are just learning the ropes. Most leaders would not be involved in training new employees and the telling approach is not terribly effective with others. It can seem faster to simply tell people what needs to be done but it does not result in engagement and commitment.
Women leaders do not adopt a selling approach to any real extent. Selling can be very effective with employees to buy into different ideas and concepts. The high focus on participative communication may sound very positive but it also has a downside. Too much participation can slow organizations down, create too much debate and discussion, and not be seen as decisive. Participation sounds great but female leaders may be depending too much on this one approach.
Younger leaders tend to be much more likely to sell or seek participation in their communication and very unlikely to tell or direct. Again, the trend sounds somewhat positive but the key again is adaptability. Telling may be more necessary for younger leaders as many of these leaders would be in manager or supervisor roles where training and developing new employees is more prevalent. A higher degree of telling may be needed here as new and developing employees need to know what to do before they can participate effectively.
The CEO position results are intriguing and revealing. There is a reasonable level of selling and participating but an overwhelming dominance in telling with almost no delegation at all. At this senior level of leadership position, the breakdown is very surprising. Leaders in CEO, President, and Executive Director roles are much more likely to deal with other senior people - executives who are masters on their own and employees who know their work well. Taking a telling tone in communications does not work at all - delegating would be much more effective. It is intriguing that the higher the level of leadership the more likely the communication approach is telling which would be almost counterintuitive - and counterproductive.

The concentration of leadership style (particularly at the senior level of CEO) can explain much of why change initiatives are failing. The prevalence of the telling and directing mode of communication is not conducive to engagement and commitment.

What happens when we don’t adapt? My dominant style is selling and persuading. I have a high focus both on the relationship and the task – I like to lead the witness. This approach works well with people learning their roles and starting to make a contribution on their own – the apprentices. However, this approach does not work well with team members becoming experts and looking for greater levels of participation and involvement. In the past, when I just treated everyone with the same approach, I had great difficulties with employees after they had developed their expertise. As they mastered their work and wanted to increase their participation, I continued to treat them as apprentices learning their work and sold them on what I wanted them to do – rather than including them on the journey. No surprise – we had a lot of turnover at the more senior level. When I understood the impact of my approach, I started to become more adaptive and interact with team members based on their level of development and competency in their roles. Our turnover has reduced dramatically and one reason is that, as a leader, I think first and then approach people based on their needs and not just my way.

Leadership style needs to be somewhat inconsistent. Leaders need to be able to match their style and behaviors with the needs of the group or individual. For communication that influences engagement, the leader needs to stop thinking about their way and start thinking about the needs of their audience.

We need to learn to match the needs of our audience with our style of leadership.

Add New
Search

Comments (1)

2011-01-07 13:12:14 |198.166.214.xxx| Bill - The impact of style on effectiveness.

Thanks for shading some light on the why of what I experience. I have been trying something like this but didn't realize it could be described and likely understood and learned. It helps explain problems and redirect effort on our teams. Bill
- 0
- 0
Reply Quote