Leading on Continua: Adapting Fiedler’s Model
Can the task-relationship contingency model still guide leaders?
Should leaders focus on building relationships or meeting objectives? Seems like an odd fork in the road although there is a long-used theory, Fiedler’s Contingency Model, that posits just that choice. A reporter asked about it recently and I thought it was worth a longer explanation rather than a quick quote.
Fiedler puts leaders into one of those two camps: task-oriented and relationship-oriented (good graphics at that link). People are hard to change, so he says expecting any individual to navigate both domains easily is a challenge. The model calls for matching the leader (or the leader’s style) to the demands of the situation and the power dynamics at play. Straightforward enough though I only partially agree.
The seemingly binary choice is one of the limitations of Fiedler’s model (or at least superficial interpretations of it). Fiedler worked in the bureaucratic “grey flannel suit” age of industrial capitalism where conformity and rigid structures were prized. This was the top-down, command-and-control environment of the 1960s. He was also a psychologist, and they invariably start with the individual. Theories are time-stamped with the assumptions prevalent at their conception.
Theories are also constrained by artificial boundary settings necessary to build and explain the concept. It helps to recognize that boundaries are more permeable in practice. Most successful leaders I encounter fall between extremes of the task-relationship scale because to accomplish tasks you need robust relationships, particularly today when mental wellness and other human-oriented concerns are high on leaders’ agendas. They are constantly navigating the grey, liminal spaces between hard deliverables and the need to take care of people.
Neither of these necessarily banish a theory to the waste bin.
Fiedler’s distinctions remain useful when I teach leadership to subject matter experts — physicians, engineers, public safety officials, and others who rise and are rewarded for getting stuff done. These are classic task-oriented professions. Similarly, I find it helpful with executives whose daily lives are constrained by KPIs that emphasize task-oriented metrics. Here, Fiedler is useful in showing the alternative of relationship-oriented leading. It helps people see the possibilities and generate options.
Neuroplasticicity should also be considered. While the study of this phenomenon of the brain changing “through growth and reorganization” predates Fiedler and many advances were made in the 1960s, the discipline-centric nature of academia makes it unlikely that it figured greatly in his thinking. We now know much more and see fewer personality traits as immutable. The ideas of unlearning and relearning are more widely accepted and practiced. Leaders can grow into greater fluency with both task- and relationship-orientations.
Fiedler also helpfully suggests choosing leaders based on circumstances, an idea that predates his contingency model. This is consistent with my latest work on communities of leading. When facing a complex challenge, it is rarely possible for one person to always be the best choice. Nor can one person handle every facet. There is a need for an environment where the baton of leading can be taken and handed off without a permanent change in status, something few organizations have mastered. Even groups of leaders, the celebration of which I believe originated with Warren Bennis, have yet to reach their full potential because the focus on individual leaders endures.
Lesson number one: most leading is done along continua. It’s more dial than switch. It’s knowing when the urgency of accomplishment matters most and when it’s better to lean into developing individuals and the team. And how building the right relationships makes it easier, indeed possible, to push hard when needed without alienating or damaging people. Teams go all in for each other and for a leader who believes and invests in them.
Tasks can also be a vehicle for enhancing relationships. One question that I often hear from people who have been on a crisis team is, “Why can’t we be like that every day? We cut through the bullshit. We made decisions We had each other’s backs.” Well, because we tolerate bullshit, indecisiveness, and in-fighting far too often in organizations that promote silo boundaries, tolerate time-sucking practices, and enforce strict hierarchies, even when they are counterproductive. It’s a matter of acknowledging collaborative as well as competitive options(as well as setting the bar high on core principles). Thinking along continua makes that possible.
The second lesson is to test classic theories to see if they adapt well to modern circumstances. Fiedler’s work was done in the “right stuff” era of leadership scholarship that looked to fixed traits of individuals to predict leader effectiveness. We’ve come a long way, baby. Rather than seeing the ability to lead contained in a single individual, scholars (at least in the camp of which I count myself a member) increasingly see leadership living in the relationships between leaders and followers. Leading is done more with than to people. The capacity and capability to lead is system rather than individual based.
Finally, the tension in Fiedler’s model is useful for making a more fundamental shift in thinking: transcending the trade-off to see tasks and relationships as inextricably linked. In Fiedler’s time, organizations were seen as machines with discrete functions to be optimized by managers. They are actually complex, adaptive systems, and complexity theory teaches us that such systems are governed by the dynamic relationships between the parts, not the parts themselves.
I think that Fiedler can be refreshed to meet our needs. Responsive agility is prized in leaders today in ways it was not in Fiedler’s time. Rather than asking, “Am I…” ask, “When do I need to be more…” and “How can I be more…” Even better, substitute “we” for “I.” When you start with a continuum — not seeing tasks and relationships as mutually exclusive — it makes it easier to see the need for fluency with both.
