Soft power in leadership — what is it and why does it matter?

There’s a blistering scene in last week’s episode of Billions that sees Taylor Mason breathe fire all over two former employees for trying to poach two current ones.

In the split seconds that follow, fury disappears and Taylor is in full-on charm mode, enticing the deserters to remain.

Honestly, I’d already spent the last week in front of a page of chaos in Notion, writing and rewriting, trying to put together this piece on soft power. This scene encapsulated everything I was trying to voice.

The importance of soft power was at the centre stage of our department last year when we hired an individual for a scaling European team of a complex global tech business. It was a diplomatic minefield. Trying to manage each and every stakeholder required nuance at every stage.

When I started this piece, I thought that perhaps ‘soft power’ in the technology industry was just too widely understood. I wondered — is it so widely advocated for as to be unremarkable?

To learn more, I reached out to a number of leaders in our A8X community to talk about their experience of soft power and other levels of influence. It led me down a deep rabbit hole. It was obvious the subject matter could travel in any number of directions: gender, innovation, and even societal structures.

But the scene in Billions gave me a new frame for the picture. What became really apparent as I explored further was this: the key to the castle is the ability to bend and flex your leadership style according to context.

Sure, in technology soft power skills are increasingly the default mode. But knowing exactly what that means and does not mean, when to deploy which tactics and how soft power sits at the heart of our professional identity as leaders and organisations, is a subject matter worth unpacking.

Let’s take a step back for a second. As a literature grad, my M.O is to reach for definitions and models. For context, there are two worth briefly highlighting.

What is soft power?

In the late 80s, Joseph Nye (writer and political scientist) coined the term ‘soft power’ in the context of the world stage. Later, in 2004, he wrote about it in detail.

Soft power, he said, was:

“The ability to influence the behaviour of others to get to desired outcomes without using force or payment but instead by attracting, leading by example — co-opting rather than coercing.”

As an aside, he’s credited with having considerable influence in both the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Great place to start, right? The TL:DR for the modern leader is that soft power is the ability to inspire results rather than force them. Bingo.

But leaders don’t exist in a vacuum, and this had me reaching for one of the most popular leadership models from the past few decades. In 1994 Wilf Jarvis (writer and behavioural psychologist) developed a 4 quadrant leadership development model that effectively defined the shepherd in the context of the flock, so to speak.

This model and his training programs put winning hearts and minds at the centre of his methodology.

You can see only one quadrant even hints at any kind of hard leadership vibes — it’s (can you guess) the red one. The rest have more of an emphasis on ‘bottom up’ leadership.

But what this model is really great at signposting is that there are different strokes for different folks. And herein lies the key:

Leadership is not a one-size-fits-all approach.

Leading a team is a constantly evolving and dynamic activity that involves having a range of tools and knowing when to use them.

Inspiring people to lead themselves

When I chatted to friends, colleagues, and contacts about this, the following theme(s) came up time and again. Leadership means:

• Encouraging autonomy — allow people to lead themselves
• Empowering teams to effect change and deliver innovation
• Contouring the outcome, while leading the journey
• Having your team wake up in the morning saying ‘I get to’ rather than ‘I have to’

All of this embodies Nye’s macro theory of co-opting rather than coercing.

But is that it? How can we optimise the… power of soft power? What do we need to balance it with?

I guess for me when we look at the tech ecosystem, effective soft power needs two things to be truly impactful (and a third that we’ve not really touched on but is pretty much essential)

The Keys to Soft Power in Leadership

#1 Flex your leadership style

You probably already have an instinctive grasp of what kind of leadership style you naturally gravitate towards, which will be in turn dictated by the people you’ve led.

For example, having spent a lot of my career leading less experienced teams, peer leadership was exciting new ground for me. Nevertheless, you will have a general direction of travel stylistically.

Key Learning: Pinpoint your dominant style (because you will have one) but then also flex your EQ to ‘read the room’ so you can code-switch between styles

#2 Model collaborative behaviours

There’s lots of evidence that the modern workplace is moving towards a softer and more conscious model.

Gen Z tells us that evaluating the social impact of a business, plus its approach to lifestyle design and flexible working, is way more important than money and status.

At the senior level, we see leaders prioritising profit for purpose and genuinely looking to change the world — you only have to look at the fact that green industries are growing 20% year on year to know that ‘greed is good’ and ‘lunch is for wimps’ went out with the bad perms of the 80s.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are massive movements in the tech world — just look at high-velocity movements like the Femtech Lab.

But given all this is the case, we need to model behaviours that mirror and support the missions we want to be part of. It might sound like a contradiction but empathy and compassion — highly aspirational behaviours — fundamentally help you wield power.

Key Learning: Do as I do, not as I say — hire for attitude, train for skill, be woke AF

The third one is one I’ve barely touched on so far because in tech we take it for granted. In our little echo chamber, we are all very much alive to these leadership nuances and the potential they offer.

We also already work in an environment (eg. flatter, agile structures) where test and adjust, constant feedback loops and iterative processes are at the heart of what we do — it’s like a fertiliser bag for soft power.

I wondered whether I would be left with the same impression had I reached out to my old investment banking network, where for sure rigid hierarchies and top-down policy still rule.

So the third factor to consider, after soft power and soft skills — is what I will call soft structure:

#3 Innovate organisational structures

How we organise ourselves as teams of humans for desired outcomes has a significant impact on the effectiveness of tips #1 and #2.

In one of my many dinnertime conversations about this, a friend brought up the concept of holacracy (”a system of corporate governance whereby members of a business form distinct, autonomous, yet symbiotic, teams to accomplish goals”) which reminded me of the newer structures and thinking we are seeing in decentralised business models.

No hierarchy, fewer traditional reporting lines, lots of collective, collaborative modes and behaviours.

So I’d conclude, if you want to effect change and drive growth, you need everyone on the team to be an innovator.

You need to:

a. Inspire them to lead themselves

b. Model behaviours that are attractive and influential

c. Have a structure that encourages individual and collective potential

Key Learning: Soft power can only be effectively deployed in an organisational structure that mirrors and supports it

With the current popular gaze focused on the opportunities offered by Web3, it stands that we need to look at how we lead in this brave new world. Maybe it’s time to throw out the rule book.

Final Question — Is there any place for ‘hard leadership’ in the high growth tech space?

This is an interesting one, we unpacked it at our most recent leadership offsite at ACELR8. Looking back over the pandemic and talking about crisis comms — we agreed that being under threat as a business is going to require a more directional approach.

Taylor Mason’s approach in Billions last week was carrot and stick in flashing neon lights — and while the state change is slightly clumsy, it was a stark example of someone in command of both modes and the ability to move swiftly between both.

I’d be wary of stealing staff from Taylor Mason Capital, that’s for sure 🤷🏻‍♀️

Joseph Nye himself noted that smart power strategy means the ability to combine hard and soft power depending on what’s more effective in a given situation. Coming full circle I’ll quote CEO Mike Prince from Billions, talking about key differences in optimistic and pessimistic behaviours:

“Like most things, what you want is to be able to control your emotional range enough to trigger whichever is more useful in the micro-moment.”

A bit Machiavellian right?

But absolutely spot on.

Special thanks for the insightful coffees, wines and chats in the process of writing this to:

Sarah Dattani, Leanne Beesley, Elena Bladh, Georgia May and Vicky de Groof

Do you have thoughts and musings to add? Feel free to hit my DMs.