So you want to be a leader… #2

What does it take to be a leader? Start with understanding your leadership!

Published in

Coach Jose — Leadership and Project Management

6 min readSep 3, 2024

In my previous article, “So you want to be a leader… #1” I gave an overall view of a number of skills a leader needs to be successful. The list is not exclusive but these are the ones that in my experience add the most value. Other skills, such as negotiation, stakeholder management, financial knowledge, etc. are important. These, though, are supplementary in my view.

To recap, the list I provided was:

Your leadership skills in general. What behaviors are necessary to be a successful leader? How do you assess and understand the readiness of your team members?
The outcome/goal/result your team must achieve. How does it complement/support your organization’s?
The strategy that your team must align to, refine, and drive. And sometimes create.
The planning of the various efforts so that they can be successful.
Their execution of the various efforts, making sure they are successful.
Your team’s and your self-development.
Intra-team dynamics.
Your relationship (and the team’s) to stakeholders.

In this article, I’ll discuss leadership models that will help a leader be a better one. I’ll start with the Six Domains of Leadership™, or SDL, the model developed at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business by professors Sim Sitkin and Allan Lind. In a future article I’ll address Situational Leadership, and, if there’s enough interest, Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius (not really a leadership model, but a tool to understand people’s natural strengths and talents), and Tuckman’s theory of group development. Both of these are helpful to leaders.

Note that I have discussed SDL along with Situational Leadership (“Situational Leadership and the Six Domains of Leadership” and “Situational Leadership — Leveraging SDL’s Personal Leadership”).

What is the Six Domains of Leadership (SDL)?

SDL is, in my opinion, one of the most effective yet simple models of leadership. It is a behavior-based model as opposed to a trait-based model. A behavior-based model suggests that leaders can develop their leadership behaviors through education, training, and experience. A trait-based model suggests leaders are born with certain personality traits and characteristics, and if you don’t have them you are out of luck.

Not only is SDL a behavior-based model, but directly addresses the effect that a leader wants to have on their team or others. That is, if a leader wants to be credible, they will investigate the actions in the Personal Leadership domain that can help them be credible.

But we are jumping ahead.

As the name indicates, there are six domains the model proposes, along with their leadership effects:

Personal Leadership -> Credibility
Relational Leadership -> Trust
Contextual Leadership -> Community
Inspirational Leadership -> High Aspirations
Supportive Leadership -> Initiative
Responsible Leadership -> Stewardship

In addition, there’s an Overall Leadership domain that helps assess the entire leadership capabilities of the leader. Its leadership effect is Loyalty.

Note that the six domains are shown in a pyramid, and they support and interact with each other. The three subdomains in each domain further interact with other subdomains.

Personal Leadership

As the name implies, these are the personal behaviors of the leader. These behaviors, having and sharing a vision, being authentic, and being dedicated make the leader credible. Leaders who have a good vision but are not authentic or dedicated, are not credible. They basically say, “do this” and proceed to do something else (“do what I say not what I do.”) Personal Leadership seats in the bottom left of the pyramid (see image above). For some insights, see my article “Leadership: Trust vs. Reliability and Credibility”.

Relational Leadership

The keystone of the model sitting in the middle of the bottom layer of the pyramid, Relational Leadership yields Trust. Trust on the leader. Trust by the leader on their team and others. How do leaders become trustworthy? They show concern and respect, understanding, and fair treatment. Leaders get to know their people and other stakeholders to achieve this trust.

For more details, read my article “Trust — the Keystone of Leadership”.

Contextual Leadership

Contextual Leadership is in the bottom right of the pyramid. Based on our Six Domains of Leadership Survey, this is the one domain that most leaders have trouble with. See my article “Why don’t they get it? The need for context in leadership”. To achieve community, the leader must demonstrate coherence, Identity, and focus and simplify the work.

Inspirational Leadership

On the left side, middle layer of the pyramid, Inspirational Leadership is what encourages team members and others to “aim high” or have high aspirations. To enable this effect, the leader must have high expectations, enthusiasm and optimism, and promote innovation. To promote innovation, the leader should not only have a vision (Personal Leadership), but this vision should be one that enables an innovation system within the team.

Supportive Leadership

But, if the team members don’t feel safe, they won’t be inspired. This is what Supportive Leadership enables, for team members to take the initiative. To enable this effect, the leader must show efficacy, security, and blame control. In other words, the leader must help the team understand what they can accomplish, provide the security for them to perform, and manage blame so that when problems occur, and they will, the focus is on the what and how to solve it, not the who is responsible.

Responsible Leadership

The final domain, Responsible Leadership, is at the top of the pyramid. It rests on all the other domains. This is the domain what shows the leader’s ethics, ability to demonstrate a public role, and balance internal and external demands, including those based on time.

Overall Leadership

While the model asks questions for each subdomain and leadership effects, questions that provide insights into the leader’s behaviors and effects, it also asks questions of the overall leadership of the leader. Questions such as “is a good leader?”, “someone we look to for guidance”, and “someone we count on to lead us well”. In other words, lets validate that the domain and subdomain scores are supported by an overall view.

The leadership effect of overall leadership is loyalty. Do the leaders and team members have a strong connection, are loyal, and are mutually supported?

Summary

Understanding leadership models is very helpful to leaders who want to improve their leadership. In this article we covered the Six Domains of Leadership, one of the best models, in my opinion, to understand leadership. It’s not the only one, so we’ll cover others later on.

This is just a brief introduction to the Six Domains of Leadership. Duke runs a week-long program, the Duke Executive Leadership Program which is all about this model. Also, Delta Leadership offers an e-book about the model The Six Domains of Leadership by Allan Lind and Sim Sitkin. Delta Leadership also offers a coach certification program for those coaches who want to apply the model and survey in their practice. This program just received ICF’s accreditation for 20 CCE units.

For insights into the leadership effects, read my article “Leadership Effects — How to Achieve the Results You Want”.