What’s Your Leadership Style?
Anyone can be a leader. You just need to identify your natural style, explains Les McKeown
While some of us are born leaders, we can all learn how to lead. So why is it that so few of us choose to step forwards?
Many people simply don’t see themselves as the ‘leadership type’: ‘I’m not ambitious/energetic/passionate/decisive enough,’ they think; or ‘I’m not good with people/ideas/stress/ambiguity.’ Truth is, there is more than one leadership ‘type’. In fact, there are four, and all of us — everyone (that includes you, so we’re clear) — shows up as at least one of these types, and sometimes more.
So no matter how you think, or cope with stress, or deal with risk, or ambiguity, or any one of a million other variables, there’s room for you to lead. The only secret is to know your own style — and put yourself forward where and when your style will genuinely help two or more people achieve a common goal. Considering the four styles we each commonly exhibit when we’re working in groups and teams, and learning to use whichever style is most natural to us is the key to effective leadership. Let’s take a look at those four styles: Visionary, Operator, Processor and Synergist. See if you can tell which you are.
The Visionary
The Visionary operates at 30,000 feet, is most comfortable working on long-term, strategic issues, embraces change and risk, and needs frequent exposure to both in order to feel satisfied and useful. Visionaries are often charismatic, are usually great communicators, and enjoy building a tight, loyal team around them. Visionaries alternate between bursts of creative energy and times when they shift focus in order to recharge. They usually come back from the recharge period with a multitude of ideas they’ve generated.
On the downside, the Visionary’s need to constantly be launching new, grand ideas and their tendency to hyperlink between multiple topics, coupled with their ability to hold seemingly contradictory viewpoints on the same subject, can exhaust and confuse those who work with them. Using their vision, courage and ability to simplify complex ideas, Visionaries motivate others to ‘get things out the door’, but team members often find the Visionary’s boredom with detail frustrating, as with their need to ‘own’ all of the team’s ideas and their tendency to extremes of commitment.
Visionaries deliver best in those activities involving change and a minimum of routine. They need variety, accountability and frequent check-ins to make sure they stay on track and aren’t distracted by their own innate curiosity and boredom.
Famous examples of Visionary-leaders include Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Tony Blair and Jack Welch (General Electrics).
The Operator
Unlike the Visionary’s preference for starting new projects, the Operator achieves endorphin release by finishing things. Give an Operator a clear task, a ball of string, some gum and two boiled eggs, and somehow they’ll complete the job. Improvising and finding short-cuts, they’ll get done whatever they’ve committed to, come what may. Operators are uncomfortable working in a vacuum, preferring clear direction, and despite often being highly motivational, Operators find it hard to delegate, depending instead on their team to follow their lead and act as self-starters.
Operators are intensely task-focused and will do whatever it takes to complete the job they have in hand — even if it means working outside the system and ignoring standardised procedures to do so. Because of this propensity to action rather than theory, Operators provide an effective reality check for groups and teams, frequently eliminating unnecessary activities and identifying redundant or overly-complicated systems and processes. On the other hand, they can at times seem to everyone else in the organisation to be ruthless, roughshod mavericks, and not good team players.
Attempting to micro-manage an Operator is ineffective and can cause intense frustration on both sides. Their impatience with delay and their maverick approach to systems and processes often make interactions with Operators defensive and issue-oriented. Conversely, providing clear direction and autonomy, being consistent in enforcing boundaries, and helping them with prioritisation and delegation can produce an exceptional Operator-leader.
Leaders with an Operator style include Sam Walton (the Wal-Mart founder), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), and Steve Ballmer (Microsoft).
The Processor
Risk-averse and sceptical by nature, the Processor thrives on systems and processes, lives for data, eschews intuitive leaps of faith and bases decisions only on measurable, objective criteria. Not as naturally gregarious as the other two styles, the Processor will often build a tight team of like-minded individuals who together put in prodigious hours crunching data and running scenarios. A Processor thinks logically, is compelled by data, not anecdote, and likes to bring order to the situations they find themselves in. They do not cope well with ambiguity or imprecision. Processor-leaders bring consistency, scalability, accuracy and an objective perspective.
Some Processors can overanalyse data to an extent that others find frustrating. Their resistance to both risk and change, their relatively steady pace of work (irrespective of the need for urgency), and the fact that they often respond to requests by saying no, can make them a challenge to work with. Nonetheless, a highly effective relationship can be built with the Processor-leader by respecting their need for order, listening to them with respect and attention, challenging them constructively, giving credit where due, and refraining from hyperbole and exaggeration (which they abhor).
Setting up a Processor-leader to succeed involves setting clear, precise goals, making sure they clearly understand the organisation’s overall commercial priorities, having patience and improvising sparingly. Working for a Processor-leader requires an understanding of the underlying pattern or rhythm to their work and similarly understanding their priorities.
A great example is someone you’ve probably never heard of, Charles Coffin. It was Coffin who made GE into a great company, creating a machine that for years dominated global industry. And in the UK, former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
The Synergist
Unlike the Visionary, Operator and Processor styles — which are primarily focused on the desires and preferences of the individuals themselves, in ways we examined earlier — the Synergist is primarily focused on what is best for the enterprise (the organisation, department, division, project, group, team or issue being discussed).
This detached perspective — not focusing reflexively on their own concerns — gives the Synergist a high-level perspective of the team’s activities. The Synergist can be compared to the neocortex, collecting information and signals coming from the rest of the body, processing them, and outputting the instructions that enable the team or group to perform productively. It’s as if the Synergist views the Visionary, Operator and Processor interaction from an elevated level, watching their engagements on the dance floor below, only choosing to intervene when necessary to move the process forward. It’s what author Ron Heifetz calls ‘going to the balcony’.
While ‘natural’ Synergists exist, they are rare. The good news is that the Synergist is a style that anyone can learn to emulate, irrespective of their ‘natural’ style — any Visionary, Operator or Processor can (and should) learn to also be a Synergist. Although some find it easier than others to do so, the most effective team is one in which all of the members, be they Visionary, Operator or Processor, have successfully learned how to be a Synergist when necessary.
Finding Your Own Fit
So, which are you? A Visionary, Operator, Processor or Synergist? It may already be blindingly obvious to you from these brief descriptions. However, if you’re not sure (and remember, some people are more than one), you can find out in just a few minutes with this simple self-assessment.
Anyone can be a leader — but the ‘secret’, if there is one, is to match your leadership role to your style.
Adapted from Do Lead: Share your vision. Inspire others. Achieve the impossible. by Les McKeown. Copyright © 2014 by Les McKeown. Published by The Do Book Co.
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For details on Les McKeown’s 2019 workshops, head to Predictable Success.
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