The balanced boss: how you can be two styles of leader at once
We all deal professionally with a host of different people, environments and challenges. The trick to becoming an effective leader is being able to adapt to each of them by modulating between two common leadership styles.
Leadership styles can have a critical impact on the success of any organisation. But rather than adopting a single, inflexible style, the most effective leaders are able to draw on a toolbox of styles, pulling out the one that’s most appropriate in any given situation. So attendees discovered at a recent CUHK EMBA Master Class conducted by Professor Thomas Bain, who has worked at the Central Bank of the Bahamas, JP Morgan and Barclays Wealth, and has over 25 years of experience of providing leadership training to financial institutions.
Professor Bain is about to start a leadership course at CUHK, which covers a range of subjects, including time management; questioning skills; giving and receiving feedback; vision, values and mission; diversity, equity and inclusion; working together; and executive presence. His Master Class, though, focused specifically on how people can become better leaders. To do so, he said, they need to first look at themselves, and then look at the people around them, with an eye on how those other people are different from them – adapting to that will make them a more effective communicator.
How people lead
The two main modes of leadership, he said, are the powerful and attractive styles. People exhibiting the former are detached in conversational tone, physically demonstrative, tend to interrupt and introduce abrupt topic shifts, and are less polite; whereas those favouring the latter are more empathetic, respectful and attentive, and tend to use more accepting physical gestures.
There are big differences between the two groups in verbal style. Powerful people tend to be faster, louder, more direct, and use a more intense style that includes more jargon, with few non-fluency features or qualifiers. But it can also have an equally big impact on non-verbal communication, aka body language – which, Professor Bain emphasised, has been repeatedly shown to have more of an impact on people than verbal communication: we are communicating all the time, whether we mean to or not.
It can be as simple as leaning backwards (powerful) versus forward (attractive) when someone else is talking; or how much physical distance you maintain (powerful people get closer). Powerful leaders make eye contact when talking but not when listening; with attractive leaders, it’s the other way round. Powerful leaders are also more likely to stare, adopt serious expressions, make controlled movements, talk while moving away and touch people in a non-reciprocal and uninvited way – for example, by patting them on the back.
Tailoring the message
Professor Bain asked attendees at master class to imagine talking to someone two ranks above them at their workplace, and work out which markers of the powerful and attractive styles of both nonverbal and verbal engagement they would use. Unsurprisingly, many attendees favoured an attractive style in most cases, while many other were somewhere in the middle, but only a few favoured a powerful style. When he repeated the same question with someone two ranks below them in the origansation, however, more people favoured a powerful style.
The lesson from that, he said, is that we can all change, even though of us who think we’re restricted to a certain style. You have more tools in your tool box than you thought: it’s a case of knowing which one to employ in which situation.
According to Professor Bain, leaders should be powerful enough to be heard and attractive enough to be followed. Ironically, that turns out to demand of people more or less the opposite of what the attendees had just said they do – because the most effective strategy could be to act powerfully upwards and attractively downwards. If you want people to follow you, you need to be a bit nicer; if you want people to listen to you, you need to be more powerful.
He said this is something he encounters regularly in his work in Asia, where the culture tends to be more respectful, deferential and hierarchical than most other places. This can make people be less direct, for example, when it comes to expressive dissatisfaction to their boss – but their boss is never going to know that they’re unhappy unless they do so.
In response to a question from an audience member about the best and worst leaders he’d encountered, Professor Bain said that the worst tend to exhibit an excess of powerful behaviours – bullying, sarcasm, cruelty, disrespect and so on. The best are the opposite: great leaders focus on your behaviour, not your person. That means if someone does something wrong in the workplace, tell them they’ve done something wrong; don’t call them an idiot. Great leaders respect people as individuals.