Here’s a question you may or may not be able to answer: What is your leadership default?
In other words, what leadership style or preference do you naturally go to? It may be tough to answer that question because it take a level of self-awareness that is often difficult to face, especially when you’re in a position of leadership and faced with tremendous expectations. But it is incredibly important when it comes to leading the team members in your span of care.
On this podcast, Barry Kirk and Shannon Lindwedel of Chapman & Co. Leadership Institute explain what we mean by "leadership default," how leaders can identify theirs and they're going to give a "real talk" example to help illustrate the situation.
This is another podcast installment of the People and Performance Playbook on the Truly Human Leadership Podcast where our experts at Chapman & Co. share their knowledge on leadership development. You can listen through your favorite podcast provider or through the link in the header above.
Transcript
Barry Kirk: Shannon, we're going to have some real talk here today, because something you and I both know — and will come back to in a few minutes — is that I found out, through second-party feedback from the team that I lead, which is the worst way to find this out, that the thing that I was proudest about as a leader was the thing that my team actually wanted less of.
You know this firsthand, and we'll talk about why. But I think it's a good starting point to say we both have personal experience with the topic that we want to get into today, which is this idea that when you go into leadership — whether you know it or not, and the likelihood is you don't — you go in with a default style or approach to how you're going to lead. I think you like to call it a leadership instinct.
Shannon Lindwedel: Instinct, default — things that are likely invisible to you.
Barry: They're essentially biases that you bring into the role as a leader. Here's the thing that doesn't get talked about much, or examined much: If you're in leadership, you almost certainly had some success before that as an individual contributor. That's how most of us end up there. You're so good at what you do — I guess you should lead people.
Shannon: You're a great doer. So, let's lead.
Barry: You bring some style with you that seemed to work. You’ve actually built in that bias — the thing that got me here must be the thing that will continue to deliver success for me. That is not necessarily true.
Shannon: Your default probably isn't wrong all the time, but it probably always isn't right either. That’s another way to think about it.
Barry: Or it might not be right for the people you're leading. It might have been absolutely the thing that helped you navigate corporate America or wherever you work or a university or any system that you're in. When you arrive at the point where you have people in your span of care, the question is: Those things about you — your personality, your work style, the way you think through a problem, the way you approach solutions — are they the default that is needed by the people who you’re actually leading?
You know, there's a fascinating study that was done by organizational psychologist and coach Tasha Eurich, and her study was on self-awareness within the business world. It was a multi-year study. There were about 5.000 working professionals, across many different corporations, different levels of organizations. The study was trying to define self-awareness and land on a measure of it.
Here's the really interesting thing: When they asked people early in the study, ‘Are you a self-aware leader? Do you know about yourself and how you show up?’ how many people said yes to that question? Just make a guess.
Shannon: Probably most of them.
Barry: Yeah, like 95%. An amazing number of leaders said, ‘Of course I know how I show up. I know how I'm perceived by other people.’ Do you want to make a guess what the actual number was, based on the assessment metric used in the study?
Shannon: Let's say four out of ten.
Barry: It was actually better than that. See, you’re a little cynical about leaders.
Shannon: I bring some skepticism to the room — maybe from the leaders I've seen in my career.
Barry: It was a little better, but I wouldn’t say much better. Only about 10 to 15% were actually self-aware, based on the metrics used in this study led by psychologists. The way she puts it — and it’s a fascinating quote — “On a good day, about 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we're lying to ourselves.” This is a fascinating, reality-bringing statistic. The assumption we're most likely to have in leadership is that we are self-aware —that we understand the person sitting across the desk from us, that we know how they're perceiving us and whether we're bringing to them what they need. Yet, the challenging reality is: We probably don't know how we're coming across, and we may not be giving them what they need.
Shannon: Barry, I'm curious what these things are that we actually need to be aware of. These leaders who think they have all this self-awareness and really don't, what should they be looking for within themselves?
Barry: I think what we're trying to get at is: What is the style you bring to leadership? What is the approach that you normally take? We used the word ‘bias’ earlier, and I think it’s a good one. When you are resolving a challenge — an innovation need or an interpersonal conflict on the team — what do you default to? It's the lens you use and the way you arrive at a solution. One example is your thinking style. You could be a highly conceptual person, thinking big picture, or you could be much more structural, actually putting a plan together. Does that make sense?
Shannon: That sounds like two people I actually know pretty well.
Barry: It might be something you and I are going to talk about again in a minute. But that's a good example. I'm sure you can think of other comparisons between two approaches a leader could take.
Shannon: Yeah, two maybe contradicting ones I've seen: Leaders who micromanage — all over what you're doing, constantly checking in, managing everything closely — versus a more laissez faire leader who is very hands off and gives a lot, maybe too much, freedom. You could also think of some people as very inspirational leaders — that’s another instinct — versus others who are just hyper-focused on developing careers within the people on their team.
Barry: I can also think of a leader who — and again, if you're listening to this today, I hope you're seeing where you fit within these pairs of opposites — is mostly an operational leader. Their goal is to set the plan and to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Or do you tend to focus more on the interpersonal side? You're not so focused on how things are running but on how people are running. Do you know what's going on? Are they feeling good? Are they feeling motivated? The interesting thing is: Can you be all of these things? Yes. The question is: What is your default? What is your highest bias? When you approach a problem or an opportunity, what do you default to?
We talked about one fallacy here: the style I have, whatever the bias, got me here, so it must be great — it must be the thing I want to keep using. We'd say that's definitely a fallacy. Or it could be — I'm not saying it's always the case. The fallacy is assuming it's true without verifying that the bias that got you here, the default that got you here, is the one needed right now. What's the other fallacy? Because there are actually two things often at play here.
Shannon: The other one we see a lot, and probably have personal experience with, is assuming that as a leader, my team must want to work the way I work. One, what got me here is probably the thing I want to keep doing. But also, I assume it's probably the right way to lead. Therefore, that's how my team sees it. They must think my instinct is the right way, and that they should do the same.
Barry: I think the reason — and this is probably a common occurrence — is that we have this notion, just in culture and society, that success begets success. You identify what works and think, "Let's keep using it." You probably also assume that you want to treat your team the way you want to be treated. That's basically the golden rule we're taught as kids: Treat other people the way you want to be treated. I think this is where we actually want to modify that and talk about the platinum rule: treat other people the way …
Shannon: … they …
Barry: … want to be treated. Exactly. So, we said we'd get real here, and we're going to talk about an actual example of this — about you and me, actually, and reveal how we connect to each other at work. What is our relationship within the work world?
Shannon: Hashtag real talk: Barry is actually my leader at Chapman & Co., and has been for a little over a year now. We've also worked together on client teams, so we've had a couple of different working relationships. But for the purposes of this conversation, we're focused on our leader-and-team-member relationship.
Barry: You are in my span of care.
Shannon: Correct.
Barry: And have been for about a year. I think it's safe to say I have some pretty obvious defaults in my leadership style, based on what actually brought me to leadership. Without getting into a long story: If I look back over my career arc, what I mostly leaned into, appreciated and utilized was leaders who gave me a lot of freedom and autonomy. I would often take that as far as I possibly could. I found that I was often able to get away with things other people couldn't because I was a high performer. I could break rules. I could step outside the system. I had a new leader once ask me what he needed to know about me, and I remember saying, ‘I operate best under the least amount of oversight possible.’ He looked at me like I was crazy when I said it. But by then I'd figured out what worked for me. When I moved into leadership, I know I brought that bias with me — that everybody in my span of care should also be granted maximum freedom in their decision-making, and in whatever rules they do or don't want to follow in how they get things done.
It's possible I was just at the wrong place, if this wasn't working. I know this was actually the approach Netflix took for a long time under Reed Hastings in how they ran the company. This "radical freedom" culture is what they called it. They had no policies around vacation time, way before other companies were doing that. Nobody required you to get your expenses approved. There was minimal process, minimal rules — it was all about freedom and responsibility. That's basically the style that worked great for me and moved me forward in my career. You probably experienced that when you first came on the team. I'd basically say, ‘Oh, great, you want to do that? Just go do it. Let me know if you need resources, and let's see how it turns out.’ I'll pause here — does that match your experience?
Shannon: Yeah, let's just say that was my experience. And I was also the person saying, ‘I would like more resources, more clarity, more direction — more of a path for where I'm supposed to be going,’ versus, ‘Go ahead and just do whatever you feel is right.’ Which I think, in some regards, is really great and can help people learn. I think I've learned a lot living in more ambiguity in this consulting role than I had before. However, I'm the type of person who needs the agenda, needs the written goals, needs the path to get where we're going. As a new member on the team, it was a bit of an interesting experience.
Barry: As a new member on the team, once you recognized you had your bias and I had mine, and mine wasn't serving your need — I actually don't recall this — did you come to me and say, ‘Barry, this isn't working, I need you to lead me differently’?
Shannon: I did, yes. In one of my goals conversations, we were able to talk about the different ways we approach work, including our communication styles — what worked better, email, Teams, text, what have you. But we also got to talk about things like our thinking styles. That was, I think, a really productive way to have that conversation, because we were able to be very clear about what I, in particular, needed as a team member.
Barry: How about a letter grade? Be honest. How did I actually do delivering on that after we had that conversation?
Shannon: Before that, maybe a B-minus, sometimes in the C range. But after that conversation, things definitely improved. We're in the A range now.
Barry: But we've had a year to work at it.
Shannon: Exactly.
Barry: Here's the crux of it: I think what you were looking for was more clarity along with freedom. I don't think you were saying you didn't want freedom.
Shannon: Exactly.
Barry: I think you were saying you need some structure and context around it. Which I didn't necessarily see as my forte to deliver, but I came to realize it was something you, and maybe other people, needed within that context. How did we find this out? Partly just from the work we do at Chapman & Co. We use our own tools within our organization, and we ran a series of listening sessions with different teams to give feedback to leadership. You and I had that conversation, but you weren't the only one who needed more clarity from my leadership style. I found that out more specifically through listening sessions, where people could openly discuss what was working and what needed improvement without the leader in the room. That feedback was brought to me.
I'll be honest, I scratched my head a little, because what I initially read it as, ‘They want less freedom." Which — if you're listening today, and your default is being challenged — the first thing you can't really process is: Why wouldn't somebody want the very thing I found so valuable in my own career success? Yet, here you all were saying, "Well, freedom is great, but what we really need is more structure, more guidance, more direction — maybe just make some decisions for us. Don't leave everything up to us." Maybe we should talk for a minute about this, because not everybody on the team agreed, but a number of you said, ‘I want that.' What was challenging about that for you? What was the challenge, in terms of getting your work done or performing well, in the leader not having the right style for what you needed?
Shannon: What's interesting is that my leader before you thought a lot like me — or I could say I thought a lot like her. I went from having a leader with a very similar thinking style to one that didn't. We had to have a lot more honest conversations, get more feedback. I mentioned our goals conversation — that was a little challenging, not automatically falling into one-on-ones where the person across the table was thinking exactly the same way as me about problems or projects I was working on. I had to flex my thinking a bit too, to try to understand where you were coming from, your default, your instinct — and those just being a little different.
Barry: That's a really interesting point. Depending on where you are in your career arc, you might be scratching your head a little, thinking, ‘What am I supposed to do — flex to every single person and their needs around my leadership style?’ Our answer to that is…
Shannon: Yes.
Barry: We are saying that.
Shannon: You do have to do that.
Barry: If you're in the Boomer generation or Gen X, you were probably more experienced in a corporate America where it worked the other way — if you were on a team with a leader, your job was to figure out your leader and then flex to their style. Whatever your leader was doing, that's what you would do. In this more enlightened era — this Truly Human space we're working in now — what we're finding is it's far more effective to take responsibility as a leader to understand what each individual team member needs, and flex to that for each one of them, even if that means flexing differently for each person.
The likelihood is you've got several people on your team who need one style from you and several who need another — but you have the capacity to make those choices. We're not stuck with our bias or our default, but you need to know what it is so you can understand whether it's compatible or not. Let's shift into: How do I get there?
If you buy that — and I hope you do, if you're a leader — how do I actually get to the level of self-awareness I need about my own style, and the style of the person in my span of care?
Shannon: One tool you could use to gain this self-awareness is Emergenetics. At a high level, it's a tool for understanding your thinking and behavior preferences — we use the word ‘preference’ rather than ‘style,’ because it's measuring where your brain naturally goes. There are four thinking preferences it measures. Conceptual thinkers are the big-idea people — a lot of imagination, visionaries. Social thinkers are always thinking about the ‘who’ in the equation — how something will impact people; they're empathetic. Analytical thinkers are the data-driven folks — clear, logical problem solvers, your numbers people. And structural thinkers are more practical — they like guidelines, love a project plan, love knowing how things are going to get done.
There are also three behavioral styles it measures. Expressiveness is roughly how many words you use to get your thoughts across — very expressive, or pretty quiet. Assertiveness — not ‘assertive’ in the way people usually think of it — is more about the pace at which you work: fast at making decisions and driving things forward or taking more time to think things through. And flexibility measures how much, at the high end, you welcome change, or, at the lower end, are a bit more firm and harder to convince when big changes come around.
When we think about Barry and me, we have some similarities — we're both pretty high in social thinking, so we're always thinking about others in the situation, pretty relational and intuitive about people, empathetic. I would say we’re in a pretty good job for having that kind of style. A place where we differ: I have a very high preference for structure — I'm a more practical thinker, I really like guidelines, and I'm sometimes cautious of new ideas. Sometimes they're really great and fun — if you've seen any of the crazy whiteboards in our office, you know how many big ideas there are around here — but I'm the person who hits pause and says, ‘How is this actually going to happen?’ Whereas you, Barry, are a lot more of a conceptual thinker than I am — that's actually your strongest preference. You're the one writing all these big ideas, a little unorganized, probably on the whiteboard. You're very imaginative, intuitive about ideas — a visionary, another word we might use. Those two sometimes feel like they're in a little tension, but I think that's also why we make a good team on the clients we work on together — you bring a lot of the big ideas, we both bring collaboration because of that social preference, and I come in with the project plan and how we're actually going to get it done.
A tool like Emergenetics is a good way for you to become a lot more self-aware about how you think and behave naturally — and it's also a good tool to use with the people in your span of care, to learn how they naturally think and behave.
Barry: It could be any assessment tool — there are many great ones out there. DISC is another one people are familiar with. But whatever the tool is, it starts to give you clarity, and gets back to that self-awareness question. Self-awareness is just hard to come by on your own — it's hard to look in the mirror and see what everybody else sees. But taking one of these assessments can begin to break it down for you and let you compare it to a team member's. Shannon, when you bring up the difference between our thinking preferences, conceptual and structural — when I look at our Emergenetics profiles, your percentile preference for structural is 80%. 80% of all people who take it, you're above. I'm at the 5th percentile.
Shannon: It actually doesn't get much lower than that on Emergenetics.
Barry: It doesn't get much lower. Whereas, on conceptual thinking, you're a little over 25%, but I'm almost at the top — 95%. That simple tool, sitting in front of us as we're having this conversation, lets us immediately see where we're going to have gaps in how we relate to each other, but also how we complement each other. And as you said, one of the other measures is social thinking — do you think about other people and how they might be impacted — and that's the place where you and I share. The minute you've completed the assessment and gotten the results back, it almost immediately becomes an effective tool for understanding what a team member might need. It also helps you, on the other side of the table, know what you need if you're trying to influence a leader or get a yes. What's most likely to cut through the noise of their day and get to what will give them clarity is what I want to talk about.
Now, leaders — here's the challenge. We're describing an interaction between one leader and one team member, Shannon and me. But in reality, you have many, many people in your span of care. It's back to that question: Am I supposed to know this about each team member and flex based on that? Again, we'll say yes — you should be able to do that. Why? Because it gets the best performance out of that team member. It also recognizes that team member as an individual. They are not just some part of a homogenous team without a name or a face.
There's also a team version of this that's valuable. Once you have this on each of your team members, you can take the results from DISC, Emergenetics or another assessment, and create a team profile — this tends to be how we work as a team, here's where our gaps are and so on. What we're advocating for is using something more data-centric, with scientific backing, to break free of the chains of your default. You don't have to live by a default you don't even know you have. You can become aware of it, keep using it where it's effective, and also understand that plenty of other people need different things from you as a leader.
Shannon: Being aware of your default also means being aware that you have an impact — not just on your team, but on the culture as a whole. Barry, what are the ways being aware of your instincts and defaults will help you have a positive impact, not just on your team, but on your culture as a leader?
Barry: I want to answer the inverse question first — what's the effect if you don't know your default? We touched on this slightly earlier, but there's a concept we've talked about many times: trickle-down leadership. In an organization where the leader doesn't seem particularly interested in knowing what other people's needs are, when the team tries to learn that style anyway, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — the whole team takes on that style, whether it's natural to them or not, because they're trying to please the leader or figure out what the leader wants them to be. You end up with a team of people operating in a way that isn't natural or comfortable to them, trying to map to you and what you look like.
Trickle-down is probably OK if your defaults are relatively positive. But if your defaults have some things mixed in that aren't so great, your team is going to pick that up too. The positive side is: In an environment where you actually understand each individual's needs and flex to their style so they can be high performers and bring their own thing, you start to impact the culture differently. The trickle-down isn't, ‘My style permeated the corporation’ — which is probably what we sometimes see in CEO-heavy cultures, where everybody's trying to be like the CEO. You're actually creating a culture that says, ‘We see everybody here as an individual, with an individual style and an individual contribution to make,’ and people show up knowing they can contribute that way. That's a much more positive culture to be in — you're impacting the whole business, and hopefully influencing other leaders too. We've seen organizations where one leader starts to say, ‘I'd like to be self-aware, I see the advantages of that, I want my team to feel like I see them and know them’ — beginning to operate at that level of real human connectedness so everyone can perform better. Other leaders start to see the results and pick up that approach themselves.
As we come to our conclusion, I guess the other real-talk question is: How hard is it to stick with this? Let's say I've done the work to be self-aware as a leader — not only aware of my own biases and defaults, but I’m now aware, because I've done some assessment work with my team, of their thinking and behavioral preferences. Am I going to be perfect at this? Maybe the realest way to ask is — Shannon, knowing we've been through this process within our organization and team, am I 100% perfect at leaning into that self-awareness, especially that part where I get into conceptual land too easily and not into the structural side?
Shannon: I would say yes. There are still days where you fall back into your default, even though you're aware because of these tools like Emergenetics. But I also think that makes having the feedback conversation of, ‘Hey, Barry. You are way too conceptual today. We need to bring it back to some structure.’ Or even getting some more data like our analytical thinking style flexing into something else that might be a gap. But having this tool makes that conversation a lot easier and gives us some shared language to have between leader and team member.
Barry: Yeah, I think that's really important. It gives permission to raise the question or to make the request. Because you've been through this together as a team. You've assessed each other as a team. You’ve shared your profiles and now you have language, but you also have the right to bring it up, because now you have this information on each other.
It's not secret information, right? It's information you want everybody to share and to know. And then they can call it out when they need it. Or they might just say, ‘Today, I think we need to think about the team more than we think about the plan. Let's move into our social brain today and talk about that.’
You have language for it. Whereas, before not only did you lack self-awareness, but even if you had it for yourself, there was no way to really talk about it to other people. I think the way we break free of our biases is we become leaders who know ourselves really well before we start to focus on how we lead others.
‘Leader, know thyself’ is a core need here. And then understand that if you can get great at that and you put the work in to flex, yes, for each person in your span of care, to understand them and meet them. Not only are you affecting that team in a positive way, but it is one way that you can start to have a real impact on the whole culture of the business where you work.