The ideal leadership blend for Stage 1 is Visionary, Coaching, and Commanding.
A Stage 1 leader guides their team with a strong vision, focuses on people’s potential, and takes charge to lead the organization through chaos. This ideal blend results in an organization that has a picture of where it is headed, is comprised of high functioning, engaged team members, and pushes through chaos with decisive decision making.
Primary Leadership Style: Visionary
The Visionary leader is tasked with guiding the team and the company with a strong vision. This creates a clear picture of the future that energizes the team and improves the confidence of the organization.
The vision set in place by the leader drives the organization forward. In this Start-Up stage, having a visionary leader who ignites the spirit of innovation and instills pride in the organization is key to the organization’s success.
Secondary Leadership Style: Coaching
Leaders who are strong in the Coaching style develop people for the future. They help people identify their strengths and weaknesses, while aligning work with their career goals. This is important in Stage 1, because the organization needs to attract employees with initiative who have an interest in being part of a growing company that will provide future opportunities. This style focuses and builds upon the team’s potential.
Tertiary Leadership Style: Commanding
Commanding leaders exert forceful direction to get results and make decisions. This is an important style to round out the leadership style blend because a Stage 1 organization needs both a clear vision and a commanding leader to help propel the organization towards that vision. Without Commanding as the tertiary style, the company can become stuck from indecisiveness at a time where so many decisions have to be made. A leader employing the Commanding style takes charge to lead the organization through chaos.
Leadership Style Blend Misalignment
A talented Interior Designer decides to start her own company. She’s certain she can provide better service and products than where she previously worked, where her potential was hindered by many layers of bureaucracy. In her new role as company founder and CEO, she brings a tremendous amount of energy and passion. She easily attracts new clients and impresses them with her design capabilities.
Eventually, her client base grows to the point where she needs to hire additional designers. It isn’t long before a pattern is established with the new hires; they start out eager to do the work, but after a few months show very little self-motivation. Most only last a few months before leaving. The CEO continues to search for the right employees but grows increasingly frustrated that she must spend all of her time servicing clients rather than growing the business. She’s not shy about setting clear expectations for her employees, but no one seems capable of rising to the challenge.
This CEO’s natural Leadership Style is Pacesetting. If someone can’t keep up, she switches to a more Commanding style, simply dictating what needs to be done. She’s never able to cast a vision for her team, however, so they tend to get bogged down in the day-to-day work without connecting it to a higher purpose. Her natural tertiary Leadership Style is Affiliative, but she can’t retain employees long enough to develop a harmonious team. Without group momentum, she is left doing the majority of the work alone.
The concepts from this article were taken from The Start-Up Stage: Organizational ReWilding Rules for Business Growth. Available through The ReWild Group and Amazon, the book explores in-depth this and other concepts while providing illustrations to help business leaders incorporate the ideas into their organizations. Get your copy today to learn the rules for growth for companies with 1-10 employees.