Here's How to Mess Up Situational Leadership -- or Make It the Success You Seek

What makes a great leader? The answer isn't what you think. Industry knowledge, high EQ, organizational skills -- such things do matter. Yet none make a leader great. Great leadership is leadership that fits the situation, and great leaders see and seek this fit. It's an important insight, but what's more important is helping you understand and use that insight.

Situational leadership should be an expansive concept. Too often, however, it's approached with a bias, one that implies that the situational challenge leaders face has to do primarily with those they lead. This bias infers that a leader's primary task is to get others to follow, and to do so by focusing their attention on leadership tactics: telling, selling, participating, and delegating. In truth, a leader's primary job is to create an environment in which everyone can lead, each in his or her own way as the situation requires. The situation is something far greater than who leads and who follows, and situational leadership by that definition offers two enormous opportunities: for leaders to ensure their organizations thrive far into the future, and also to change their very view of what it means to lead.

While every leader and organization crafts its own specific strategy and tactics, thriving organizations, especially in fluid and unpredictable environments, understand that three factors play pivotal roles in successful situational leadership.

Inquiry

This article has already shared a key leadership awakening: Not only is successful leadership situational, it's shared. Leadership in volatile and uncertain times has never been something that can be borne by a single heroic individual, or even a few. Because of this, every member of a team must be expected and empowered not only to look at the situation, but to question it, seek solutions, and do their part to help the organization in total thrive. The questioning aspect is key.

Questions are powerful, universally accessible, and mostly underutilized tools. Their strengths are multifaceted. Questions demand we observe, not simply accept. They keep us from getting stuck. And, of course, they are the vehicle that leads us to new lands and new ideas. The X factor of inquiry is what gets overlooked or is consciously avoided: making inquiry a shared right and responsibility. When inquiry becomes part of the daily mindset of an organizational culture and a tool everyone is expected to use, situations are most likely to be laid bare for their true opportunities and threats.

Co-creation

The inquiry process isn't just an assessment process, it's also an innovation and creation process. When inquiry is a shared value, so is creation. When that truth becomes an organizational mindset, innovation leadership naturally shifts from being the domain of a single creator or a small team to a culture of innovation. Decades ago, Harvard professor and sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot offered a new theory called portraiture that reshaped the landscape of sociology. As its name implies, portraiture seeks to take in the whole picture, not just one part, and not just one person's view. It's a concept that thriving organizations recognize the benefit of as well, doing what Lawrence-Lightfoot describes as "letting everyone into the process equally." As she told me, "This is a difficult concept for many to get their minds around. But a truly robust, versatile, and creative framework is referential, progressive, ongoing. It's true power lies in the inverse of one view, person, or way. It's beauty is that it is collective, reciprocal, and co-created," which in the end is the only way to come close to seeing the totality of the situation.

Diversity

What's implied in embracing inquiry and co-creation is the allowance for a diversity of views. It's the very thing that keeps many leaders stuck in the relic view of effective leadership as leader-over-followers, and the thing that causes many to miss the forest of the situation for the important diversity of the trees. Often what such leaders fail to see is the totality of diversity's role, including the fact that it is the very thing that makes teams smarter.

With a steady thrum telling leaders that diversity is important, but a remaining headwind of hesitation, in 2016 Harvard Business Review did a study of studies, looking at research about diversity in the broadest sense. Doing so allowed HBR to see what often gets lost in discussions about diversity's pros and cons. What the report stated matter-of-factly was  "non-homogenous teams are simply smarter. Working with people different from you may challenge the brain to overcome its stale ways of thinking and sharpen performance ... to reexamine facts and remain objective ... to keep joint cognitive resources sharp and vigilant," among other benefits the research clearly showed.

Pause for a moment and consider these facts in total. Diverse teams, ones that question and co-create, are able to do so because they see the situation far better than teams that aren't and don't. There is no doubt, not to mention ample proof, that this is what makes their leadership successful and superior.

Larry Robertson

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