When Your Go-To Leadership Style Stops Working

Harvard Business Review

3 days ago

As you move into senior roles, some leadership styles will come more naturally than others, shaped by your personality and past successes. And over time, your favored style may become your brand, expected by others and increasingly authentic to you.
But what happens when your preferred approach suddenly loses followership? If you don't adjust, you could diminish your credibility as a leader. On the other hand, adopting an unfamiliar style can be both awkward for you and confusing for your colleagues.
The challenge to become versatile across leadership styles is arguably harder than improving technical expertise or strategic competence because it calls for personal transformation. And these days, if you're not committed to developing past your comfort zone, you're unlikely to inspire others to stretch themselves and follow your example.
In my work coaching executives, I've seen that having the courage to develop greater adaptability in their leadership approach is worth the effort. Leaders who expand their range of styles not only sustain followership, they're often surprised by how agility gets easier with practice. Here are five strategies to help you successfully meet the moment when your default leadership style stops working.
Scan for shifts in the business, stakeholders, and yourself.
When your leadership style loses impact, it's typically because something changed in the systems around you. To avoid blind spots in your effectiveness, look for sudden changes in three areas: the business you serve, the stakeholders you manage and influence, and your personal concerns.
Ask yourself: Have market dynamics, customer needs, or product strategies shifted? Are your stakeholders requiring something different in order to willingly follow you? And within yourself, have any new responsibilities demanded a change in your confidence and presence?
I once coached a VP who noticed morale dropping across his team and complaints rising from internal customers about work delays. As he scanned for shifts in the business and key stakeholders, he recognized that constant pivots in strategy to keep up with market competition confused the team's priorities. At the same time, internal customers were applying pressure on shared projects. And the new VP, newly promoted, was trying too hard to please everyone, rather than managing around a clear vision and strategically setting boundaries on service. The result was a purely reactive team seen as order-takers targeted for criticism rather than valuable strategic partners.
By scanning at the level of the business, stakeholders and self, the VP realized he needed to lead with more clarity and conviction to improve credibility around what his team could promise and deliver. Shifting his style with this intention helped reset and re-engage both his team and stakeholders more effectively.
Identify a style you're overusing and try on new ones.
To help you assess which styles you tend to favor, consider how you show up across these six leadership styles, as provided by psychologist Daniel Goleman's research: directive (using command and coercion), authoritative (defining a vision to follow), pacesetting (insisting on high standards), affiliative (preferring personal bonds), democratic (seeking consensus for decisions), and coaching (prioritizing individual growth).
Several factors influence your chosen style, from your personality and unique strengths, to how you were taught about leadership, perhaps from prior bosses or mentors. But comfort breeds complacency, and as needs change, your over-reliance on one approach can limit future followership.
One of my coaching clients was a CEO who had spent his whole career at his company. Because of his deep institutional knowledge and a scrappy, 'roll up your sleeves and get it done' personality, he preferred to operate in the weeds, involving himself in extremely tactical issues. This pacesetting style—hands on, detail oriented and pushing for his view of excellence—worked well when the company was small and his leadership team was made up of longtime colleagues who expected it.
But as the business scaled and new leaders were hired to help the company develop a mature operational structure, his involvement became a bottleneck. And his style, once effective for solving simpler problems, now limited his managers' capabilities in addressing increasingly complex ones. He realized that in order to sustain effectiveness, he needed to try on some new styles, namely a visionary one that encouraged team ownership, and a coaching one that empowered others to grow themselves in preparation for future demands.
Be transparent about style changes.
Expanding your range of styles is a sign of sophisticated leadership, but be prepared for growing pains. Not only is adopting a new style unfamiliar to you, but it may confuse others if done without warning. Failing to share the context of what and why you're changing, may be seen as erratic and even worse, diminish trust.
To ensure alignment, build on your ongoing social contract, explaining your intention and how you'll experiment with broadening your range when leading your team. You might tell them:
Over the past year, I've noticed a habit of mine that is getting in the way of achieving the results we all want. I like to jump in and insert myself in the work when I don't see progress. But that's not working for either of us. Going forward, I'm going to try to empower you more, asking questions to invite your ownership and delegating more intentionally. If I seem quieter in meetings, it's not that I'm disengaged, and if I'm asking lots of questions, I'm not trying to test you. I'm just trying to listen and encourage your process and solutions rather than mine.
Reinforce how this shift will help everyone: 'Being a more intentional coach will not only help me spend more time on the big issues on my plate but also show you I trust you and want to give you opportunities to show what you can do.'
Taking ownership for where your style needs to expand can understandably make you feel exposed. But remember it's courage, humility and your modeling of vulnerability that will strengthen your team's capabilities and increase your followership.
Practice, seek feedback, and expect pushback.
Once you've clarified your intentions, start experimenting in small, yet visible ways. Ask for feedback on how your new approach is landing, but don't be discouraged if some colleagues aren't happy with it. After all, even if your prior style had its flaws, it was familiar. Changes in how you lead them may feel unwanted until they experience the benefits of adaptation.
One of my coaching clients was an SVP of technology, responsible for innovating engineering processes to improve his company's competitive edge. His style was grounded in vision-building and democratic decision-making, motivating the team to imagine the impossible and engage in healthy, inclusive debates about how to get there.
While his team felt safe and supported, several recent project failures reduced other stakeholders' confidence in the SVP's operational maturity. He developed a reputation for overpromising and underdelivering, caused by two problems with his leadership approach: his unwillingness to give critical feedback to his team and an aversion to consistent, detailed reporting to his peers on progress. To his credit, he made demonstrable changes in his approach in response to these setbacks.
To more objectively assess his team, he asked himself who he would re-hire (or not) if he had to start the team from scratch. Then he defined specific gaps for each and coached them with targeted feedback, acknowledging that his prior avoidance of that limited their potential. And when his team engaged in endless debates, he redirected them toward closure and action. Lastly, he had his team develop a cadence for planning and reporting out to stakeholders based on key metrics of interest.
Not everyone on the SVP's team welcomed these style shifts. After all, it meant more work and personal accountability. But he continued to seek feedback as a way of calibrating his approach to avoid over-indexing the other way. And by persisting with experimentation while accepting the pushback as a necessary part of evolving, he offered a model for them to expand their range as leaders too.
Commit to developing versatility over mastery.
As you experiment with new leadership styles, don't be discouraged if some just never feel right. Stay open to practicing across styles so you have access to more choices when the moment calls for it. And commit to choosing your approach based on purpose rather than personal preference. This not only increases your leadership effectiveness in a given context, but it ensures you're actively growing your adaptability muscle for future needs.
In today's ever-changing workplace, being adaptive is a major strategic advantage. A recent study reported more than 60% of corporate learning professionals believe leaders must become more behaviorally adaptable to meet future needs. And these days, companies are even creating C-suite roles specifically designed to foster agility because of its criticality for achieving enterprise-wide alignment. But versatility demands vulnerability and often letting go of your core identity.
For example, if you're a leader who has built trusted relationships before setting expectations, you might view the necessity to be authoritative and decisive first, as an affront to your values and 'who you are.' And yet in holding onto what feels authentic, you could miss the opportunity to use a directive style when it's more effective for the moment at hand, such as providing clarity in crisis, or helping new employees know what is expected of them before ramping up to their own level of competence.
To develop your adaptability across styles, let go of the need to feel authentic at all times. Versatile leaders often embody all six styles in the span of a day, depending on the purpose of the interaction. Read the room, consider if people need you to be decisive, observant, facilitative, or something else at that time, and show up accordingly, just to see what works.
In any leadership role, your style of engaging others plays a significant part in determining success, sometimes even more than the subject matter of the work. And when your style suddenly loses its desired impact, it can be hard to know how to shift it without losing your authenticity or confusing those you lead. By using these strategies, you can make sure you're sustaining followership by optimizing your style for the moment and developing your adaptive range for future shifts.