Range is a critical and under-talked about leadership skill.
In this post you will learn:
Why Range Matters:
Leading teams requires context switching.
As an example, before becoming a coach, I ran marketing teams. During this time a common day looked for me looked as follows:
-Get to work and lead a quick, light-hearted team stand-up.
-Spend an hour in a combative and productive executive team meeting.
-Take a BD call, evaluating a new partnership opportunity. Follow this up with back-to-back candidate interviews pitching our company to new hires.
-Talk to a team member about a personal issue, requiring patience, honesty, and empathetic dialog.
This ability to shift between leadership styles and to be light on one's feet is range.
Types of Leadership Range:
Range comes in many forms. Here are a few to think about:
1. Managerial Range:
In Daniel Goleman's best-selling book, Primal Leadership, his research on CEOs found that there are 4 Leadership Styles every leader should use frequently, and two styles that leaders should use sparingly. These are:
-Coaching Leadership
-Visionary Leadership
-Affiliative Leadership
-Democratic Leadership
And used sparingly;
-Pace-Setting Leadership
-Commanding Leadership
Good leaders excel in each of these styles and know when to use which.
2. Emotional Range:
Strong leaders are aware of the different emotions they experience throughout a day and how to respond to each.
I like to narrow the array of emotions we all experience into five core emotions: Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Creative Energy. Do you have the range to manage and be with each of these?
Research shows that strong leaders don't barricade themselves off from emotions (or else they will fail to connect with their team), instead, they notice these feelings, regulate them, and have the ability to respond to each.
3. Personality Range
Each of us develops a personality at a young age (research shows that ages 0-3 are particularly tied to ego formation).
We have behaviors that we get applauded for doing (listening, being kind, being strong, etc) and ones that we get discouraged from. And, as our personality solidifies, we develop patterns that become simultaneously strengths and weaknesses.
As an ex., I am a strong listener, excellent at synthesizing ideas, and at understanding people; however, I find being loud or challenging more difficult.
As we grow as leaders, if we rely only on our old behavioral patterns, we’ll hit a ceiling. Instead, we need to hone our strengths and fill in our blind spots to rise to new challenges.
Tools to Expand Your Range:
There are many tools for growing one's range. Here are a few I like:
Improv! The most fun tool on this list is Improv. Improv is powerful because the "Yes, and" format means giving up control, being comfortable running with other people's ideas and quickly adjusting one's energy to that of the group. There are many places to take Improv 101 (and many leaders do this), I personally like Jet City Improv.
The Enneagram is my favorite personality tool because it has deep understanding of how people change within a personality type or ego-structure. The Enneagram can help you identify your personality-type and patterns, as well as offer deep insights into how to expand your range (and challenges you will face in doing so). In particular, the Enneagram uses a notion of personality "wings," which are related personality types that each person can and should use to balance their core personality. Want to learn more about the Enneagram as a tool for expanding leadership range? Contact me here for a 30-minute consult.
Group coaching. Group work helps us expand range because we can get feedback on our leadership style from many people at once. This helps us better understand our impact, blind spots, stories, and opportunities to grow.