“Approaches which focus on leadership style tend to ignore what is most fundamental about leadership. Leaders add value to their organizations by exercising discretion and making sound decisions. The style with which those decisions are made is not, ultimately, very important. What is important is the quality of these decisions… The critical individual difference variable in leader effectiveness is the conceptual competence to do the required work. Good leaders are, first and foremost, competent to undertake their leadership responsibilities. A leader’s awareness of his or her preferred style and that of others may marginally improve communication, but it won’t, ultimately, get the right decisions made.”
– Phillip Lewis and T. Owen Jacobs in “Individual Differences in Strategic Leadership Capacity: A Constructive-Developmental View” from Strategic Leadership: A Multi-Organizational Perspective (1993)
I came across this quote in an overall discussion on leadership style, competence, and conceptual capacity and it’s got me thinking. At least in my organization, there’s been a lot of emphasis on style and tools like Meyer’s Briggs and other personality tools. This approach assumes that when we can develop more self-awareness about our own preferences and awareness of how other people’s preferences shape their behavior, then we will be able lead and partner effectively.
I like the MBTI, I’ve even gone through the qualification/training and think there’s immense value to it. However, the above authors argue that such an emphasis on valuing and respecting differences and style has its merits, but is limited when it comes to the very essence of effective leadership – sound decision making.
They argue that decision-making requires a conceptual capacity to know and relate to the whole of their environment (organization/ministry) that extends beyond the realm of preferences and strengths. Another author I’ve read says that such a reality means that a healthy view of differences can help a leader be less defensive about their own style, but functioning with such comfortability about one’s own style also leads to conceptual complacency – meaning that the leader fails to expand his or her conceptual capacity and learning. This has significant weight for decision-making as it is the difference between leaders routinely making decisions out of their own limited perspective or out of an organic and increasingly complex knowledge of the whole of which they are a part.
We need to include the need for such a conceptual capacity in relationship to the whole and not just settle for a version of it that just seeks to respect and value differences in preferences and style. The proof of our intellectual flexibility will be in the fruit of our decision-making in the context of the whole of which we are a part and not in our own sense of how “flexible” we think we are with ourselves or others.
This is good insight, that an essential part (and of course, not the only part) of leadership is decision making. Conceptual flexibility is a part of that decision making capacity/ capability, which I think I have (i.e. strengthsfinder theme of adaptability), but then being able to weigh the different options and arrive at a firm decision — that intangible part I don’t have, and I don’t have the words for what makes a person have decisiveness.