Video: 100% Leader

100% Leader Most Effective Of The Leadership Styles

When we talk about the different kinds of leadership styles, and becoming a 100% Leader, two essential dimensions are where we want to focus: challenge and connection.

100% Leaders challenge people to grow beyond, to transform, to achieve amazing things. This is an essential component of leadership. So, too, is connection. And what connection means is you have to actually build relationships with the people that you're trying to inspire to do go big, giant, amazing things. You have to challenge them, but you have to also connect with them, because if you don't connect with your people, you have no emotional capital from which to draw on and to use to inspire people to go achieve big things. Challenge and connection is what sets 100% Leaders apart from all the other leadership styles.

If you can challenge people and connect with people, you are what we would call a 100% Leader. And this is the most effective of all the leadership styles. As a 100% Leader, you're helping people to realize their full potential, to maximize all of their abilities and to achieve amazing things, which is what we're all really after. When you think about all the great accomplishments in your life, they typically weren't super easy things. It wasn't like, "You know, the big achievement I had last year was I sat on the couch and I made it all the way through Game of Thrones and only ate three tubs of ice cream."

That's usually enjoyable, sure, but not normally our number one big achievement. Normally, it's things like, "I got that big promotion. I finished that giant project. I finished a graduate degree. I ran a marathon. I lost twenty pounds." It's something significant and big.

That's what 100% Leadership is about:  challenge and connection. When we look at the other leadership styles, if you're all connection with no challenge, you're what we call an Appeaser. That is, it's fun to be around you, it's a lot more Game of Thrones, eating bonbons and ice cream, but it's not really achieving things that are of great significance.

If you're all challenge and no connection, that's what we could call the Intimidator which is another one of the leadership styles. You may take the hill, you may climb that mountain, but it's going to feel more like a death march than an inspiring parade and people will eventually quit.

If you do neither of those things, we'll just call that an Avoider. It's somebody who isn't doing much one way or the other. Fortunately, we don't really even call that leadership. That's just sort of being there. That doesn't count. It's the Intimidators and Appeasers we really have to watch out for with these other leadership styles.

Think of it like this. Connection is what allows you to push with the challenge. You can only challenge people so far as you have a connection with them. When I learned to drive many, many, many years ago, it was called overdriving your headlights. You drove so fast that when you're driving at night, your headlights couldn't even fill enough of the road in front of you to allow you time to react. Well, this is kind of like that. If you push people, but you don't have enough relationship with them, enough connection, it's like overdriving your headlights.

Are you challenging your people? Are your people learning and growing and developing? Are they better this year than they were last year? If they're not, you're probably not doing enough challenging.

Connection. Will your people talk to you? When you go and ask them, “Hey, what was your professional high point? What was your professional low point this past month?” If they won't talk to you, if they seem closed off, if they seem afraid of you, you don't have enough connection.

If you do both, if you hit that sweet spot, we call that a 100% Leader, and again, it’s the most effective of all the leadership styles.