Leadership and People Management: Foundations to Practice · Leadership Styles and Adapting to Your Team
Developing Your Own Leadership Range
Genuine flexibility across styles and readiness levels does not happen automatically with more years of experience; it requires deliberate, structured practice, since experience alone tends to just deepen whatever style a leader already defaults to.
A common assumption holds that leadership range naturally develops with more years of experience, but in practice, experience without deliberate reflection tends to simply deepen and reinforce whatever style a leader already defaults to, since the natural default style typically feels comfortable and gets more reps than the styles a leader instinctively avoids using.
Key Takeaways
- Leadership range does not automatically develop with more experience alone, since experience tends to just deepen a leader's existing comfortable default style.
- Identifying your own default style and which situations it handles poorly is a useful starting point for deliberate development.
- Practicing an uncomfortable style in a lower-stakes situation first builds real competence before it's genuinely needed in a high-stakes moment.
- Seeking honest external feedback provides a more accurate picture of actual style range than self-reflection alone, since self-assessment is often inaccurate.