December 14th, 2007
The Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model
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Read about how a soft-hard-soft leadership style works best in an environment that is constantly changing.
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Management literature is littered with debates on what is the right leadership style. Most of these models recognize that there is no right leadership style, that different leadership styles work in different environments.
Based on my own experience over the last few years, I have found that a soft-hard-soft leadership style works best in an environment that is constantly changing.
Simply put, a soft leadership style is focused on people and a hard leadership style is focused on targets and processes.
According to my Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model, managers need to adopt their leadership styles to how easy or difficult their environment is.
There are three stages in the Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model model –
Stage 1 - Soft-Soft
When the environment is soft and targets/ processes are not under pressure, managers should adopt a soft leadership style to maintain the feel-good factor in the team.
Stage 2 - Hard-Hard
If the environment becomes harder and targets and processes come under pressure, managers should adopt a hard leadership style, in order to focus the efforts of the team to engineer a turnaround.
If the turnaround happens, managers should revert to the soft leadership style they had followed in Stage 1. If the turnaround doesn’t happen, managers should adopt a different type of soft leadership style.
Stage 3 - Hard-Soft
If the environment remains hard, and targets/ processes come under extreme pressure, managers should adopt a soft leadership style to prevent the team from falling apart.
Therefore, managers need to adopt a soft leadership style in both a easy soft and a very difficult environment and a hard leadership style in a moderately difficult environment.
Implications of the Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model
A manager who switches from Stage 1 to Stage 2 too late ends up with targets and processes that have totally spun out of control. Similarly a manager who switches from Stage 2 to Stage 3 too late ends up with a team that is too de-motivated to either achieve targets or improve processes.
Of course, identifying the inflection points at which managers need to switch from soft to hard and back to soft leadership styles is a question of judgment. I have often erred, for instance, in shifting too early from soft to hard and too late from hard to soft.
Do let me know your thoughts on the Soft-Hard-Soft Leadership Style Model via an e-mail or a comment –
- How do you identify the Soft-Hard-Soft Inflection Points?
- Do you have a tendency to switch from soft to hard or hard to soft too early/ too late?
- Do you see how the model can be applied to all relationships, including personal relationships?
