Here is an excerpt from an article written by Robert B. Kaiser for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.
Credit: Aliaksandr Bahdanovich/Getty Images
* * *
These challenges have significantly amplified the need for versatile leaders who have the ability to cope with a variety of changes and the wherewithal to resolve competing priorities. It is not an overstatement to say that versatility is the most important component of leading effectively today. Versatile leaders have more engaged employees and higher performing teams. Their business units are more adaptable and innovative. Their organizations are more capable of gaining a competitive advantage because they know how to disrupt before being disrupted.
For almost 25 years, my colleagues and I have worked to help leaders improve their versatility, and we have found the above to be true in a range of industries across North America, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Throughout our work, we have coached hundreds of senior executives and systematically studied their development, as well as assessed more than 30,000 upper-level managers in mostly large, global corporations as varied as Google, The Walt Disney Company, Allianz, Schneider Electric, and more.
Our practice and research have helped us create a framework that defines what versatility is and how it can be developed.
What Is Versatility?
In short, versatility is the capacity to read and respond to change with a wide repertoire of complementary skills and behaviors. Leaders are typically better at reading change than they are at responding to it, largely because developing a broad range of behaviors requires a systematic effort that often pushes them out of their comfort zones.
To help leaders understand how to expand their behavioral repertoire, we devised a practical model that synthesizes the work on leadership behavior from the last 100 years of research in both psychology and management. Because of the paradoxical demands versatile leaders face, our model emphasizes opposing but complementary behaviors: It makes the distinction between, on the one hand, how you lead (in terms of interpersonal behaviors for influencing and interacting with other people) and, on the other hand, what you lead (in terms of the organizational issues you focus them on).
Think yin and yang, where both types of behaviors are good and necessary, and each is completed by the other.
* * *