What most leadership books neglect to teach you

Challenging your leadership paradigm may be the key to becoming a good leader

When I was given the opportunity to manage my first team at 26, I was excited. I felt like I’d been waiting for this for a few years and I really wanted to do a good job. 

So I studied great leaders and read a bunch of books to help me understand how to get results and motivate my team to create the best work of our careers. I understood what each team member was good at and currently responsible for. I got clear on our mission and communicated it to the team. And everyone seemed positive and excited about what we were trying to accomplish.

But the next year was one of the hardest of my career. We did not get stellar results as a team. I was able to make sure we met our objective, but my team ended up resenting me and I had to let some go because they weren’t able to adapt to the changing environment. It sucked.

I can see now that I was not a very good manager out of the gate. (In retrospect, how many people really are?)

I knew how to create a process or structure that would get results because that’s what I had developed as an individual contributor on the team. And that is why I was asked to lead the team - to leverage the things that I’d done over the previous year across the entire team so we could be more efficient and automate more of our work.

But I could not figure out why the team struggled to execute our goals. For me, having a clear goal was enough to point me in the right direction. I appreciated having the space to try things and figure out the best way to do them. I am a natural problem solver and am always looking for more efficient ways to do things. Because of my personality type, it is easy for me to see what isn’t going right and to strategize a new way to approach things.

But other people on the team needed different types of support, and neither of us had the self-awareness or shared vocabulary to explore that at the time. The very thing that made me good at fixing systems, was the thing that made my suggestions feel nagging. And my drive for efficiency meant that sometimes I didn’t take the time to consider people’s feelings as much as I should have. 

Honestly, it took me a couple of years to get really good at leading my team. I learned it wasn’t enough to be a strategic thinker. I learned that for most people, rapport and connection are the juice that greases the wheels of a project and makes coming to work more fun. I learned that really understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each team member helps to structure projects so that we can be more effective. 

I really wish I’d known about the Enneagram personality types at the time. It would have provided shortcuts to understanding different perspectives and seeing the way that I was getting in my own way. It would have helped me understand how my motivations were very different than the motivations of the rest of the team. And it would have given me a shared language to explore issues as they came up in a less confrontational way.

The mistake most new leaders make without realizing it is focusing on how we do things without connecting to the why. The things that you most admire in great leaders may have little to do with what they DO as much as WHO they are and what they BELIEVE. 

Sure, those leaders get results because of specific competencies they have, but those competencies are driven by a deeper belief about what makes a good leader and how they view the world. And these beliefs are unconscious motivators that shape the decisions we make. Think of it as the engine that drives the results.

The more you can get comfortable with your natural gifts and the ways that you instinctually navigate the world, the more inspiring and effective you can be as a leader. Good leaders are able to not only work with their natural talents, but they hold their beliefs about the world loosely and have the mental agility to take on different perspectives. In other words, they can see the world through a broader lens that allows them to take in information differently and evaluate threats more realistically. Then the tactics and processes naturally flow because they are aligned with a new vision. And before you know it, you’ve accelerated the change process and are getting results.

And this is why I like to use the Enneagram when I’m coaching clients. The first step is getting clear on your unconscious beliefs that are driving your current results and limiting how you see the world. Because the reality is that you are getting your current results for a reason. And it isn’t just the business environment you are operating in or a weak link on your team.

It is more effective to make significant changes when you start with a new belief than a new process. When I coach executives, one of the things we look at are the beliefs that are driving our current results.

So today, I wanted to share with you one of the tools I use to help managers build mental flexibility, the 9 leadership paradigms Ginger Lapid-Bogda outlines in her book, What Type of Leader are You? 

Each Enneagram archetype has a particular belief about what makes a good leader. These beliefs are typically unconscious - a byproduct of internalized beliefs we acquired growing up and notions of success that were modeled for us.

Nine Leadership Paradigms:

Taken together - these beliefs paint a beautiful picture of the things that great leaders do. The more you work with your Enneagram type, the easier you will be able to access each of these paradigms as needed. But at first, the ones associated with your wings or connecting lines will likely be the most accessible for you. 

If you are running into a problem and can’t seem to make progress on a project or with your team - can you expand your leadership paradigm? It is likely that the default paradigm you are using is not getting you the results that you want. See if you can incorporate one additional paradigm into your model of excellent leadership.

Note: you’ll want to integrate the new paradigm fully before adding another one.

Challenging limiting beliefs is a process that takes time, as your brain has been used to paying attention to certain information and filtering out the rest for a while.  As you add a new paradigm to your existing one, you will begin to pay attention to more aspects of your organization, and your behavior and skills will expand and improve accordingly.

If you’d like to work with me on identifying your Enneagram type or executive coaching, you can reach out to me directly via our contact form.