Leadership in Constant Motion

The traditional notion of an effective leader is someone who is visible, outspoken, and assertive and who motivates people with the power of his personality. New research from have tried to disprove this notion and have offered evidence that when the subordinates are proactive, an extroverted leader might not always be the best person to lead the group. However, I believe that leadership is more nuanced and more dynamic than just pairing extroverted leaders with introverted subordinates and vice-versa.

Working in the government and in development projects for almost four years, I have held several leadership positions in the past and throughout these experiences, I have learned an important lesson - leadership is more than just figuring out whether your subordinates are introverts or extroverts and how they would fit in your style. To me, it has always been a "high-wire balancing act", where things go awry when one leans too much to one side or the other. I have come to understand that effective leadership is the ability to understand and adapt to different roles depending upon the prevailing circumstances.

When people have known each other for a considerable amount of time (as in the case with me and my previous co-workers and subordinates), there would be times when I have to assume the characteristics of an extroverted leader, which I am not usually comfortable in. At other times, I become more effective being my usual self. Most of the time, I figure that in order to progress more efficiently with a project, I would have to allow my extroverted subordinates to dominate the direction and the pace of the discussions, but also many times I would have to shut them off. In a similar manner, I encourage my introverted subordinates to be more outspoken and generous with their ideas and in other cases I just allow them to assume tasks that were more akin to their personalities.

In any case, I figured that in order to pursue a higher goal like fulfilling the requirements of a project, or to affect the overall development of your employees (who would someday be leaders themselves), it is necessary to override these extrovert-introvert divides when it comes to assigning roles for your subordinates. Sometimes, I need to give them tasks they were not comfortable in. Assigning an introvert to network with people or an extrovert to become data crunchers, may not seem to be the best decision, especially in a project with limited time and resources, but I have realized these risks to be necessary.

For me, these choices were necessary because of several factors. One is expertise or familiarity with the problem area. However, eloquent or convincing an extrovert may be when speaking to people, his lack of expertise and knowledge in a problem area, would urge me to prevent him from doing so. Another is familiarity with the clients and partners. Although government may be a big institution, the public policy circle is a small, exclusive group. Thus, in most cases, the people my teams were assigned to work with were people we were already familiar with. In these cases, it is more effective to assign the task of networking with these people to my team members who know them more rather than to subordinates who are more eloquent. Finally, it is necessary for me to assign my team members to tasks they are unfamiliar or uncomfortable because I feel it is necessary for their overall growth and training to become effective leaders and managers themselves.

For all the work I have done with my team members, my experience in working with them were more for a nuanced day-to-day, case-by-case decision making process rather than constantly relying on extrovert-introvert stereotypes. This dynamism required that my leadership style constantly change and adapt to whatever situation is presented.

For me, an effective leader is not just someone who can take advantage of his personality and that of his subordinates. An effective leader is someone who can adapt and constantly tweak his style depending upon the circumstances.