Lead Like a Swiss Army Knife
How the 6 leadership styles can help you adapt to any situation (and get better results)
Welcome to The Evolving Leader's Guide. Each week, I share one mindset, framework, or toolkit designed to help you become a more effective leader—so you can lead with confidence, inspire your team, and build a career you're proud of.
This Week's Tool: Leadership Style Framework
Your team's crushing it. Creative. Collaborative. Everyone's happy.
Then your new executive arrives with bold directives. The vision makes sense, but suddenly your inbox is flooded with stakeholder complaints.
This happened to my client “Sarah” recently. Her innovative team hit a wall when priorities shifted. While she was busy smoothing ruffled feathers, deadlines slipped. The more she tried to maintain her usual collaborative approach, the further behind they fell.
"I feel like I'm spending all my time playing therapist instead of driving results," she told me during our coaching session.
Here's what Sarah was missing: Different situations demand different leadership styles.
The coaching approach that had built her dream team was now holding them back.
Leadership isn't one-size-fits-all. Team dynamics, business challenges, organizational changes, individual personalities—all these variables require different approaches from you as a leader. The most effective leaders adapt their style to match what the situation demands, not what feels most comfortable.
Meet Your Leadership Toolkit
Psychologist Daniel Goleman—best known for popularizing emotional intelligence—conducted research on thousands of executives to understand what made leaders effective. His groundbreaking discovery? The most successful leaders don't rely on a single approach.
Instead, they draw from six distinct leadership styles, switching between them based on the situation.
Think of these styles as tools in your leadership toolkit. Just as you wouldn't use a hammer for every home repair, you shouldn't use the same leadership approach for every business challenge.
Let's explore these six styles—what they are, when to use them, and how to develop the ones that don't come naturally to you.
The 6 Leadership Styles You Need to Master
Here's the complete arsenal of leadership approaches at your disposal. Each style serves a specific purpose and creates distinct effects on your team's climate and performance. Knowing when and how to deploy each one gives you flexibility as situations change.
1. Coaching Style: The Developer
What it is: One-on-one development focused on personal growth. You ask questions instead of giving answers, connect goals to personal values, and provide ongoing feedback.
When it works best: For skill development, career planning, or helping capable team members overcome specific hurdles.
Signs of overuse: Projects fall behind schedule, urgent problems go unaddressed, or team members feel abandoned ("stop asking me questions and just tell me what to do!").
Impact on culture: Creates a growth-oriented environment where people feel valued and invested in.
2. Democratic Style: The Collaborator
What it is: Collective decision-making that builds buy-in through participation. You facilitate discussion, ensure all voices are heard, and forge consensus.
When it works best: When implementing changes that require broad support, solving complex problems that benefit from diverse perspectives, or when the team has valuable insights you lack.
Signs of overuse: Decision paralysis, endless meetings, or abdicating your responsibility as the leader ("we can't move forward until everyone agrees").
Impact on culture: Fosters inclusion, psychological safety, and collective ownership of outcomes.
3. Affiliative Style: The Connector
What it is: Relationship-building focused on creating harmony. You prioritize emotional needs, celebrate people personally, and foster belonging above all else.
When it works best: During stressful periods, when healing team divisions, onboarding new members, or rebuilding after failure.
Signs of overuse: Avoiding necessary tough conversations, prioritizing feelings over results, or creating a culture where mediocrity is tolerated ("at least everyone's happy!").
Impact on culture: Builds loyalty, reduces turnover, and creates a supportive environment.
4. Visionary Style: The North Star
What it is: Future-focused direction that inspires action. You communicate a compelling "why," connect daily work to larger purpose, and give autonomy within clear guardrails.
When it works best: During organizational change, when setting new strategic direction, or when teams have lost sight of their purpose.
Signs of overuse: Too much big-picture talk without practical execution, or frequent pivots that create strategic whiplash ("I have another exciting new vision!").
Impact on culture: Creates alignment, purpose, and intrinsic motivation toward shared goals.
5. Pacesetting Style: The Standard-Bearer
What it is: Excellence-driven leadership by example. You demonstrate high standards, jump in to show how it's done, and expect others to match your performance.
When it works best: With highly skilled, motivated teams; in crunch time scenarios; or when quick wins are needed to build momentum.
Signs of overuse: Team burnout, declining creativity, unhealthy competition, or creating dependency ("nothing gets done unless I'm involved").
Impact on culture: Drives high performance but can create pressure and perfectionism if overused.
6. Commanding Style: The Director
What it is: Clear, direct instruction with immediate compliance expected. You make decisions unilaterally, provide specific direction, and leave little room for discussion.
When it works best: During genuine crises, when safety is at stake, when previous approaches have failed, or with inexperienced teams needing clear guidance.
Signs of overuse: Fear-based culture, decreased innovation, high turnover, or passive-aggressive resistance ("just tell me exactly what you want").
Impact on culture: Creates clarity and decisiveness in crisis but can damage trust and initiative long-term.
The Leadership Style Trap
Most leaders default to just one or two styles. They find their comfort zone and stay there.
This isn't surprising. Your dominant style probably aligns with your personality and values. It's gotten you this far, so why change?
Because leading with a single style is like having only a hammer in your toolbox. Eventually, you'll encounter a problem that needs a screwdriver.
Sarah's challenge wasn't unique. Her coaching and democratic approaches had built an innovative team perfect for steady-state operations. But organizational change demanded visionary and pacesetting styles she rarely used.
She was trying to collaborate her way through a situation that required clear direction.
How to Develop Your Full Leadership Range
The question isn't whether you should expand your leadership style portfolio—it's how to do it effectively. Here's your roadmap:
1. Diagnose your natural defaults
Most of us gravitate toward styles that match our personalities. Extroverts often default to democratic or affiliative approaches. Detail-oriented people may lean toward pacesetting. Big-picture thinkers frequently prefer visionary leadership.
Take a few minutes to reflect: For each leadership scenario you've faced in the past month, which style did you instinctively use? Look for patterns. This isn't a formal assessment—just honest self-reflection.
The styles you use least? Those are your growth opportunities.
2. Find your personalized style-stretching path
There's no universal map of adjacent styles—it's highly individual. The key is to identify which unfamiliar style feels the least uncomfortable for you personally.
For some leaders, moving from coaching to visionary feels natural. For others, commanding to pacesetting is an easier stretch. Start with what feels slightly uncomfortable but not completely foreign to your personality.
3. Create deliberate practice opportunities
Leadership styles are skills, not personality traits. They can be learned through intentional practice.
Identify low-stakes situations to experiment with unfamiliar styles. Running a routine meeting? Try a different approach than usual. Working with a confident team member? Test a style that feels uncomfortable.
Micro-experiments build competence without risking major failures.
4. Use the right style diagnostic
Before every significant team interaction, ask yourself:
What does this specific situation require most?
What does this specific team member need from me right now?
Is my default style actually the most effective choice here?
This three-question framework cuts through the noise and helps you identify which tool to pull from your leadership toolkit.
5. Develop style fluidity
The most sophisticated leaders don't just switch between styles—they blend them situationally, sometimes within the same conversation.
You might start a meeting with visionary framing (here's where we're going), shift to democratic discussion (what approaches could work?), then finish with some pacesetting clarity (here's my expectation for results).
6. Get real-time feedback
Ask a trusted colleague to observe your leadership in action and note which styles you use when. Their perspective will reveal blind spots in your self-assessment.
Better yet, directly ask your team, "What leadership approach would help you most right now?" You'll be surprised how often they'll tell you exactly what they need—if you're willing to listen.
Sarah's Leadership Evolution
After understanding the Leadership Style Framework, Sarah made a strategic pivot.
She didn't abandon her coaching and democratic strengths. She added visionary clarity about the end-state they were working toward and used pacesetting to establish new performance standards.
The results were immediate. Her team, instead of debating the change or processing stakeholder feelings, channeled their energy toward executing the new direction.
Within three weeks, they were back on track. The complaints didn't stop entirely, but her team was no longer stalled by them.
"I felt uncomfortable at first," Sarah told me. "But then I realized my discomfort was less important than giving my team what they actually needed from me."
That's the leadership lesson: Your comfort matters less than your team's needs.
Coach's Challenge: Your Leadership Style Expansion Plan
This week, I challenge you to deliberately expand your leadership style range:
Style inventory Identify which two styles you use most frequently and which one you avoid entirely. Be brutally honest—our blindspots cost us the most.
Find your anti-style mentor Identify someone in your organization who excels at your weakest style. Schedule 30 minutes to ask how they developed that approach and what situations trigger them to use it.
Create your style-switching cheat sheet List your three most common leadership scenarios and the optimal style for each (not your default). Post it somewhere visible during virtual meetings.
Deliberate practice Choose your least comfortable style and use it in at least one interaction. Note how it feels and the impact it has. Discomfort is the feeling of growth.
Feedback gathering Ask three team members: "What leadership approach would help you succeed in your current work?" Listen without defending your current style.
The most dangerous leadership myth is that great leaders are born, not made. The truth? Leadership versatility can be developed like any other skill—through deliberate practice, feedback, and the willingness to be temporarily uncomfortable.
Your team deserves all six tools in your leadership toolkit, not just the ones that come naturally.
That's not just how you evolve as a leader—it's how you evolve your entire team.