#6 The Friday Digest — The tyranny of false dichotomies
The thing on the left is bad. The thing on the right is undeniably good and cannot be disagreed with…
No doubt you’ll have seen this many times in presentations and PowerPoint decks — often demonstrated by ‘experts’ who push one way over another whilst positioning anything that conflicts as wrong. This is especially common when the subject is leadership behaviour.
Command & Control — Servant Leadership…
Picture this scenario; you’re in a state of chaos — a critical system is down and it is having a significant impact on customers and the morale & productivity of employees… Engineers are trying to solve the problem but need direction and major decisions to be made… What style of leadership may be best applied here?
Leadership is situational. There is no “one size fits all” — the hard part is knowing when best to apply different styles. So, how can you figure out if you’re applying an appropriate style in context?
The below approach can be used as a self-assessment for any given situation or context. You could use it multiple times and better yet, ask the people you’re leading to share their perspective. Critically, it has points of tension, not dichotomies.
This article is the source. It provides a definition for each of the options.
Go well.
