Leadership Style Flexes. Values Don't.
The Douglass SPD Dauntless – my dad trained in this aircraft during World War II. The war ended just before he was to be deployed to the Pacific.
A few weeks ago, Erin Meyer shared an interesting post on LinkedIn. Two individuals, one from Japan and the other from Germany, shared their views on working with U.S. leaders. They found that U.S. leaders came across as far less egalitarian than they had been led to believe.
Ms. Meyer has spent decades studying gaps like this one, and her book The Culture Map remains one of the most valuable I have read for understanding how cultural norms shape the way people experience leadership. My copy is always close at hand and full of highlights and notes.
Meyer's post drew a range of reactions, which was the real point. The perception of a person's leadership style is, in some ways, in the eye of the beholder. What one person reads as confidence, another sees as inflexibility or arrogance. One sees openness; another sees indecision.
Meyer closed her post with a simple question: How do you lead?
That question deserves more than a one-word answer.
I have a specific definition of egalitarian leadership, and it does not match what people often assume. Egalitarian leadership is about inclusion. It means gathering information and ideas from everyone before deciding, not abdicating the decision itself to a vote.
The person accountable for the results is responsible for making the final call. Business is not a democracy, even when it borrows democratic habits like open input and honest debate. Confusing the two is how well-meaning leaders end up failing to makes decisions that are their responsibility.
I have different thoughts than the framing in Meyer's question implies. I do not believe leadership style is fixed by culture or personality. It is fluid.
How we engage and direct changes depending on whether we are managing a crisis, planning for the future, or running normal operations. The style that works in a turnaround will frustrate a team in steady-state mode, and the reverse is just as true. A leader who runs every planning session like a crisis burns out a team that never needed the urgency.
What must remain constant.
What stays constant is something deeper than style. At the core, everyone carries a personal moral code. It drives how we behave in every situation, whether we notice it or not. It drives how we treat people and approach making ethical decisions.
Experience shapes how we apply that code over time, and it helps us rewrite and strengthen it as we go. Our codes evolve, and they should.
What must never happen is letting that evolution compromise our core values. Style can flex. Values cannot.
The Leader With A Thousand Faces
In my book, I write about how leaders need to adapt their approach based on the situation in front of them: crisis, turnaround, visionary direction, program and project execution, and day-to-day operations. Each calls for a different mix of direction and delegation. Leaders who apply one style everywhere eventually run into a situation their default approach cannot handle. We owe it to our teams to keep reflecting on how we lead, because the factors that shape the right approach rarely stay still for long.
One of the most challenging factors is understanding how different groups will respond to feedback. Some cultures expect direct, unfiltered input and treat softening the message as a sign of disrespect. It helps to remember the difference between blunt and brutal here.
Blunt tells someone exactly where they stand. Brutal does the same without any regard for how it lands. In other cultures, that same directness requires real diplomacy, delivered with care for how it is received.
The worst approach: the feedback sandwich. Coaching delivered between two compliments. Most people see through it immediately, and it tends to blur the important message underneath. Neither extreme, unfiltered bluntness or over-cushioned vagueness, actually serves the person receiving the feedback.
Ultimately, leadership requires full presence. Presence leads to understanding, and understanding is what enables us to adapt. The hardest leadership moments are not the routine ones. They arrive at the inflection points, when steady management on its own is no longer enough, and the path forward calls for real change.
Style bends with the wind, values anchor the ship, trust survives the shift.
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Leadership is the most important work we do—in business and in life. I've spent over 40 years working with leaders across more than 100 companies, and I'm still learning. These newsletters share my thoughts on leadership today and what we can learn.
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Find The Leader With A Thousand Faces and other recommended books on my website.
