The ideal leadership blend for Stage 5 is Democratic, Visionary, and Affiliative.
A Stage 5 leader guides through collaboration, inspires the team with a grand vision, and builds loyalty through comradery.
Primary Leadership Style: Democratic
Democratic leaders focus on promoting harmony in the organization while building a relationship of trust and respect with employees. A Stage 5 organization has spent the last several Stages developing its management team. Stage 5 is the Integration stage, where that management team begins to integrate with other departments and creates a cross-functional leadership team.
The Democratic leader builds buy-in and forges consensus while encouraging collaboration among the team.
Secondary Leadership Style: Visionary
The Visionary leader guides the team and the company with a strong vision. This vision becomes especially important as the leader works to create an integrated management team. Ensuring that the key members of the organization understand a common vision and are committed to driving their departments towards that vision are what propels success.
The Visionary leader ignites the spirit of innovation and instills pride in the organization.
Tertiary Leadership Style: Affiliative
Affiliative leaders build tremendous loyalty and strengthen connectedness by recognizing employees as people. The Affiliative style is needed in a Stage 5 organization to create an emotional connection to the organization and the management team. Creating a harmonious environment where employees feel valued is critical as the organization continues to grow.
The most common misalignment in Stage 5 is a leader who is overly reliant on the Commanding style. While useful in earlier Stages, when a business reaches Stage 5 (with between 58-95 employees), a Commanding style can creative a negative culture. This heavy-handed, top-down approach is not effective with this larger number of employees. Instead, Stage 5 requires a shift away from Commanding and towards styles that develop emerging leaders—Democratic and Affiliative.
The second most common misalignment is the continued reliance on the Coaching style at the expense of emphasizing Democratic and Affiliative. Coaching is the primary leadership style needed in the prior three Stages, so it is common that leaders have learned to emphasize that approach in how they oversee the organization. However, this size of organization needs the leader to lead primarily with the Democratic style that is supported by Affiliative. The Coaching should be handled by the leadership and management teams at this Stage.
Leadership Style Blend Misalignment
The CEO of a commercial metal fabrication and welding company is naturally a Coaching and Pacesetting leader. She has high standards for excellence and likes to meet people where they’re at, developing them to a place of competence and high performance. She has built a strong leadership team that has been loyal to her for years. Thanks to winning a couple of key contracts, the company has grown rapidly over the past year and is now up to 68 employees.
Her focus is currently on the leadership in Business Development (primarily Sales and Marketing). She is mentoring leaders from those departments, working closely with them to continue to earn more business and grow the company. She considers it a great success when they close on a huge new contract—that is, until the Operations Manager confronts her over it. He tells her that his team is not equipped to handle the new client, who is in an industry they’ve never worked with before. He and his team have been focusing on breaking into smaller teams and specializing. Now, thanks to the new contract, they must switch gears completely and take on a steep learning curve in order to service the new client.
The CEO has been focusing on coaching her managers individually rather than gathering them together as a unified team, listening to their concerns, and consistently instilling a vision for the company that they pursue together. As a result, the departments are siloed; they’re pursuing projects and making decisions without thinking about how they will impact the company as a whole. Instead of working together as a cohesive leadership team that is based on consensus, the leaders are competing against one another for resources. It is up to the CEO to provide a democratic environment where ideas are shared, and a sense of unity is constructed.
The concepts from this article were taken from The Integration Stage: Organizational ReWilding Rules for Business Growth. Available through The ReWild Group and Amazon, the book explores in-depth this and other concepts while providing illustrations to help business leaders incorporate the ideas into their organizations. Get your copy today to learn the rules for growth for companies with 58-95 employees.