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There are a lot of different ways one can conceptualize leadership traits. One of my favorite posts that I’ve ever written is about maximizers and satisficers as two examples of leadership traits or styles. As you might be able to infer from the words, a ‘maximizer’ is basically a hard-driving perfectionist. Nothing can leave the office for a client/customer unless it’s absolutely, 110 percent perfect. If this person is generally nice and you care deeply about working in that field or industry, this is a good boss to have. Otherwise, it can lead to a ton of burnout. You’re always getting “frame-f*cked” on every project you do, essentially. A ‘satisficer’ is more laid-back — projects can leave without being perfect — which makes some Type-A process junkies want to shoot up heroin on the spot, but it can be an effective form of leadership traits in the right context. Everything is always in context. It’s part of the 23 ways to approach leadership.
I also wrote a post back in the day about ‘push vs. pull’ as applies to e-mail. Now let’s apply the push vs. pull concept to leadership traits.
Leadership Traits: Push
Whenever you talk about push and pull in any context, ‘push’ is typically the older-school, more traditional, potentially negative one. In this case, leadership traits connected to ‘push’ include telling, directing, and delegating. It’s all very old school, etc. It’s hierarchy, chain of command, and rank and yank. It’s pretty old-school and it’s what many companies are trying to move away from these days — because hierarchy and chain of command prevent effective flow of information, which prevents effective and swift decision-making, which means you can be easily disrupted.
Leadership Traits: Pull
These leadership traits would include empowerment, collaboration, and coaching — although let’s ignore for a second the dirty little secret that no one really wants to collaborate at work. This is a new-school focus on what ‘leadership’ or ‘management’ should be — it’s more about having a legit mission (not just a buzzword vomit list of core values) and bringing people into that mission, as opposed to the execs deciding everything. Years ago, very few companies would ever think about operating according to ‘pull’ leadership traits…
