Hey everyone, it's Lorenzo and welcome to two Minute Tips on Hacking Leadership podcast. Today's two minute Tip has brought to you by David Hammett. David is the founder's CEO of Innovation for Entrepreneurship at Barnet Management School. As always, checked the episode notes for links to his LinkedIn page. My name is David
Hammett and you're listening to Hacking your Leaderships two Minute Tips today. I want to talk to you about adaptive leadership styles, which means changing your management and leadership styles adapt to what each of your team members, customers, or stakeholders needs. One of the first things I try to teach the new leaders and
my team is that their leadership style can't be static. Leader's job is ultimately to motivate, influence, enable their team members to be able to progress against their goals and their work, and your role as a leader is to help others get things done. I'll give you an example of this. I recently had one of my leaders approached me and tell me about a situation that he handled in a way that I thought was magnificent. He mentioned that he had
a team member who was really having a tough time getting things done. He had given him a number of tasks, giving him a deadline, and when he came back, none of them were done. Now, this teammate has been going through some personal situations that have been difficult and his mental state wasn't all that great, and this leader decided that instead of giving the feedback directly, he would ask one of his team members co workers to give that feedback.
He brought in somebody he trusted, explained the situation and said, look, I need you to give his feedback because if I give it, it might be too much coming from his boss. But if you give it as a co worker, he might be able to take it better. And that's what they did. The situation resulted in the person really improving their work and starting to deliver again, and it didn't cause them unnecessary mental anxiety. And
that's exactly what adaptive leadership is all about. It's about being careful to understand what the people you work with need right, what are their psychological needs, how they need to be told things. Is it difficult for them to deal with certain management styles? And if it is, you need to adapt your own management style so that that teammate, that customer or that other leader in your organization can move forward and get their own work done.