Leadership has always been an endeavor laden with challenges—both the good kind that enables you to grow, and the difficult kind that stretches you. This year will certainly be no exception and is likely to test leaders, both formal and informal, at all levels. Given this climate, how do you not get stuck just reacting instead of intentionally leading? How do you prepare for what you don’t know is coming?
It might feel like there’s too much happening to focus on how you show up as a leader, and that other things should take priority—but this is exactly the time to lead, and leadership is the way forward. Throughout the year, Academic Impressions will highlight essential skills for leading in the moment, no matter the circumstances. We’ll focus on such skills as knowing yourself as a leader, making decisions amid uncertainty, and managing disruption fatigue, to name a few. You may not be able to predict every challenge, but you can build the skills to navigate them—keeping yourself and your teams moving forward.
Learning how you show up—both in normal and times of stress
Some of the biggest pitfalls that can trip you up as a leader might start with you, and you don’t even know it. Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment measures your ease of access to the five intuitive styles of leadership—Critical Thinker, Relator, Visionary, Warrior, and Sage. Each path represents a different type of leadership intelligence. Put another way, each path represents how you think about, interact with, and influence the world around you, both in normal times and in times of stress. In this article, we’ll help you to understand who you are as a leader, how you show up during times of stress, and what that means for the work in front of you.
A key factor creating stress can be a sense of instability and the challenges brought by unexpected circumstances or events. Todd Henry’s Challenge Stability Matrix from his book Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need tells us that people and teams need the right mix of challenge and stability in order to thrive. While Henry specifically framed this work as relevant to leading creative people and teams, I posit that we’re all going to need to think outside of the box and tap into some creativity to get through the year ahead, so I think there’s a lot we can take from applying this framework more broadly.
Essentially, Henry says that as a leader, it’s our responsibility to create an environment that is free of disruption and offers clear expectations (stability) and work/opportunities that encourage, motivate, and allow people to grow (challenge). When that mix is out of balance, depending on which way the imbalance swings, it can cause people to become angry, lost, or stuck. When the balance is right, people thrive. The diagram below provides an illustration of this.
This means that high challenge combined with high stability is the balance you want to strike. It means people can thrive by showing up as the best versions of themselves and taking appropriate risks in their work. When there is high challenge and low stability, it creates a feeling of never-ending pressure and frustration that wears people down and contributes to their feeling angry. Similarly, with the mix of high stability and low challenge, despite that stability, the lack of challenge makes people feel bored and stagnant, leading to an overall sense of feeling stuck. Lastly, low stability and low challenge equate to people feeling lost due to little direction and a high sense of being overwhelmed.
So, what does this mean for knowing yourself as a leader and how you’ll lead in 2025? Given the current conditions and a fair amount of instability, let’s look at the facets of each of the Five Paths to Leadership®, how each may react in times of instability, and what you can do to restore stability (to the extent of what is in your control).
Critical Thinkers
Gifts you bring:
Critical Thinkers lean into being analytical and data-driven, and they learn through examining the evidence. You are able to research and dig into wanting to find the right path forward. As a Critical Thinker, you can be very skilled at looking at a situation and all the information it has to offer and then quickly seeing options and pros and cons of various paths forward. Given this propensity to want to have all the information to move forward, paired with the speed of change and volatility, as a Critical Thinker, you may not be able to get all the information to feel completely comfortable. It is therefore important to be aware of this and notice where it may be stalling progress or decision making when things are uncertain. This instability can also result in feeling lost or angry, frustrated that you don’t have enough information to move forward in a way that feels correct, paired with tensions to immediately act and react. High instability can also result in feelings of being lost as there aren’t patterns or certainties to rely upon. Dare we say these times truly are unprecedented? As such, the feeling of being lost may emerge.
How to lean into this path:
During uncertain times, Critical Thinkers can bring grounding to themselves and to those they work with by providing information and certainty around the things they do know. This can provide much-needed clarity to help teams and leaders to better understand the lay of the land and focus on what is within their control. Where appropriate and possible, Critical Thinkers can help to restore stability by bringing information and structure to situations that seemingly have neither.
Relators
Gifts you bring:
Relators are emotionally intelligent, values-driven, and place importance on people. A Relator often understands the impact situations have on people and can bring groups of people and teams together to achieve mission-driven work. As a Relator, you have a lot of social capital and a desire to use it for the greater good, creating a sense of unity with everyone contributing together. In times of instability, you may overly focus on the impact on people, not wanting to disappoint your team or leader and taking on additional responsibilities to show your support. You’ll likely sense the impact of instability and work hard to try to regain it for others. This can quickly result in burnout and breed feelings of loss and isolation from always carrying the weight of others’ emotions.
How to lean into this path:
In times of instability, Relators will often look to support colleagues by bringing feelings of groundedness and empathy. You may lean into understanding and compassion, help people feel less overwhelmed, and open up space for them to focus on the challenge in front of them. By doing this, you can also bring people who are feeling disconnected back into the work because, remember, as a Relator, the way you do something—in the sense that the process was transparent and considerate of people, etc.—is just as important as what you do.
Visionaries
Gifts you bring:
Visionaries are creative and conceptual, opportunity-focused, and place importance on purpose. Visionaries can often connect dots and see opportunities in many challenges, and they often shift their focus when it comes to possibilities. Often comfortable with change, instability may not be as jarring to you as it can be to the other paths; however, Visionaries then may have a hard time choosing just one option to move forward. As a visionary, be aware that this can cause additional frustration for your colleagues trying to create a sense of stability, calmness, and focus. You may also feel lost during times of instability because the “north star” or purpose can get fuzzy.
How to lean into this path:
When things are uncertain or unstable, Visionaries can help by seeing opportunities and options amidst the chaos. By focusing on potential, you can bring a sense of optimism—a hope that people need in order to accept present realities while not losing sight of the north star. Often, you will be looking a few steps ahead to where the situation may unfold, and by not getting bogged down in the details, you can envision a way forward when others are getting too caught up in the weeds. Leading others in tasks such as scenario planning, brainstorming, or looking for what may come next can be a great way to utilize your strengths.
Warriors
Gifts you bring:
Warriors are outcome- and implementation-focused and learn through action. You have the strength and determination to make progress—and even more so in the face of great risk or challenge. As a Warrior, you help to mitigate inaction by modeling the way. Despite instability often making the path forward unclear, you push through. You utilize your action intelligence to provide specific and clear direction for others to take steps forward, which is something people crave during time of instability, even if it’s smaller steps that then lead to bigger ones. You don’t allow lack of details to impede progress and understand that perfection does not have to be the enemy of progress. However, it’s important to know that quick action might not always be the right action, or that it might leave other people behind.
How to lean into this path:
Instability can often breed paralysis, whether that is due to shock, lack of clarity or information, or by being overwhelmed. Warriors can use their gift of action intelligence to move themselves and their colleagues to take action based on the information and situation given. You are able to roll up your sleeves and serve as an example, encouraging others to do the same. However, given that propensity to get things done, make sure you’re pausing periodically to align with others in making sure the work is aligned with priorities and you’re seeing the impact you want.
Sage
Self-awareness is the foundation for leadership development because having the awareness to know how your leadership style may shift or have an impact is critical to your ability to influence, lead, and support others. In the Five Paths to Leadership® Self-Assessment, we talk about the Sage as being a “Leader as Learner” through reflective practice. Being aware of your tendencies in each of the paths is helpful, and it is even more critical that you reflect and understand when it works for you and when the path can work against you—especially in times of instability. Gallup’s recent Global Leadership Report: What Followers Want names the things that followers want most from their leaders: hope, trust, compassion, and stability. And while every leader will have more natural ease of access to different paths, the reality of leadership—especially during times of instability—is that we will have to tap into all of the paths in order to be effective. The only way to move across the different paths is by practicing the Sage—that is, by looking deep within ourselves to find hope, enable trust, demonstrate compassion, and to therefore create stability that begins from within. As Gallup’s report states, leaders “must know themselves and invest in their innate strengths as leaders; and they must know the demands of—and expectations attached to—their specific leadership role.”
In that vein, we conclude this piece by asking you to ask yourself the following:
- What quadrant of the Challenge Stability Matrix am I sitting in today/this week? Why? What factors are in play, in myself or my environment, that are causing me to sit in this quadrant?
- What can I do to move myself or keep myself in the thriving quadrant? What is one thing I want to try to do—or stop doing—this week to maintain a thriving spirit?
What’s next?
Steady Leadership in Uncertain Times
Now more than ever, strong leadership is essential—but you don’t have to navigate these challenges alone. We’re here to support you with strategies and resources to help you lead with confidence. Explore Now.
