Balancing Push & Pull In Your Leadership Style

Striking the Balance: Navigating the Push & Pull Drives of Effective Leadership

Leadership is a delicate dance between challenge and support. Finding the right balance that draws out your people’s best performance can be difficult.  Have you ever found yourself unintentionally slipping from being a collaborative partner to an overbearing parent in your leadership style?

By unraveling the dynamics between these push and pull drives, you can discover how to create a powerful synergy that brings out the best in your teams.

The Engagement Paradox

This white paper offers a new path forward – one that blends the energy employees want with the customer experience and business results leaders need.

The Fine Line Between Micromanagement and Supportive Leadership

Picture this, you’re in a meeting, talking to your team about autonomy, decision rights, the ability to make mistakes, and learning from failure. You catch some eye rolling in the room, and your alarm goes off. A couple of weeks later, you hear secondhand that people consider you to be a bit of a micromanager, which is not your intent at all.

There have been times in your career where you found that beautiful sweet spot, using a directive approach to help bring out the best in people, while providing the coaching and guidance that shows you have your employee’s backs.

What could create the shift from partnering, holding out for each other’s highest good, to parenting?  Triggers, complexity, tight timelines, and high stakes can cause you to shift from a partner to a parent, without your knowledge. Let’s take a look at what could cause that to happen.

Understanding the Push-Drive and Pull-Drive

You have two powerful drives as a leader, and both of them are very valid. You’ve got a push-drive, and a pull-drive.

Push-Drive:
The push-drive is high challenge. Speaking your truth, stepping into constructive conflict, being directive, and resolving problems uses your push-drive.

Pull-Drive:
In contrast, the pull-drive is high support. Showing interest, genuine curiosity, unguarded openness, empathy, and asking powerful questions uses your pull-drive.

So, when these two drives are integrated, you can provide that beautiful sweet spot and bring out your people’s best stuff.

The Importance of Balance In Your Leadership Style

If we overdo the push-drive, we end up being the overpowering, authoritative micromanaging parent.  If we end up overdoing the pull-drive, we end up being the helicopter and over-nurturing parent. If we have neither of the drives, we’re the absent parent who just kind of throws things over the fence and avoids tension.