Carol J. Geffner is president of CB Vision and a sought-after coach and consultant. She is the author of Building a New Leadership Ladder.
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On the surface, dissonant leadership may appear to be entirely undesirable, but in the world of leadership, few things are clear-cut.
Resonant leaders are leaders who pay close attention to the emotional lives of their organizations and employees. They are aware of and strive to build trusting relationships and collaborations while prioritizing employee learning and growth. By contrast, dissonant leaders are, above all else, more authoritative. Stereotypically, they are leaders who adopt a command-and-control style focused on driving results and invest little time in relationship building.
While resonant leadership is far more desirable than dissonant leadership, neither approach is inherently bad. In fact, problems tend to arise when leaders lean too far into one style, especially if it happens to be on the dissonant side of the leadership spectrum.
Advantages And Drawbacks Of Resonant Leadership
Since the early 2000s, resonant leadership, with its focus on individuals and relationships, has been favored by many leaders and encouraged by most leadership coaches and scholars. There are many reasons why this style has become mainstream, including evidence-based research highlighting the positive effects resonant leadership has on the bottom line and employee engagement. In my experience, resonant leadership also plays a significant role in building diverse, inclusive and psychologically safe work environments, all of which have been linked to improved performance, employee retention and other measures of a healthy and productive workplace.
While resonant leadership has been widely embraced and garnered considerable praise, it is still a mistake to disregard dissonant leadership. Despite showing up as an old-school approach, there are conditions under which dissonant leadership can be necessary and desirable.
Advantages And Drawbacks Of Dissonant Leadership
Dissonant leaders are frequently praised for being highly objective and logical. They are the type of leaders who demand that work must be delivered and executed according to specific instructions on a specific timeline. For this reason, dissonant leaders are generally praised for being excellent at getting tasks done. In short, they know how to set goals, command team members’ attention and track success.
While dissonant leadership can be effective, this leadership style can be or appear to be authoritarian, cold and uncaring. After all, even when it is not overtly authoritarian, dissonant leaders tend to maintain a social and emotional distance from team members.
For example, in practice, a resonant leader might make a point of knowing all team members’ names and expressing care about how they are doing, and as a result, hold regularly scheduled check-in meetings. By contrast, a dissonant leader may make a point of doing neither, especially if they oversee a large team. Indeed, not getting to know team members (i.e., keeping work impersonal) may be viewed as the best way to remain objective and well-positioned to make decisions on behalf of the larger organization rather than individuals.
When Dissonant Leadership Works Best
Dissonant leadership may not be the default style of most contemporary leaders for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which are the preferences of (especially younger) workers for healthy workplaces in which individual needs are valued. Still, there are a few situations in which dissonant leadership can be effective and may even be the best approach.
Addressing A Financial Crisis
When a company is facing a financial crisis, both fiduciary and legal conditions usually call for decisive action. If time is of the essence, and urgency and confidentiality are real factors, there may be a greater need for emotional distance and an authority figure to make difficult final decisions. A cautionary note is that this should be a rare occurrence, and the crisis must be one that demands strict confidentiality among a small group of individuals.
Responding To Market Shifts
Like it or not, it can be hard for employees who have spent years working at an organization to accept that their work has become or soon will become redundant or too costly. At times like these (and with the rise of artificial intelligence, we’re currently in just such a time), leaning into a more command-and-control decision-making approach can be valuable. Focusing on the long-term health of an organization—what will enable it to remain viable over time—rather than the immediate needs of individual team members is sometimes the only way to make the tough calls and steer an organization toward its next chapter.
Resetting After A Leadership Vacuum
From time to time, organizations operate under the direction of a weak leader. There are a number of reasons why this dynamic might emerge, from wishy-washy leaders who can’t make decisions to well-intentioned leaders who over-index on consensus to leaders who don’t stay long enough to achieve results. Whatever the scenario, when an organization hasn’t had a strong leader for an extended period, it is often necessary for an incoming leader to adopt somewhat of a dissonant style for a short time to reset the culture and start driving results again.
Although resonant leadership has many strengths and may be an impactful default style under most conditions, there are times when dissonant leadership can be both an appropriate and even preferable way to tackle specific fiscal, market and organizational challenges.
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