A New Leadership Model That's Surprisingly Useful

hen it comes to leadership, are you like the person at the gym with huge biceps and skinny chicken legs? Are you adequately recognizing the different forms of leadership needed to do your job and that your team members bring to the table?

A few weeks ago, the founders of the Coaches Training Institute unveiled a new, simple leadership model that surprisingly helpful in thinking about this. After putting the model to use with my coaching clients, mostly entrepreneurs and business leaders, I believe it has the potential to be as powerful for leadership as Porter’s Five Forces is for strategy.

It’s called Co-Active Dimensional Leadership (CDL). The premise is that leadership is expressed in a variety of forms, not just the take-charge kind. The model specifies five different leadership dimensions:

• Leading from within means leading ourselves. It’s the foundation for all the other forms of leadership, which is why it's at the center of the chart. Leading from within is about channeling the best versions or ourselves. It's about getting in the zone. When we're tired, stressed out, or just not present, it's hard to be effective in anydimension of leadership.
• Leading from the front is what we most often associate with leadership. It’s being the Alpha-dog point person who’s providing vision, inspiring action, and driving things forward. This is the most visible, vocal form of leadership, the kind we think of when someone says Lead the way!
• Leading from the whole focuses on leading the emotional vibe in the work space, the spirit and morale of your team. It's about being attuned to the energy in the space, giving voice to it, and pointing it in a helpful direction. Examples include rallying your team with a fun cheer, acknowledging and caring for a colleague in need, or calling a time-out during a meeting that’s not going well and redirecting it more positively.
• Leading from beside focuses on the dance of co-leading with another person towards a common goal or intention. Successful parenting relationships and co-founder teams are great examples of this. When you co-lead a project with someone, supportively playing off of each other, that's leading from beside.
• Leading from behind is about helping others be successful and shine. It’s the type of leadership you see in coaches, mentors, and bosses who help others be successful. It makes me think of Yoda in Star Wars. Yoda led Luke from behind, helping him call forth The Force within him.

The folks I work with typically excel at leading from the front. This is where they tend to focus the most energy and what they value in others.

When we audit their leadership, the two dimensions where they typically see an immediate need to improve are leading from within and leading from the whole. Though hard-working and disciplined, the stress of running a business puts them in a reactive and stressed-out state more than they’d like. Similarly, their relentless drive to move things forward makes can make them overlook, and sometimes steamroll, the energy in the room — and then they wonder why the team isn't as motivated as they'd like.

What I like about CDL is that give us a language to talk about these issues. It reminds me of asset classes in an investment portfolio: where do we need to rebalance our leadership?

Another thing I like is that it challenges us to view leadership more expansively. In our society, we're great at recognizing leadership from the front. But what about those other dimensions? Should we do more to recognize them?

The CDL is still evolving and, to continue the investment lingo, I'm bullish. I'll be interested to see where it goes.

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