Leading With Science In Mind

What mainly guides us in leading includes our favorite role models and expert frameworks, inspiring stories of successful leaders, and our own “research”—what we’ve learned from our experience.

While we occasionally encounter discussions of research-based findings on a singular topic like psychological safety, our shared understanding of 50 years of leadership research and tens of thousands of leadership studies is not wide and deep.

Applying science in leadership seems rather obvious, and yet it’s not happening at any scale. To help, we translated the best work of leadership researchers, from 22 countries covering 40 plus topics and overlapping models, into nine fundamental capacities (Table 1) in three levels.

What makes leading complicated, and researching leadership particularly so, is that it operates wickedly fast and simultaneously at three levels, leading self, others, systems and systems of systems like global corporations. That may be why agile leadership resonates so widely, while barely defined, measured and studied by scientists. A 360-degree kind of intellectual and psychological agility is essential to any system leader getting through a day. Emotional intelligence is central to leadership development because it balances our over-reliance on the frontal brain for thinking. Yet EQ is criticized in the scientific literature (along with authentic, servant and transformational leadership) as lacking studies of causation, and relying on correlations and associations.

Let’s have a brief look at what researchers have found that works in leading systems.

Shared Leadership

The study of shared leadership has arrived in the past two decades, also known as distributed, collective or participative leadership. Shared leadership is the real deal in inclusion, going beyond respect and belonging to sharing the creation of the why (vision, values, purpose), and what (strategy, decisions, goals, plans, actions). The how of leadership (capacities) supports wide sharing of the why and what (Table 2). Leadership researchers mainly study the how, while business schools mainly teach the what. The science of well-being grounds the science behind the why.

Research Findings

A review of 55 years of shared leadership studies noted two kinds of positive outcomes—organizational improvements such as operational efficiency, retention and accountability, and benefits to leaders including less workload, stress and isolation.

Now let’s talk about sharing the why. A large review of authentic leadership studies shows that being authentic in sharing one’s purpose is good for the leader herself, but what improves organizational performance is everyone rallying around a shared purpose, like saving the oceans by producing bamboo toothbrushes or collecting taxes to pay for the healthcare of our elders. A review of shared leadership in 3,019 teams confirms that a shared purpose (why), along with shared decision-making (what), improves team performance.

Next let’s look at sharing strategy. You won’t be surprised that a research review defining strategic leadership finds it to be an exclusive, top executive activity. A large review of inclusive leadership studies finds that most organizations are not inclusive when it comes to organization-level strategy and decision-making. This aligns with leadership scholar Richard Rumelt’s perspective that good strategy “crystallizes the crux out of a complex, messy situation,” yielding a critical focus which may not be understood or shared by everyone.

The term “open strategy” has a study of executive leaders seeking diverse perspectives in a large bank’s strategic planning process through empowered teams. The study concluded that the inclusive approach of open strategy will succeed or fail based upon the quality of followers’ strategic thinking and the training and coaching of followers to get there.

Discussion questions to get you started

Given that sharing the why and what via the how improves organizational performance and the well-being of leaders who share, here are questions you might consider:

1. Why is sharing leadership important in your organization, now?
2. What is the best place to improve sharing of leadership across the why, what, and how?
3. What skills do you need to learn to better share leadership?
4. What skills training and experiential process would work best to enable those new to higher level strategy and decision-making to be effective?

Servant Leadership

Servant leadership is one of the earliest leadership models, going back 50 years. It’s focus is on serving the needs of both followers and stakeholders, including some form of collective good. Humility is central to servant leadership, which is a feature of the psychologically mature and quiet egos of servant leaders who are less dependent upon self-oriented leadership rewards.

Research Findings

A comprehensive review of servant leadership studies shows that it is broadly effective at the individual, team and organizational level. As in shared and authentic leadership, the more leaders focus on followers doing well, the better they perform and thrive. And why?

First, servant leaders are humble—they have an objective view of themselves, appreciate others’ strengths and contributions and are teachable—agile in responding to new ideas and feedback. In a review of 100 studies on humility in leadership, humility didn’t impact the leader’s performance (being arrogant doesn’t harm your own performance) but humility did improve others’ performance. Except…in high stakes situations when followers prefer less humility, as indicated in a recent study.

Second, followers of servant leaders are more engaged because they have more of two kinds of high quality motivation—meaning-based motivation based on serving some form of greater good—and intrinsic motivation from finding work enjoyable in and of itself, without focusing on future rewards.

Discussion questions to get you started

1. What would more of ‘serving a greater good’ look like for you and your organization?
2. How can you do more to help followers meet their needs for motivation, competence and collaboration?
3. What arouses your unquiet ego and how might you outgrow the unquiet?
4. What might you do more of to be humble in low stakes situations while maintaining your out-in-front strength in high stakes situations?

Transformational Leadership

HBR‘s recent article on middle managers needing to become change agents is about the sharing of transformational leadership, the top-most researched leadership topic. Contrary to the adage that leadership skills are soft, in fact they are hard, and transformational leadership is probably the hardest of all of the nine capacities.

Hundreds of studies of this four-part model developed by Bernard Bass are criticized because the causative links between what leaders do, how followers are transformed, and how that improves organizational outcomes, haven’t been shown. The four dimensions, with our updates, are 1) being an influential role model, 2) inspiring visionaries, 3) fostering creativity and innovation (through intellectual stimulation) and 4) providing individualized coaching.

That said, what are research highlights that are worthy of what’s called action research—applying and testing in your own system?

Research Findings

Let’s start with the science of inspiration, which is a transcendent state of receiving a sudden, vivid, insight like a flash in the dark that illuminates new possibilities. If the source of inspiration is someone you do not relate to, like an Olympic runner for most of us, you are inspired by, but don’t act on the inspiration and go for a run. If you are inspired by someone you can relate to, like a fellow leader, then you are inspired to do something they did that’s new for you.

For example, a study showed that inspirational physician leaders inspire their physician colleagues to do new things but not their nurse colleagues. Being an inspiration and helping followers find inspiration from relevant role models, perhaps not you, is a vital source of motivation, creativity and confidence on the long and windy transformational path.

Getting closer to understanding causation, a study of leader behaviors that are signals of transformation showed two things. Coaching others to higher levels of confidence can be done by affirming their strengths and introducing them to development opportunities. Effective intellectual stimulation (an agile process) includes seeking, questioning or challenging, and presenting different perspectives to followers.

Coming back to sharing leadership, sharing vision-creation helps followers align with (and not work against) a bigger organizational vision and even have their own vision of how they will contribute to the larger one.

What’s interesting is large comparative studies asking which model is more effective for followers’ creativity and innovation. Creativity is higher with authentic leadership than transformational leadership, perhaps because of a more authentic relationships and an inspiring shared purpose. Innovation is higher with servant leadership than transformational leadership, perhaps because followers’ persistence is improved by a leader’s dedication to their needs including higher quality motivation.

Adding to the comparisons, transformational leadership is associated with higher individual performance than authentic leadership, while authentic leadership appears to improve organizational performance more than transformational leadership.

All that to say, the entirety of leadership science works together as a whole, where agile leaders choose the capacities that fit the current moment. No one capacity gets the job done alone.

Discussion questions to get you started

1. How can you best share the skills and process to arrive at an organizational vision?
2. What relevant sources of inspiration can you bring in to lift up motivation, creativity, and confidence?
3. How can you share skills for intellectual stimulation so that they can be be disseminated throughout our organization?

Last Words

In the category of surprising findings, a December 2024 review of 50 years of gender and leadership research, the scientists were surprised to find that women had higher evaluations than men on nine leadership behaviors shown to be effective, including five we just discussed and all four dimensions of transformational leadership: providing individualized support, inspirational motivation and intellectual stimulation, being influential role models, participative (sharing), and ethical. Men were rated higher than women in only an ineffective style—being passive or laissez faire. The researchers conclude: “Indeed these findings may support an enduring necessity for women to prove their leadership effectiveness as they are held to a higher standard. Our data coincides with the notion that women may enact the most essential behaviors of the era’s reigning leader prototype.”

The scientists give us the last words—to hold all leaders, not just women, to a higher standard in leading themselves, others and systems.