Limitations of Reactive Leadership - A Focus on Protecting

An Excerpt from Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business Results, by Robert J. Anderson and William A. Adams (Wiley, 2015)Protecting leadership centers on the belief that you can protect yourself and establish a sense of worth through withdrawal, remaining distant, hidden, aloof, cynical, superior, and/or rational. The Protecting dimension of leadership is comprised of three sub areas: Arrogance, Critical, and Distance. Each of these is strongly inversely correlated to all the creative dimensions of leadership.Today, I complete the series on the limitations of reactive leadership.Behaviors are the external expression of your internal assumptions. The general behaviors associated with protecting behaviors include holding back and watching how situations unfold, identifying what is wrong, illogical, or lacking in plans, seeing the flaws in others’ thinking, speaking, and actions, analyzing what is right and what is wrong.Protecting leadership tendency suggests that you tend to keep yourself safe by acting aloof and maintaining distance in your relationships. You also hold back from the risks that might come from fully deploying your creative abilities. Safety means being above it all. This stance can come from an inner lack of confidence, self-doubt, inferiority, or its opposite, superiority. It may well be that you project an air of superiority, needing to be right, find fault, and put others down as a strategy to build yourself up. The need to build yourself up may spring from feelings of self-doubt and vulnerability. Protecting is an internal set of assumptions that link security with distance, and worth with either being small and uninvolved or big and superior.As you listen to this final episode of reactive leadership, reflect on whether you have a leadership tendency to be arrogant, critical or distant and do something about it because it will limit your leadership capacity to deliver results. Thank you for coming on this journey with me on unpacking the significance of creative leadership and the limitations of reactive leadership. Have a fantastic week.