#8: Leadership Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All—Here’s What Actually Works

Leadership Isn’t One-Size-Fits-All: How to Adapt Your Style to Develop Others

 

It may come as a surprise, but the way most leaders show up is more habitual than intentional. They lead the way they were led. They rely on instinct, default patterns, or inherited behaviors—often without realizing it. They lean into what’s comfortable, not always what’s effective. But here’s the reality: leadership is not one-size-fits-all—especially in today’s fast-evolving, multigenerational, and values-driven workplace. If you’re leading everyone the same way, chances are you’re not actually leading them at all.

In this transformative episode, Eric Pfeiffer sits down with Director of Content, Dawn Neldon to explore the Leadership Square—a dynamic, practical model that empowers leaders to flex their leadership style in real-time to match the development level, confidence, and competence of each individual on their team. Building off the Development Square introduced in the previous episode, this conversation moves from theory to execution, showing leaders how to move with intention—not assumption.

You’ll uncover the four key phases of leadership development—Direct, Coach, Support, and Delegate—and learn how staying stuck in just one mode (especially the one that feels most natural to you) can create disengagement, dependency, or frustration within your team. Dawn breaks down what each stage requires from you as a leader, how to identify where your team members are on their journey, and the micro-adjustments you can make to accelerate their growth.

Through compelling examples, personal reflections, and immediately applicable tools, Eric and Dawn bring clarity to one of the most misunderstood aspects of leadership: adaptability. You’ll gain insight into how effective leaders tune in to each person’s unique needs, challenges, and capabilities—building trust, confidence, and ownership along the way.

If you're ready to move beyond rigid leadership formulas and become the kind of leader who develops people with purpose, precision, and presence—this episode is your guide to creating a team that doesn’t just execute… but evolves.

 

🎧 Listen now to unlock a more responsive, effective leadership style that drives transformation from the inside out.

👉 Don’t forget to follow, leave a review, and share this episode with your friends, collegues, and networks!

 

---

Are you ready to unlock your full potential and lead with purpose, clarity, and conviction?

The MPWR Podcast, hosted by Eric Pfeiffer, CEO of MPWR Coaching, is your go-to space for transformational conversations, powerful insights, and practical strategies to help you step into the next level of your leadership journey. Whether you're scaling your business, seeking greater alignment in life, or stepping into your calling—this podcast will challenge, inspire, and empower you.

Want more tools to accelerate your growth? Head over to mpwrcoaching.com where you'll find free resources, game-changi

Episode Transcript

eric (00:00):
Most organizations spend more time planning their next product launch. Then the next generation of leaders within their company, they hire fast train reactively and promote inconsistently the result, burnout, turnover and talent walking out the door. Yep. At Empower, we believe developing leaders shouldn't be accidental.

(00:01):
Train, deploy and review and how this process can transform not only your company, but your culture, your retention, and definitely the results that you're getting.
This is such a crucial piece of the success and ongoing success of an organization, and yet so many businesses struggle to do it well. We see it time and time again with clients. This is a huge area of struggle. So I'm curious, Eric, where do most leaders in organizations get this wrong? What's falling apart for them?
I'm here to do a job. Yes. Yeah. I'll keep my personal life out there, and I show up as long as I do my job, then I get my paycheck and everybody's good. The problem is, as human beings, because we're integrated creatures, who we are is who we are wherever we go, and so we're going to bring the quality of our character, which is something that we're always evolving, developing, trying to mature in into the workplace.
And then as leaders, we feel stuck. What do I do with this person? Because they're actually producing some great things within our organization. But at the same time, they are, they're undermining the relational fabric of our team or our organization. They are becoming incredibly difficult to work with, and we don't know what to do with that tension.
So we're rarely giving them the kind of. Qualitative feedback that would even give them a chance to know where they need to grow and develop. Right. We do the one once a year official HR review that's, really not doing much good because as human beings we'll talk about in a minute, is we grow more effectively when we get regular feedback.
Which is a group of people who are operating in such a way that just like an engine has all these multiple parts and when all those parts are functioning well together, it produces power efficiency, right? It enables us to travel, to cover distance, to accomplish things. Mm-hmm. When that engine is leaky, when parts are old, when gaskets have blown when.
Okay, so. Let's unpack these four areas. Recruit. We're talking about when we're recruiting people from outside the company, we're hiring people in, or even when we're promoting people within the company, we have to have an intentional recruiting strategy. We often talk about what we call the four filters of recruiting that encourage our listeners to think, which ones of these am I doing well?
So I do think check, practical things like checking, references, calling, you know, here's a great question asking the person who's interviewing. Hey, if, when I contact your former boss, what are they gonna tell me about the way that you handle yourself when things aren't going your way? Hmm.
Mm-hmm. If this person's working remotely, do they have the capacity to stay? In alignment with the rest of the team, can they carry the load? Do they have the mental fortitude? Do they have, when we think of capacity, think of bandwidth. Does this person have bandwidth? So for example, if somebody's in the process of taking care of elderly parents, I.
The workspace itself, are they in an open space where everybody can see and hear each other? And, is how is that person gonna respond in that environment? And again, going back to the issue of character, can this person play well with others when, they're up against it, when there's a lot of pressure on?
Unfortunate experiences. The last filter is competence. And we put that last because I think it's the one we pay the most attention to. It's the one we're most. Well experienced in how do we test for somebody's ability to do the job related responsibilities that we're bringing them in for.

dawn (00:12):
can't really train for the other pieces of those fil, the other three of those filters, the character, the chemistry. The capacity, those are, you can't do much training around that. So it's something that's really important to keep in mind. One thing that I know clients ask us a lot when we're going over this recruiting phase with them is, okay how can we understand in an interview process.
Mm-hmm. So one of the things that I often, encourage people who are doing the interview process is to say, Hey, create an environment. Which these things can come to the surface. So instead of having somebody, come into an office and it's a sterile environment where we're sitting across the table from each other, and I'm asking you a barrage of questions, why don't we grab a few of the people they're gonna work with, and let's go have lunch together.
In which people can feel a little bit less formal, a little bit more comfortable is gonna be really helpful in beginning to assess and identify who this person really is. And then of course, for those listeners who are familiar with some of our tools. You know, once, once people learn our toolkit, that becomes a kind of framework through which we're listening to people and giving us a better ability to discern, to detect what somebody's bringing to the table.
Yeah, we assume because somebody's an adult or they've had multiple years of experience in other companies that they know how to show up well. So here's a question I would ask our listeners. Do we even know what we expect of people when it comes to how they can show up? Well, how they resolve conflict.
In the midst of how they engage with other people and how they do their job related skills. So that, those are the two categories of training that I think are critical. And we'll come back to this, this is probably where I have seen the least amount of intentionality in the companies. They usually have an onboarding training process that may or may not be helpful.
They're having a cross-cultural experience. Yes. So you can't expect to understand how this new culture operates unless they've done some work, some research, some gotten some training around how does this culture email, how does this culture process data? How does this culture respond when I, when they feel misunderstood?
And, and it, you know, for most people, we don't really know how to. Integrate in those spaces. And so what we do is we either just kind of. Subsume ourselves into that new culture, and we just say, I guess I'm gonna forget who I am and I'll just be a part of this new environment.
Because I think very, very often we hire somebody, we deploy them into a responsibility, and then, eight years later they're doing the same thing. And we never slow down to ask the question, is this person bored? Or, have they, because as human beings we, when we just do the same thing every day and everything becomes super familiar, we actually stop growing.
And again, the visuals of this tool are available in the show notes, so please check it out. It's very simple, but it's fun to see these visuals 'cause it makes everything just really clear and mm-hmm. More memorable. But the review process, this is by far. The most neglected aspect of a leadership pipeline in any organization, in any team.
Yeah. That's really important. Number two the review process of checking in with people gives us as leaders a clear review of where, how that person's doing and where they actually need to grow and where they might need some more intentional training. Mm-hmm. That's equally important for us as leaders to consider this.
And it gives us, as leaders an opportunity to now give feedback based on their perception of what's going on. So it again allows the leader. To constantly feel in tune with how their team is doing, how their people are doing, and how we as leaders can more intentionally invest. Now, here's what happens.
This is the way that we begin to reshape the culture of our organization. We've talked about this before. Culture is, this is how we do it, this is how we do it, whether it's job related skills or how we show up to work. And engage with other people. We reshape the culture or shape it into the desired culture that will lead to greater efficiency, productivity, profitability, greater enjoyment for everybody involved when we commit ourselves to intentional.
Yeah. One, one thing I love about that process too is it actually gives leaders the freedom and a strategy for how to stop micromanaging because they don't have to be constantly looking over the shoulder to make sure that things are going well. It's relying on that process of the review and then.
We all know we don't. Transform our fitness, our health, our capacity. Our strength by one big Yeah. Training event every six months or every year. That's right. It's what I heard somebody on a podcast one time say, it's about stacking days. Mm-hmm. And I think our, the leadership pipeline when it comes to training, deployment, reviewing, if we would just learn to stack those days, it doesn't have to be two, a two hour meeting, it could be a 15 to 20 minute session where it's like, Hey, how are you doing?
Yeah, that's good. And I, I've also heard you say, I think this is really important that the tighter the timeline between. The event and the review the better for our learning process. Yeah, and I wanna say personally, I've experienced that because even for our team, after we have a significant event, even after we podcast, for example, we take a few moments just to review how it went and when you offer feedback, I'm able to see that in pretty much real time and then implement so that we can make changes and tweaks moving forward.
And, and the other thing I think this provides for your team members is that feedback doesn't feel as scary. That's right. 'cause you're not feeling like, oh my gosh, this person has been, you know, saving up all of the bad things that I've done over the last year, and they're, I'm gonna come and they're just gonna dump 'em all, all on me.
Not gonna call out the client by name, but an organization that we've had the privilege of working with for some time now who as they stepped into a significant leadership role in the organization realized that. The culture of the organization was really dysfunctional. And what I mean by that is there was a lot of competent people in the organization, but how they were showing up and interacting with each other was very toxic.
The new culture that you envision. Because through training and reviewing, you're holding people accountable to, Hey, this is how we do things here. This is how we do things here. Let's constantly adjust, let's realign ourselves. And other people will, over time, self-select out. And I remember him saying, you mean I may not even have to fire everybody?
But what transpired over that time was that this leader continuously. Reiterated over and over, this is how we do things. This is how we do things. This is how we do things. You've been measured by your competence, but now we are all being measured by what we do and how we do what we do. They both equally matter.
These people all shared stories of significant growth that they had experienced since they were in the company. And even one person made this comment, and I'll never forget it, they said, Eric. I don't know how long I'll be in this organization, but I can tell you I will be a greater asset. If and when I leave this organization than when I came in here.
That's significant. That's significant. Okay, so help us move then from like, that's the vision being a place where the people who leave us are better than they were when they came to us.

(00:33):
Really important to go back and say, are, are we actually considering these different areas or are we kind of stuck just looking for competent individuals? When it comes to training, what part of your training is missing or are you providing ongoing skills training? Are you providing ongoing? We would call character or culture training.
And then the last, when it comes to review, when was the last time you gave real time growth oriented feedback? And do we have a regular rhythmic? Yeah. Mechanism for soliciting from our team. How are you experiencing the workplace and how you, what you're doing, and then opportunities for us as leaders to speak into that.
As a matter of fact, this might sound surprising to many people, but this is a great parenting strategy, right? Like, how are reviewing with our kids to help them continually grow and develop? Lemme say it this way. Rate yourself one to 10 in each of these four areas. And when you think of the highest number, celebrate that.

eric (00:36):
Yeah.