Every Leader Wants Results – Managing My Leader

Leadership and Growing Series.

Having navigated being a team member or follower and being a leader in multiple contexts, I have keenly observed many times that many followers expect to be led, managed and engaged by their leaders. However, very few understand that there is the concept of managing your leader, while your leader also plays their part. In more corporate contexts, this may be written as ‘managing your boss, even as your boss, is expected to understand the dynamics of employee management or engagement’. But this article is for every leadership context, whether secular, spiritual, informal or formal; hence the use of leader and follower for this article.

There are many recommended ways to manage your leader as a follower. This article, however, focuses on managing your leader from an understanding of temperaments, especially as it deals with achieving results. We know the popular book by Tim LaHaye, “Why You Act The Way You Do”. In this book, the temperaments of human beings are classified as sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic, each with its unique pros and cons.

There are also general classifications that people with the choleric temperament are usually bosses and may be found more in leadership roles. Well, I am here to openly state the well-known fact that every leader, visionary, forerunner wants results! Regardless of their temperament. When you let that marinate into your mindset and soul, we can then start to explore how this links to me managing my leader as a follower. Temperaments are also a large contributing factor to the how and the when of results demanded by every leader.

Let’s make this a bit more relatable. How a choleric leader wants results and when they want the result is often different from how a melancholic or phlegmatic leader wants results. A melancholic leader, for example, is often able to make more room for how the results are achieved, the details, and they are often also able to understand how certain factors can limit or hinder results. A Choleric leader, on the other hand, more often than not has no time for the how and just wants the job to get done with tangible results in good time; preferably at the exact time he/she wants it. Their typical phrase would be ‘just get it done’, ‘fix it’, ‘just make sure it’s sorted today’.

Now, the above scenario makes the choleric leader appear insensitive and uncaring as opposed to a melancholic leader. Here is where, if you are a leader (everyone is, really, because leadership by my definition is about taking ownership and responsibility for whatever you have been assigned, and more importantly for yourself), you are not permitted to make an excuse and say I want results and I am a choleric, so I am validated. No, you are not, sir and ma. We all have to learn to find a balance and pick the good sides of each temperamental difference, incorporate the strengths and understand contextual application. For example, a phlegmatic leader will need to borrow some sense of urgency and burst of energy that the chloeric leader and sanguine leader would naturally have, even when they don’t naturally feel like it, in order to drive results in high-priority tasks. A choleric leader would need to incorporate some of the melancholic’s sensitivity, analytics and detail orientation, because while results matter, how they are achieved also matters.

In conclusion, if you are a follower (we all are, a follower of a mentor, teacher, way of life), spend some reflective moments studying and observing the leader(s) in your current context and get to know their temperamental tendencies. It’s a winning cheat code; you can use this to achieve your tasks, drive prioritization and deliver results that make you win in whatever context you find yourself. For example, your choleric leader may have been able to find a balance and is able to understand if you simply communicated the challenges and factors hindering the result on your current assignment, as a result, they won’t appear as ‘I want results and results only’ to you, anymore.

Till next time, I am Tolulope Inspire, and I am a custodian and dispenser of wisdom for systems and institutions.