Leadership can look differently depending on your style, but how do you know which approach works best for you and your team? Are you using the right leadership style?
In this episode of the #Career101Podcast, host Porschia and guest Gayle Ely, an executive and nonprofit leadership coach, dive into various leadership styles and their impact on team dynamics. They discuss how styles like directive, collaborative, and coaching can influence productivity, trust, and overall team morale.
Gayle shares insights into the situations where each style works best and why adaptability is crucial for any effective leader. She also provides actionable tips for identifying your own leadership style and knowing when it’s time to adjust your approach to better meet your team’s needs.
Gayle Ely, MBA, is an executive and nonprofit leadership coach who helps purpose-driven organizations build cohesive work environments for improved customer service, impact, and revenue. Through her Passionate Leadership model, Gayle empowers leaders to inspire their teams and fulfill their mission.
What you’ll learn:
- Key leadership styles and when each is most effective in a work setting.
- How to identify and adapt your leadership style to better connect with your team.
- Practical tips for using the coaching leadership style to empower and motivate employees.
- Insights into building a positive work culture through supportive and collaborative leadership.
- The 6 pillars of Passionate Leadership along with the importance of emotional intelligence in leadership and strategies to enhance it.
- Why self-awareness is crucial for effective leadership and ways to develop it.
As a thank you for listening to this episode of the Career 101 Podcast, we are sharing our FREE master class – Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have! It’s a training based on solving the common problems our clients have experienced to reach their goals. You can get access to the master class here!
Resources:
- Episode Transcript
Porschia: [00:00:00] Today we are talking about leadership styles with Gail Ely. Gail Ely is an executive and non profit leadership coach and trainer who partners with purpose driven organizations to create cohesive work environments that lead to enhanced, Customer service, expanded impact, and higher revenue with her passionate leadership model and six pillars of passionate leadership.
Gail encourages leaders to harness the passion for the service [00:01:00] they provide to ignite others who work with them to fulfill the organization’s mission. Hi, Gail. How are you today? Hi, Portia. I’m excited to be with you today. I am thrilled to have you with us to discuss leadership styles. Leadership is actually one of my favorite things to talk about, Gail, which we’ve talked about before offline many times in the past.
But first I want our audience to learn a little bit more about you. So tell us about seven year old Gail.
Gayle: Wow. Okay, so I am closing my eyes and picturing seven year old Gail, and she has freckles, and she has long braids down to her waist, the braids that her mother’s, her mother has You know, given her because she can’t braid her own hair, which became an issue later on when I said I would really like to be able to do my own [00:02:00] hair.
So please can I cut my braids? And so she allowed me to do that, but that wasn’t for a while. Seven year old Gail was living in the state of Louisiana. Here in the U. S. And was had just been told that we were moving to the state of Kansas here in the U. S. I was in, second grade. And I wasn’t so sure about what it was going to be like to be in Kansas and moved there.
Had a really cool teacher. That was really cool, was to have a good teacher and the teacher actually also had a child the same age as me. So we became really good friends and we hung out. I remember my mother asking me to if I wanted to do piano lessons and I said yes, but then I got a little bit scared when it came to recital time.
I was so nervous about being, actually being in front of the, an audience and trying to play and I think it was because I was [00:03:00] already developing that. perfectionism that actually has haunted me for most of my life that I have worked on. And hopefully, I now call myself a recovering perfectionist.
But I was a little girl. My dad was a pastor. My mom was a stay at home mom. And our world centered around church. And I grew up, really in a lot of ways with an id an idyllic childhood and a warm and comfortable home.
Porschia: That is great, Gail. I Really like how you pointed out a few things there.
I know moving, especially moving as a child can be a very difficult transition sometimes, and I would guess there’s a big difference between Louisiana and Kansas. I’m a foodie, so I love the food in Louisiana. What was, stuck out to you in that move?
Gayle: As a seven year old, I didn’t really understand [00:04:00] the move.
I, my dad had a number of churches. They were all in Louisiana. And I don’t really remember any of our other moves before that because I was too young. I learned later. That the reason that my dad moved his family from Louisiana to Kansas was because of the civil rights unrest that was going on in Louisiana at that time.
I also learned that my father was on the cutting edge. Sticking up for people who were of color at the time and even preached a sermon that started out. This is how Nazi Germany started. This was back in the 60s and there was even a newspaper article written about him in the Kansas newspaper.
About the fear he had for his family, they were burning crosses on our crosses were being burned on church lawns and churches were grappling with issues of. integration or [00:05:00] not integrate. There’s a lot of unrest going on back then. And he made that difficult decision to move his family to what he thought was a safer place, to be honest with you.
And I know he grappled with it a lot because he was always on the forefront of, wanting equal rights for all people.
Porschia: Yeah. Your dad sounds like a very brave man to, speak up for, what he believed was right. Especially in a time where obviously, to your point, it might not have been popular to do that in certain parts of the country.
So tell us about your first job, Gail.
Gayle: My first job was in retail. It was in what I guess today would be called a discount store. And I was a cashier and I don’t remember much about the person who was my boss, except for the time that a, I don’t [00:06:00] say not young man, but maybe a middle aged man came into the store and he wanted change.
I And he kept saying, give me this for this. Give me this for this. Give me this for this. And I realized after I, after he was gone, that I, that he had ended up shorting me. And when you’re a cashier, they’re going to count your money and make sure that you’re all in balance, if you will.
And I was devastated. And I went to my boss and said, I think that this happened. And I was in tears and he was so nice. to me. He and I don’t even know a lot of times you wouldn’t even count your own drawer. Someone else would count the drawer for you, the cash drawer for you. And I don’t even remember whether I was actually even short.
All I knew was that I thought I was, and I was terrified as to what was going to happen. I remember how he made me feel and that was, it’s going to be okay. And that was my real experience. First experience was a boss [00:07:00] and, as Maya Angelou says, people don’t remember what you say.
They remember how you make them feel. And that’s a huge thing when you talk about leadership.
Porschia: Yeah, I agree, Gail. And that also says a lot about you. It says you’re a very honest person, right? And then also to your point of, wanting to get things right. So tell us about some highlights or pivotal moments in your career before you started the business that you have now.
Gayle: I have a highlight that turned into a pivotal moment in my career when my husband and I moved from San Diego, California to Louisville, Kentucky for him to go to graduate school, I took a job with the U. S. Department of Agriculture in a small program that nobody’s ever heard of. So I won’t go into all the details of that.
But I had gotten my bachelor’s degree in business management at San Diego State, and I applied for a job at [00:08:00] this agency in Louisville, and it was an HR job. And all of a sudden, I kept getting asked to move into higher and higher roles. I also, I ended up being asked to supervise a laboratory that tested food for its components.
And I asked my boss, Why would you have me do that? And he said, Because I think you’re a good leader, even though you don’t know anything about chemistry. I think you’re a good leader. And I said, Okay. And eventually went on to, other leadership roles, moved actually to Atlanta, which is where I am now.
And became, essentially, they don’t call it this in the government, but essentially a COO, a Chief Operating Officer at the agency, supervising, several different departments, headed for being the head of staff when she [00:09:00] retired. What I didn’t get, any of these promotions, was any kind of training on how to be a leader.
None. And as I talk to people all over the world, they tell me that’s an issue in every industry and in every organization, nobody or very few people get trained when they are promoted into a leadership role. It’s just assumed that because they have subject matter expertise, they will then be a good leader.
over those people who do the same thing that they used to do. It is so frustrating to me to see that when I have clients come to me in that way. It was frustrating to me, even though I didn’t know it until later, because I ended up in a situation where I had a huge, a misstep in a leadership position, which ultimately led to me basically being fired from a [00:10:00] government job, if you can believe it.
Porschia: So It sounds like leadership has been important to you and you’ve been recognized for it, throughout your career. What motivated you to become a coach?
Gayle: It’s interesting that same position eventually went after I had some missteps, which kind of, happened before the big misstep. I was given a coach.
I was given a coach. It was an internal coach, someone who worked for the U. S. Department of Agriculture and did this kind of on the side or in addition to her other work, and I fell in love with the coaching process. The coaching process not being one that she told me what to do, but being one where she partnered with me.
By asking me questions and helping me think differently about, what were my strengths and what were some things I really needed to work on in order to be a better leader. And [00:11:00] it felt safe. It felt affirming. It felt transformative in many ways. And I really enjoyed the process.
And So when I ultimately left USDA, I said, I think I want to become a coach, and I think there’s so much need for leadership coaching because of what I mentioned earlier, people do not understand that leadership has its own set of unique skills and abilities.
Porschia: Yeah, I completely agree, Gail. So back in actually episode nine of the podcast, we discussed if leadership skills can be learned.
What are your thoughts on if people are naturally born as good leaders, or if they can develop those skills?
Gayle: Oh, I think it’s a little bit of both and I think perhaps there are some people who maybe are naturally born or probably more accurately through the nurture [00:12:00] of their families. If they see their father or their mother being a leader, perhaps it becomes ingrained in them a little bit.
I also believe it can be learned. It absolutely can be learned if you’re willing to put the work in to do it, it doesn’t happen by osmosis, you actually have to do it. You have to go out there and do it. You have to say, oops, that worked. And, oops, that didn’t work. And I think it’s both and.
Porschia: Great. So in my years as a coach working with hundreds of clients, I would say I’ve seen many different leadership styles. Can you describe some of the common leadership styles that you’ve seen or experienced?
Gayle: Sure. Sure. I put them into three different categories. There’s probably nuances of a lot of, a lot more than in the three different categories.
The first one I call directive. And it’s [00:13:00] basically point and tell them what to do right as if you know it all and they just go do it and they become like robots and literally with that leadership style, all of the leadership styles that we talk about can work in the right environment. The directive style has very limited.
Use, I would say, in very difficult situations where there’s an emergency, perhaps, or someone is just so brand new to a role that they really need that kind of direction. But it pretty much has limited use and limited effectiveness is the most important thing, I think. And then there’s a more collaborative style.
Of leadership where the leader and the team or the individual are really working together. In order to get something done, and I think that can be effective when you have someone who is still paid, maybe knew [00:14:00] what they’re doing and isn’t totally comfortable or have the confidence to go out and do it on their own, or the team maybe is just forming and needs some collaboration from the leader in order and for the leader to make sure that he or she tells them, what a success look like at the end.
And then there’s the delegative style of leadership. And that is, if you’ve been with it with a group or you and your team members have been together a long time, they have lots of experience. Maybe something gets handed to you as a leader and you can just pass it off to them and say, here’s what needs to be done.
Here’s when it needs to be done. Go at it. And then I think there’s a fourth one and you won’t be surprised by this because you’re a coach as well. I think there’s a what I call a coaching style, but I actually think the coaching style can overarch all the other styles. And for me, a coaching style is really about settling into the fact that you don’t have to have all the answers as a [00:15:00] leader, that you can really listen to your team or listen to your individual as you have a conversation about what other, whatever task is going on sense where it is that they may need your support.
Sense where it is, where you can say, hey, go for it. And do that by not being directive, but by asking them questions. Here’s what we’ve got to do. What do you think? What do you think is the best way to handle this? And that way you learn information about what they know and what they don’t know, and you allow them to take the lead.
Becomes more much, much more like a partnership. And I think that can overarch all the other ones, even though even, even the directive one can be one in which ask questions because sometimes you think people don’t know and they do know no. And sometimes the directive, though, if it’s an emergency or something like that, you may just have to point and say, Look, we got to do this.
But those are my thoughts on the leadership style on leadership [00:16:00] styles.
Porschia: Yeah, I agree. I think those are great ways to think about different types of leadership styles. I agree that I think the coaching leadership style can be incorporated into some of the other ones and I A word that came to mind as you were talking about the coaching leadership style, Gail, for me was empowering and how sometimes that can empower teams, I think in ways that sometimes other styles don’t.
Gayle: I agree. I agree that coaching is very empowering and empowering in a kind of an intentional way. You can misuse the delegative style as well. If They don’t have the tools they need to do the work, right? The coaching style can be the, again, be one of questioning.
What do you need? What do you, how do you think this might work? All of those kinds of [00:17:00] questions that even the delegative style, you can say, okay, now I understand what you need from me here. Here it is. Go do your work, go work your magic.
Porschia: And so people might think we’re biased because you’re coaching, but I want to know, do you think a certain leadership style is better than other styles?
Gayle: [00:18:00] I think, and as I just talked about, really, it’s situational. I think often I see leaders who use the directive style way too much, and sometimes that’s because leaders often have so much on their plate. They’re so overwhelmed that they feel like the easiest thing to do is just, here’s how to do, here’s what you need to do, and here’s how you need to do it, and, that’s it. I don’t need you to think, and that’s not what they say, but that’s what they’re really that’s what that’s the impact of the directive style. My, my experience is with the directive style. There’s so much pressure on the leader because the leader. ends up making all the decisions and people just come to him or her and say, what do you think?
What should we do? Oh my gosh, that puts so much pressure on the leader. [00:19:00] And then they get in this cycle of, okay, I have to have all the answers. And that’s what I see in leaders a lot is the pressure to have all the answers. And that goes with kind of more than, feeling as if you’ve got to be the director versus the collaborator.
And this belief that You know, being using a coaching style with lots of questions or being collaborative takes more time. Maybe up front it does, but not on the other side, because when, as you said, you’re empowering people to find their own answers and maybe come with you to just come to you to just check, to say, Am I on the right track?
Ultimately, it saves time.
Porschia: I think you made a lot of excellent points, Gail. Yes. I’ve seen many of our clients work themselves into that directive leadership style, and then realize it’s not working for them. To your point with all the pressure [00:20:00] that comes with that. And then they feel even more isolated from the team.
I think that directive leadership style can also create that separation to your point. And I also agree that some of the resistance, I think that people initially think is this is just easier. I’m saving time just telling him what to do. But to your point, it really does take more time in the long run.
Gayle: Yeah, I’m sure you’ve heard of the thought leader Simon Sinek. One of my favorite quotes of his is, when you become a leader, you are no longer responsible for the work, you’re responsible for the people who do the work. And that’s just such a powerful quote and it’s such a shift in perspective, particularly you’ve been promoted up from a non leadership role to a leadership role.
Porschia: Yeah I agree. I think that’s a [00:21:00] very powerful quote. Very powerful. When you said that you made me think about what leaders eat last. Yes,
Gayle: that’s one of his books.
Porschia: Yeah. So Gail, how might a leader know if they need to adapt their leadership style at work?
Gayle: I think one of the ways is to observe, and this is hard to do, is observe yourself and your interactions with the people that you’re leading.
How are they responding to you? Are they feeling, do you sense that they’re feeling close to you? Do they have a good relationship? Do they have a trusting relationship with you? Do you have a trusting relationship with them? Probably even more important and if there seems to be some disconnect there, you might want to Think about whether your style is really fitting what the situation is, fitting the type of [00:22:00] people that you’re leading.
It really, there’s really, the most important thing for a leader is to have some self awareness, is to develop some self awareness, and to observe What kind of reactions and interactions they’re having with those are leading.
Porschia: Yes. You said a lot of great things there, Gail. We have an episode of the podcast, I believe it’s episode 62 on emotional intelligence.
And we talked a lot about self awareness there. So if someone knows that they want to develop as a leader. What are some first steps that they can take to get started?
Gayle: Self awareness is the place to start. And there are a lot of there are a lot of ways to do that. I know you’ve had an episode on personal branding and going [00:23:00] through a personal branding exercise is actually going through a self awareness exercise.
One of the first things I often take my clients through is what I call writing a personal vision statement, and it’s a combination of three things. The first is to identify your values, which is also something that you do in personal branding, and also identify what are your positive attributes or what are your strengths.
And then the third step in the process of this building this vision statement is what difference do you want to make in the world? And when you put all of those together into a powerful statement,
something that really resonates with you, or as I say to my clients, when they read their statement to me, it has to pass the goose bump test, right? It has to pass that. Ooh, this really is me. This is really [00:24:00] who I am and what it is that I believe in, what I’m good at and what difference I want to make in the world.
The statement also becomes a way in which you filter. Your opportunities. Oftentimes, particularly high achievers are going to have all kinds of offers and opportunities, and you can filter your opportunities through that lens of a personal vision statement. I think, Simon Sinek also wrote the book Start With Why, and he does something very similar in that book, is, how do you decide what is really for you?
And since we’re talking about leadership, I think one of the critical questions for people is, do you really want to be in a leadership role? Oftentimes we say, Oh yeah, cause I got power. I get more money. I get all of these kinds of benefits. The headaches often, or the challenges often out end up outweighing [00:25:00] the benefits.
And so a great question is, can I fulfill my vision in a leadership role? Or maybe it’s something different. And that’s okay. You can make that decision and feel comfortable about it. It makes life a lot easier.
Porschia: I completely agree, Gail. And I’m glad that you brought that up. I see that with a lot of our career coaching clients, they think the only way for me to progress in my career, to make more money, to get a different title is to become a leader or a manager.
And that’s not necessarily true. Everyone doesn’t necessarily want to be in a management role or have direct reports. So there are other ways that you can achieve your goals that don’t necessarily include a leadership role of other people as well. Absolutely. [00:26:00] Absolutely. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve seen people have with leadership at work?
Gayle: I think I’ll go back to, I’ll start by going back to what I said earlier. It’s they’re not trained on the skills and attributes that a leader needs to have. When you move into a leadership role. As I, I just quoted Simon Sinek about now being responsible for the people who do the work. That means you have to really take on a new identity.
You, you have to think of yourself in a different way. You have to think of the people that you’re now leading in a different way. And that’s a huge mindset shift. And that’s a big challenge. That’s a big challenge because oftentimes you’ve been promoted so you’ve been rewarded for the good work that you have been doing and yet your new work as a [00:27:00] leader is completely different.
So in some ways, you really do need to go back to school. And some people find going back to school is moving backwards, but in order to be good at being a leader, you do have to learn how to do it and learn how to do it well. So that’s one of the big challenges. Another one, as I mentioned before, is the belief that you have to have all the answers, which leads, as it did for me in my career that, did go so well at one time, which can lead to perfectionism, which then leads to not wanting to do anything.
Stalling out or in my case, perfectionism for me led to a my way or the highway attitude. I’m supposed to know it all. So I do know it all. So you better do it my way. And if you don’t, I’m going to be upset with you. And you [00:28:00] fall into this cycle without even really realizing you’re getting into it.
So that’s another big challenge. And then I think another one is how do you as a leader mesh with the culture of the organization you’re with? I had a client one time that was actually, the organization hired me. Because she wasn’t doing so well, but she had experienced years and years of experience in the role that she had in the organization.
And she was hired to lead, this group of people in her organization. What it turned out though is that she was from the northeast of the United States and she came to a Southern company, very different cultures, in the Northeast, they pretty much speak their mind in the South. They’re like, Ooh, you can’t say that.
And what ended up happening is she ended up leaving the organization. And one of the questions I asked her as a coach was after, talking about what was [00:29:00] going on was. And why do you want to continue to work for this organization? And she told me later that was the defining question for her because it allowed her to say, this is not the place for me.
And she was able to move on
Porschia: to your point about the coaching style of leadership and asking, those thought provoking questions. I agree. I think that was a very powerful question for your client. So can you tell us more about passionate leadership?
Gayle: Sure. Sure. I will tell you that out of the ashes of my leadership misstep or, crash and burn, if you will, came my desire to really want to help people in their leadership role.
The next part of my career has been to step in the role of a nonprofit as a nonprofit board chair. And [00:30:00] what I realized is that while we all know that money is important for me, because one of my highest values is service and in the nonprofit world. Impact is as important. You got to have the money in order to make the impact, but impact is really important.
And what I observed in the nonprofit leaders that I was seeing was this huge passion around their purpose around the mission of the organization and what I saw that was a gap area was Not having the passion for the people who are going to help you, carry out the mission of the organization.
So that’s what I like to focus on is how to help these leaders who are passionate about what they do, whether they’re in the nonprofit or the for profit space. So that, and then if you think of a Venn diagram, the overlap between passion for purpose and passion for people. [00:31:00] Is power for maximum impact. So having both of those that’s what I, my birthing of passionate leadership came, around what I was seeing in the nonprofit world, but I think it applies to the for profit world as well.
I’m really excited about what I do. I’m not so sure about leading these people. But then you can’t have the maximum impact for your clients that you want to have if you don’t have both. So that’s really what I call the power. Of passionate leadership. And out of that, I developed the six pillars of passionate leadership.
And that is really, it’s all about the leader becoming the best leader he or she can be. So the pillars are a deep appreciation for both yourself and other people. So there’s the self awareness people, but also appreciating other people as well. The second pillar is a positive growth mindset. And really a positive growth mindset [00:32:00] is about, you’re not going to do it well every time you are going to have failures.
But what’s the learning? It’s having that kind of a mindset. It’s having a dynamic vision focus. Leaders really are the ones carrying the vision. And yet what we know is that you can have a vision and then things may shift. So the dynamic part of of the dynamic vision focus is being able to shift how you’re going to reach that vision when the environment shifts.
So being flexible. In your vision, even though the vision is, you may have the vision honed in really well, how are you going to get there? You might need to be flexible. The fourth pillar is embodied trust. So it isn’t just trust, it’s embodying trust in every interaction that you have. That’s how you really build trust, is that people Trust that they can trust you, right?
It’s an embodiment of that. It’s being able to, pillar number five is [00:33:00] being able to take inspired action with a calm and clear headed focus. So even though you’re not sure what, the results of the action are going to be, you’re calm, you’re clear headed, you’re focused, and you’re taking that, what I call inspired action.
And the sixth one is being able to celebrate results. Results, whether they’re the results you wanted or whether they’re not the results you wanted, celebrate them anyway. And when they’re not what you want, you celebrate the learning of them. A couple of years ago, I did a leadership conference, a virtual leadership conference where I shared these.
And then I asked the leaders, which one of those do they really need to focus on right now? And I was really surprised that celebrate the results. was at the top of the list because leaders often get focused on what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing, what’s the next thing. Whoa, wait a minute. Let’s stop and [00:34:00] celebrate what we have accomplished.
Porschia: Thank you for sharing the six pillars with us. I think that’s really each one of them are really important. And I will say that I think a lot of our clients are high achievers and celebrating what they’ve done is definitely something that they can forget to do. We’ll be providing a link to your website and social channels in our show notes so people can find you online.
Okay. What’s the best way for someone to get in touch with you, Gail?
Gayle: The, probably the best way is to go to the website. My phone number is there. You can also schedule just a session for us to chat. I’m always happy to do a complimentary just So I think it’s about I think it’s about just having a nice chat conversation.
What’s going on with you? How might I be able to help? And as I always say, it doesn’t cost anything, but I think you’ll get a lot of value out of it. Even just having a conversation often can help you.
Porschia: Great. So now I’m going to ask you [00:35:00] our last question that we ask all of our guests. How do you think executives or professionals can get a positive edge in their career?
Gayle: I think it’s by really asking two questions. And this is another, these are two questions I often ask my clients. Who am I and who do I want to be? I
Porschia: love it. I love it. Thought provoking questions, Gail. You have shared a lot of insights with us today, and I’m sure that our listeners can use it to be more confident in their careers and with their leadership. We appreciate you being with us.
Gayle: I am just thrilled to have spent some time talking to you, Portia, and I wish all the best to all of those who are listening to this podcast, and I hope you got some value. [00:36:00]
