Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
Shakespeare’s admonition from Cassius to Brutus in Julius Caesar is instructive to anyone who wants to advance in their career.
How so?
Research shows that 38–50% of new leaders underperform or fail within 18 months. And despite massive global investment in leadership training, success rates have stagnated, a clear sign that something deeper is being missed.
For decades, leadership development has focused on who leaders are: their personalities, styles, and behaviors. But what if the fundamental component to leadership effectiveness lies not in traits, but in time?
Shakespeare’s stars, in this case, represent our innate personality: what we bring to our work. His “ourselves” means what we do with our time, what gets our attention and focus.
Our personality, our character, is who we are and is difficult to change. But how we use our time is something that all of us can adjust.
Behavior versus personality
The leadership level alignment approach to leadership is centered on the lining up of thought and action, not on personality. And leadership succession is not always a straight line.
Each promotion, each new step in a career requires mastery of a different set of skills and mindsets. A successful leader must be versatile, adapting their approach to the specific challenges of each situation.
This approach is built around a structured model that provides a roadmap for growth through five distinct organizational levels: Transactional, Managerial, Tactical, Strategic, and Transformational.
Each level represents a progression in scope, responsibility, and influence, requiring different skills and competencies that are essential for leading in increasingly complex roles.
This progression provides a pathway for development, all the way from effective task managers up to visionaries capable of inspiring cultural and strategic transformation.
Each one of the five levels is important to the effective operation of any organization with a fundamentally different focus and intent, requiring not just new skills, but a new mindset.
- Transactional Leadership is defined by clear tasks, roles, and immediate performance expectations. This level emphasizes compliance, consistency, and reward-based motivation.
- Managerial Leadership is focused on resource coordination, team accountability, and execution. The leader moves from front-line performer to team facilitator and delegator.
- Tactical Leadership is focused on translating strategic objectives into practical, results-driven actions. The leader values communication, culture-building, and influence.
- Strategic Leadership anticipates change at the systems level, balancing organizational risk with opportunity. The leader navigates complex situations, initiates large-scale projects and focuses on systematic success and growth.
- Transformational Leadership is centered on challenging the status quo and inspiring change. The leader focuses on crossing organizational and intellectual boundaries and achieving extraordinary outcomes.
The core of this approach is an understanding of the usage of time, specifically Thought Time (the internal world of priorities, ideas, intent, learning) and Action Time (the external world of action, delivery, relationships, crisis management).
How personnel use their time must be different at each level because the needs of the organization demand it.
Effective leadership is grounded in two crucial concepts: Focus and Alignment. Focus is more than the ability to keep eyes on the ball; it involves maintaining the ability to keep eyes on the right ball at the right time. Alignment is the ability to appropriately match internal time (our thoughts, values, emotions, convictions) with external time (our decisions, actions, projects).
Why high-potential and talented people fail
It’s not uncommon to see a high-quality candidate undertake a new role, work hard at it, and still fail. Many leaders have watched a talented performer get that long-desired promotion and then seem to be unable to let go of their previous role.
So how does this happen? An inability (or hesitancy) to understand and accept that the new role requires a different set of skills than the previous one. It requires a different type of thinking and an ability to focus on a new set of behaviors.
In short, a leader can be a perfect match for a role with all of the right personality characteristics and still fail if they are not focused on the correct things.
This difficulty in changing focus is misalignment. Misalignment happens when leaders operate at one level internally but at another level behaviorally. For example:
- A Managerial leader who recognizes the importance of team performance but is unable or unwilling to delegate front-line tasks.
- A Tactical leader who spends a great deal of time thinking about strategy but neglects to build strong, trusting relationships among his existing teams.
- A Strategic leader who develops solid initiatives but lacks the ability to unite teams in service to them.
These are not failures of character or personality but signs of leadership misalignment. Recognizing these misalignments provides leaders with the opportunity to refocus their cognitive and behavioral energies and to re-align them more appropriately. Addressing three questions can facilitate this re-alignment:
- Where am I operating now? This is level-awareness.
- What does the situation call for? This is role awareness.
- What actions are going to be most effective in both solving the problem and building my team? This is alignment awareness.
Examples of leadership level alignment at work
A front-line logistics manager was already a year behind his expected timeline for promotion. After trying a variety of tactics from mentoring to weekly one-on-ones, he was ready to leave the organization and start somewhere new, putting the organization’s talent pipeline at risk.
Before leaving, however, he decided to work with a coach and try using the leadership alignment approach. Over a period of 90 days, he was able to move out of his persona as the consummate “firefighter,” learn a new set of skills as a developer of team talent, and free up more of his time for strategic thinking and cross-functional awareness. His observation about this re-alignment: “The organization dodged a five-figure recruiting bill and kept its leadership bench intact.”
Understanding and coaching leadership level alignment is a practical approach centered on the belief that a leader’s thoughts and actions, when properly aligned, create a foundation for strong performance, healthy teams, and organizational success. But finding or creating this kind of balance does not always come naturally. In fact, leaders moving from one level to a new one often need assistance in the transition.
This assistance can come from the feedback of an attentive one-up, a mentor, or a coach. It can be facilitated through a solid understanding of the leadership needs of a particular level and mindfulness about developing the skills required to meet them. Regardless of how they are attained, these skills are going to define leadership success or failure. Balancing what comes naturally when entering a new position with what needs to be developed is truly the primary work of any new leader.
Final thoughts
The five levels discussed here reflect the developmental reality of any organization, large or small. The structural layers may differ, but the growth of a leader through them remains. Self-awareness and the development of an effective personal style are always going to be important. But mastering leadership isn’t about perfecting one style. It is about knowing how and when to shift, how to develop the skills and mindset of a new level while retaining the ability to move to a different level when necessary and to bounce back to the appropriate level as quickly as possible.
The bottom line is that leadership level alignment is mostly in your own hands. It is something you can grow into and develop, and it will change over time as you move from one level to another.
Remember that leadership is a way of functioning, not a position and not a personality. Leaders who understand and practice this don’t just adapt better, they lead with purpose, clarity and trust. In a time of increasing complexity and uncertainty, this may be the most valuable leadership trait of all.
