I recently sat down with Maria Campbell, VP of People at Griffin, to talk about the origins of the Leadership Archetypes framework, how it’s different from assessments like Strengthsfinder, why the model focuses specifically on leaders and more.
I'd love to know how you came to develop the Leadership Archetypes framework.
It was slow development and then really fast. I found the first archetype years ago when I was a Director of Career Development. I was working with this CEO, and I noticed he had this pattern where he would be focused on a 30,000-foot strategy or way down digging in the dirt, and everyone was like, "What are you doing? Please get out of this. Please stop trying to handle these things." I found it an interesting way of leading.
So that was the first one that I discovered. Over the years, I kept jotting notes about leadership styles. They were scattered about until 2020. I was working with tarot cards as a means of self-reflection, not predicting your future and all of that, but as a tool of introspection. I started thinking about Carl Jung’s archetypes, because they're very connected to the tarot. From there the model started to take shape. That led to spending two days finalizing the model. So it was years of experience working with leaders and watching their patterns, and then it kind of flew out of me.
There's this kind of concept that there's one particular way to be leaderly, and yet your model has six ways. How do you reconcile the stereotype of leadership with having six different archetypes?
I think we look at leadership as there only being one way. We have this idea of what a leader looks like. The reality is that leadership looks lots of ways. When we say, "This is what leaders look like," we actually do ourselves a disservice. One of the reasons I wanted to create the framework was to help people understand what other leadership styles look like because the reality is there isn’t just one that's successful. It depends on the situation, on the person, on a whole host of factors. When we say "Leadership looks like this," we often mean the traditional stereotype of the tough, directive, and all of these sorts of very strong characteristics. This leaves out lots of different people and styles that are just equally as effective.
I feel that a lot. I remember getting feedback early in my career to be more “leaderly”, but no one could really describe what that meant. And I didn't see leaders who led in the way that I led. That stuck with me for a while. When I saw the archetypes for the first time I felt really, really seen by them.
People do say "be more leaderly." Well, what does that mean?
Did they describe to you what they meant?
No! I asked a lot of questions and they couldn't give me anything concrete to work with. I think a lot of the time, leadership is seen as this ephemeral quality that you either have or you don't. Like you know it when you see it, and there's only one way to do it properly.
What do you wish more leaders understood about their role in an organization?
Newer leaders, tend to struggle to make the transition from managing to leading, and what happens is they keep focusing down on their org. So they are focusing on their org and their people. I wish they looked across the org more. One of the biggest problems is leaders don't know how to navigate those peer relationships and work organizationally in a collaborative way. I think that's where a lot of problems really exist inside companies and leadership teams.
Yeah. I see that too. I see leaders who think their main allegiance is to the function that they lead, rather than to the organization as a whole.
Yep. They build relationships within their area really well, but they forget to build relationships outside their org that are so important for the work of leadership. This makes the work so much harder.
How do you see the interplay of archetypes working with your peers, rather than the function that reports to you? As a person designing a leadership team, how should I be considering balancing the archetypes?
It's interesting because people will say, "So I need to have one of every archetype? What's a successful team look like?" And the answer is, that it depends on what’s happening. We see a lot of certain kinds of archetypes at different phases. So let's say, at a startup phase, you might all be more similar because you're just trying to get this thing to be something concrete, find product-market fit, and a move towards revenue. But the task of leadership at a scaling company is quite different. So it really depends on what the team and company are trying to accomplish.
The other thing to think about is, if your team is really loaded with one archetype or one style of leadership, I think, well, what about the less prevalent styles? How does that interplay work so that you have a healthy balance? Because often what I find is a lot of people who are just trying to get things done in leadership teams. And maybe we have fewer of the folks who are thinking about that forward path, really thinking about the big challenges from a product perspective. Or we may have fewer people who are really thinking about risks and data and things like that. So it's all about, "How are we managing ourselves as a team?"
So it sounds like thinking about the archetypes in terms of what serves you at a particular space in your journey.
Yeah. The archetypes do work for the intrapersonal development of individual leaders but what they’re really aimed for is relationships between leaders and group dynamics of leadership teams. It's about how they work together and how we ease some of those problems at that layer. It's thinking about ourselves as an entity, as a leadership team, and, "What do we need now? What are the tensions? How can we leverage each other for better working relationships"
You talked about tarot earlier, we've talked about personality assessments, like Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinders and everything, as a lens to see the world through. And I think the Leadership Archetypes are really interesting because it's not like those, in a couple of key ways.
But first I want to talk about, why specifically leaders? Because of Myers-Briggs and StrengthsFinders, you can apply them to everyone that you work with. Whereas with the Leadership Archetypes, there's something kind of special there.
In my career, as a Director of Career Development, a consultant, and COO/Head of People I’ve had to take and administer all sorts of assessments. I have a complicated relationship with assessments. I like them and, they have limitations. For instance, StrengthsFinder. It's a powerful assessment for individual development. I use it with every leader I work with. It gives us a common language and helps me understand how they work. It’s not just the top five you have but the interactions of those. For example, a former executive I worked with shared three out of the same top five but we were wildly different and people experienced us differently. So while StrengthsFinder is great for understanding yourself, it doesn’t really scale to the team level. There are 278,000 unique combinations of top-fives. This makes it difficult to use for teams.
I spent the last four years deeply thinking about the challenges of new leaders, understanding where they get stuck. Thinking about how their entrance changes the leadership team dynamic, helping them understand their style. There are assessments and frameworks on leadership for sure. None of them resonated with me. And I do think that the challenges of leadership are significantly different from the work that we do as a contributor, and also the work that we do as a manager. And time after time I saw new leaders struggle with working across the org with their peers, leaders in other areas. I wanted to give them tools to navigate that divide more easily.
The other issue is that as you go further in your career in leadership, there are fewer formal opportunities for feedback like we’re used to. We have to take learning on ourselves. I wanted to create some a framework to help leaders understand themselves, their interactions, and how all of that organizational morass comes together.
Read the rest of the interview.
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