The standard view of leadership as a concept is of a collection of behaviours, both learned and innate, that make someone good at inspiring others to follow them. Generally speaking, this is correct, but there’s a lot more to the idea of leadership.
Specifically, when we look at it through social and behavioural science, it’s possible to not only redefine what we mean by leadership but also look at ways to be more successful. One way of doing this is to use the 6 domains of leadership.
Below, we’ll cover the 6 domains and explain why they’re useful for defining your leadership style and putting it into practice.
The 6 Domains of Leadership
The 6 domains of leadership were first defined by a group of leadership academics in 2006. It’s built as a pyramid that moves from essential (or foundational) aspects to peak (desirable but not entirely necessary) aspects. Leaders should start at the bottom and work their way up to become successful and effective leaders.
Also, these 6 domains build upon previous leadership academia, specifically the effects they can produce and the behaviours needed to achieve each style. For example, the 6 domains can produce (and require) credibility, trust, stewardship, and so on.
So, let’s cover the 6 domains of leadership:
Personal Leadership
Personal leadership is essentially the way a leader’s personality affects their potential. As such, it covers traits such as authenticity and credibility or, in other words, how “real” a person appears.
Personal Leadership
This is considered a foundational domain of leadership – it appears at the bottom of the domains’ pyramid. Unsurprisingly, this is because it’s almost impossible to be seen as an effective leader if those following you can’t believe in what you say or do.
A leader must be seen as credible by those who follow them, and this is the basis of personal leadership. As the name suggests, it’s about how one leads themselves, which is necessary to then lead others.
Words should be backed up by actions, and opinions and behaviours should be as consistent as possible.
Relational Leadership
Relational leadership is another foundational domain. As you can imagine, this relates to a leader’s ability to build relationships with those they lead. If personal leadership is about creating one’s leadership persona, relational leadership is about how one applies it to their followers.
The key traits of relational leadership are empathy, communication, understanding, and respect. For people to feel like they’re being led effectively, they must feel like they can voice opinions, be treated fairly for their contributions, and expect clarity within the workplace.
Relational and personal leadership go hand-in-hand to help leaders build trust. For example, providing honest feedback and clear expectations are both communication traits that establish a leader as trustworthy in the eyes of their teams.
Contextual Leadership
Contextual leadership is the final foundational domain. In short, it involves a leader creating a shared identity within their team that followers can harness for inspiration and motivation. This identity includes shared values and missions within the team to provide context for how each person’s actions affect the bigger picture.
Similarly, it involves providing context for less clear aspects of how a team works. For example, this might be explaining specific processes or establishing team norms, and giving context for why they’re used. In turn, team members can situate themselves within the team more effectively because they should have a clear understanding of how their actions impact others.
While the previous two domains relate to trust and credibility, contextual leadership is about establishing identity. Team members can use this for motivation and inspiration because they’ll know why they’re doing things and what it means for the organisation at large.
Inspirational Leadership
Moving to the middle-tier domains, we start with inspirational leadership. Its definition should be fairly clear: it’s a leadership style defined by a leader’s ability to create a climate that expects excellence. Importantly, though, a leader has to master relational and contextual leadership to even attempt inspirational leadership.
Inspirational Leadership
Because we’ve moved to the second tier of the pyramid, we’re now looking at desirable more than necessary aspects of being a leader. Specifically, any person can tell people what to do and what their goals are. An inspirational leader, however, gets their teams to want to exceed their goals.
Similarly, an inspirational leader needs a keen sense of self-awareness because inspiring isn’t about leveraging charisma. Rather, it’s about behaving in a way that motivates others to want to do better. After all, this is pretty much the definition of inspiration. Leaders in this domain, then, need to be authentic, credible, and trustworthy.
Supportive Leadership
Supportive leadership is the other domain on the pyramid’s middle tier. Much like personal and relational leadership are linked, so too are inspirational and supportive leadership.
If inspirational leadership is about getting people to want to do better, supportive leadership involves giving them the tools to do so. As the name suggests, it’s how a leader provides their teams with the support needed to excel in their roles.
But what does this mean in a workplace context? Support can take many forms, such as additional measures outside of everyday work, the removal of external distractions like workplace politics, or even just a listening ear for work and personal frustrations. The bottom line is that all types of support should be offered where possible.
The final important part of supportive leadership is shifting away from a blame culture. Rather, leaders should establish a sense of learning to react to workplace mistakes. Supporting team members through failure is a sign of an empathetic and understanding leader, and it’ll help motivate people to do better in the future.
Ethical Leadership
Ethical leadership is the peak of the domain pyramid – and for good reason. It’s what differentiates successful and effective leaders from simply good leaders. In short, a leader can balance what’s right for the organisation against the feelings and wellness of their teams. In other words, they can lead ethically.
Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is through the idea of a work-life balance. Sure, you want your teams to succeed and create revenue for the company. But you want them to do so in a way that keeps them fresh, healthy, and motivated. This is essentially the most ethical way to lead people within an organisation.
However, it also requires leaders to create a sense of both ownership and accountability within their teams. After all, people need to feel like their actions have consequences – whether positive or negative – otherwise they won’t act in the company’s best interests. This helps to drive innovation and create a shared sense of belonging in the company’s success.
Read More: How Long Should A Leadership Development Programme Be?
How to Use the 6 Domains in Your Leadership Style
It’s worth mentioning that the 6 leadership domains aren’t leadership styles as such. Rather, they’re ways of thinking and acting that together create the most effective leadership style. So, how do you use them to lead your organisation to success?
Start with Self-Awareness
Your starting point should be to improve your sense of self-awareness, as you won’t make it very far up the pyramid without this. You should focus on reflecting on your actions and getting feedback from colleagues and mentors. This can help you figure out what you did well and what can be done better next time.
Start with Self-Awareness
From there, you can start to look at your leadership actions. Specifically, you can act more with authenticity and credibility because you’ll have the ability to understand how your actions reflect on your leadership ability.
Master Each Level in Turn
If you feel confident enough to work through the 6 domains on your own, make sure you master each level before moving on to the next. This is because they build upon each other and require effective knowledge and use of the previous tier’s skills.
So, don’t try to be an inspirational leader until you’ve mastered the contextual, personal, and relational leadership domains.
Go on a Leadership Training Course
On the other hand, if you want some contextualisation for how to use the 6 domains, attend a leadership training course that uses this theory as the basis of its teaching style. Unsurprisingly, this will be the best way to understand each domain in more depth as well as to learn some ways to apply them to your leadership.
Leadership Training Course
Of course, you may find that some domains are easier to master than others. Attending a course will be beneficial here, too, as you can get individual support for areas where you feel a bit weaker.
Final Thoughts
While the 6 domains of leadership is only one branch of theory that tries to understand the concept of leadership, it’s a useful one for knowing how different aspects relate to each other. After all, you can’t inspire others if you can’t communicate with them properly!
To apply them to your own leadership potential, be sure to read around the original article for developments on the original concept of the 6 domains.
