While there are plenty of different leadership styles that could be good for you and your business, the main difference between them all is: What drives those leadership styles?

Is it Wisdom? –Something you acquire after many years of leading an organization.

Or is it Imagination? – Opening your mind to new ideas that could help your business make incremental changes.

Those new fresh ideas:

• could make you more competitive
• help you offer better service,
• save you some money
• improve the work place and retention.

But leaders that have been experts for many years suffer the risk of shutting down completely when presented with new fresh ideas.

Too many times, we get caught up in our daily routine and resent new ideas. Ideas mean you have to listen, evaluate and, in many cases, take a risk. Isn’t it a lot easier to just say “HALT!” and be done?

Here’s an example from my own experience about how wisdom driven leadership styles could suffocate the success of new ideas in a company.

The Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Hamburg was named one of the top ten hotels in the world in 1975 by Travel and Leisure magazine. It was at this hotel that I started my career in Hospitality, in 1972.

I started at the bottom, both figuratively and physically. My title: “pot washer!”But thanks to lessons learned early in life, I got myself promoted to dishwasher, and then I apprenticed throughout the kitchen as a saucier, entre-metier, garde-manger, Pattisier, Poissonier, etc.

until I finally was promoted to Comis-derang, a very hard to pronounce word for…busboy.

I thought I had achieved so much!

I now was in the FRONT OF THE HOUSE! I got to see the reaction to the kitchen’s creations first hand…meet the glitterati that frequented our exclusive dining venue…and got to really polish my “kitchen German.”

It was with great trepidation and apprehension I got up the nerve to approach our God-like Maitre d’Hotel to tell him, “Sir…I…ahh. Have been thinking and…”

“HALT!” he yelled. “I pay you to do—so go and do!”

I can imagine that having a young, immigrant, pushy busboy coming forward with an “idea” may have offended his sensitivities. After all, he is the Maitre d’Hotel and I am just the busboy. He may feel he is wise, he is the sum of years of working his way up the ladder, and everything is working just fine. The truth is in most cases fresh new ideas can be the bloodstream of your company.

Leadership Styles – What Is Being Said VS How It’s Being Said

Opportunities to bring change about do not come to us every day, and some people have to really get their courage up to come to us with those ideas. It is imperative that we create an environment where it is safe to speak up, to challenge the status quo and our current thinking.

Here’s another example from my career: when I was a student at the School of Hotel Administration at Cornell University, I took a summer job as the Front Office Manager of the opening team of the Hotel Internacional Iguazu.

The hotel was connected to the world by a strand of copper wire that had to traverse twenty miles of jungle. The lines were down frequently, so we were unable to be reached by the outside world to make reservations.

I went to meet with my boss, and suggested that we give our head office in Buenos Aires control of our inventory. They could then sell rooms to their heart’s content, and send us burst transmissions to the Telex machine, when the lines were up.

“STOP!” my boss yelled. “You never, ever give up control of your inventory! Don’t you see, if Buenos Aires oversells us, what are we going to do with the extra guests here in middle of the jungle? Hang them on hammocks between the monkeys and the mosquitoes?”

That was the end of the discussion—and the quick death of an imaginative idea.

However, a few days later I ran into the General Manager, and upon answering his question on how our bookingswere coming along, I shared my idea, and he told me to implement it as soon as possible. Which I did.

And then, “little Napoleon” (my boss) showed up in my office and proceeded to give a total dressing down, by yelling in my face that I was a little punk that had not earned his stirrups, who did I think I was to go over his head, grabbing his grey sideburns and shouting,

“This is wisdom, until you have these, you never, ever go over my head. YOU ARE FIRED!” He stormed out of my office, slamming the door with great finality.

I lived in the hotel, so over the next couple of days, as I was wrapping up my affairs, he sheepishly walked into my office saying, “Andresito, the reservations are now pouring in, so the General Manager told me to unfire you…”

Now, walk in my boss’s shoes for a moment. I was a self-assured, cocky “kid” that probably presented the idea with arrogance, and may not have thought it through, so he was naturally put off. As a result, he killed a revenue-generating idea in the bud.

When an idea comes your way, whether from your child, spouse, boss, subordinate, or vendor, are you really listening, or are you just hearing the delivery and missing the message?

So many times we get on our high horses over how things are said, instead of what is being said.

Each one of the many leadership styles can be improved by being curious. You’ll find more on this topic in my book: Blind Spots: How to Embrace Curiosity, Disruption, and Imagination to See Yourself as a Change Agent.