Nine Ways To Expand Your Leadership Impact

Today, leadership is harder than ever. It’s complex, overwhelming, and stressful.

 
Fortunately, a new book, The Science Of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact, by executive coaches Jeffrey Hull, Ph.D., and Margaret Moore, MBA, is a comprehensive guide for seasoned and aspiring leaders alike wanting to become stronger and more impactful leaders. 

The guide is based on the authors’ findings from more than 15,000 scientific studies and articles across 22 countries and over 50 years of research. Hull and Moore organized, synthesized, and translated this scientific literature into nine easy-to-understand leadership capacities. 

The nine powerful capacities operate at three levels: 

1. Self-Oriented – Master self-awareness, authenticity, and agility.

Conscious – See clearly, including myself. Being calm, stable, and objective.

Authentic – Care. Knowing what matters most to you and those your serve. Being genuine and sincere. Balancing your concern for your values and others’ values

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Agile – Flex. Being flexible when things change, and being inclusive of diverse, opposing interests. Being open and curious. Navigating easily across many tasks, perspectives, mindsets, emotional stress, conflicts, and polarities. 

2. Other-Oriented – Build trust and connections, positivity, and broad resonance.

Relational – Help. Helping others do their best work. Cultivating high-quality relationships. Empathizing.

Positive – Strengthen. Helping others leverage and expand their strengths.

Compassionate – Resonate. Generating and cultivating resonance with others on a vision, purpose, and action. Showing compassion.

3. System-Oriented – Create shared vision and purpose, serve, and transform.

Shared – Share. Elevating leadership capacities across your team/organization. Moving from “I” to “We” by distributing leadership capacities throughout a team or organization.

Servant – Serve. Serving followers, customers, and other stakeholders. Being a good steward.

Transformation – Transform. Creating and manifesting a vision that positively impacts all stakeholders. Modeling courage. Fostering creativity and innovation. 

Each of these nine capacities is brought to life with stories from Hull's and Moore’s extensive coaching experiences, explanations of science-backed tips, and exercises to improve your skillset. They set you up to grow into a transformational leader, exactly what’s needed to address the challenges of our times. 

“Over months and years, expanding your playbook by improving the nine capacities will yield more and more impact on other’s performance,” explain the authors. “You will feel more fulfilled as a leader as your impact grows.” 
 

Jeffrey Hull, Ph.D.

 

Margaret Moore, MBA

 
The authors provide these additional insights for us: 

Question: Of the nine leadership capacities, which of one or two do you typically find most challenging for leaders to master? 

Hull & Moore: We’ve surveyed the first 400 leaders to experience the book and asked them to rank the nine capacities in terms of their strengths in a live Mentimeter survey (delivered in workshop/keynote). The bottom two are shared leadership (teaching/training/coaching/mentoring others in leadership skills) and transformational leadership (enabling creativity, innovation, transformation. 

Question: Why did you decide to include the detailed Discussion and Study Guide at the end of the book? 

Hull & Moore: The book’s content is rich and ideally processed in a deep, reflective, expansive fashion, including book clubs and personal or professional discussion groups. University professors in leadership also plan to deploy the book in their leadership courses. 

Question: How is The Science of Leadership different from other leadership books? 

Hull & Moore: Typically, leadership researchers focus on studying one leadership topic like authentic leadership, positive leadership, or humility in leadership. Or leadership experts develop their own frameworks around a singular topic, sometimes with a specific audience in mind, using research that best supports their concepts. 

In The Science of Leadership, we reviewed hundreds of top studies and critiques published recently in the most respected journals (summarizing 15,000-plus studies and papers) on a wide variety of leadership topics and models. 

Aiming to create the simplest framework to support leaders at all levels, we captured and synthesized a full breadth of leadership topics into nine capacities. These capacities serve as the fundamentals for leaders to master, just like the best musicians start with classical training.

 
Backed by stories from our real-life coaching experiences, we take the reader on a personal journey with us from examining the inner self to outer landscapes, such as a team, organization, or system. In the end, we want to help executives and aspiring leaders alike expand their impact on those they influence and lead. 

Question: How has your extensive coaching experience shaped The Science of Leadership? 

Hull & Moore: Leadership and coaching are two sides of the same coin, both focused on improving others’ performance and growth. In our professional lives, we are accustomed to playing both roles. Where leadership is a more directive approach (setting the direction), coaching is a more facilitative approach (client sets the direction). 

For more than two decades, we’ve gathered and translated the science that underpins coaching. Now, we’re doing the same for leadership. Along the way, we’ve seen how the two rest on the same fundamentals.

 
With thousands of hours of coaching experience, we’ve become intimately familiar with the challenges leaders face today on the frontlines. By uniquely blending science translation and practical application with real-life case studies, we’ve assembled the science of leadership for everyday leaders to address the behaviors, attitudes, and perspectives that bring new capacities to life. As we say: research made real. 

Question: What role does authenticity play in leadership at all levels? 

Hull & Moore: Many leaders we have coached struggle with the concept of “authenticity” as it is inherently vague and difficult to define. “Do I really want to show my doubts and fears,” they wonder. Sometimes they focus on honesty or ethical behavior as the basis for authenticity—these are certainly important but not enough. 

There are two kinds of authenticity studied by researchers, being open and authentic about one’s own values and purpose as a leader, and second, understanding and caring equally about the values and purpose of followers. Together they produce a quiet ego— a balanced concern for what matters to self and others. 

A review of many studies showed that both are important but for different reasons. The first is good for the leader. The latter is good for others and organizations: it is how authentic leaders improve the performance of others and organizations. 

The research then provides two “frames” that encourage leaders to first attune to their own higher values, balance their self-interest by attuning to the values and purpose of followers, and then bringing both sets of values into alignment. 

Question: As a leader, what does it mean to move beyond empathy to compassion? What purpose does this serve? 

Hull & Moore: Empathy involves recognizing, attuning, understanding, and sharing the cognitive and/or emotional experiences of others. 

Compassion builds upon empathy and goes a step further to engage, taking action to alleviate the suffering. Compassion also stretches upward and outward to understanding human suffering as a shared, universal experience. It includes the ability, and the strength, to tolerate the discomfort and distress brought on by caring and action. 

We propose that compassion benefits from five capacities working together—conscious (see clearly), authentic (care), agile (flex), relational (help), and positive (strengthen). A team in Toronto summarized research showing that empathy (sharing suffering) is more exhausting than compassion (doing something to alleviate suffering). 

Compassionate leadership, as it expands upon empathy and the five capacities that come before, serves as a pivotal shift in perspective—a broadening of horizons you might say—as leaders move on their journey towards the more sophisticated “system-level” approaches of shared, servant and transformational leadership. 

Question: What role does humility play in becoming a successful leader? 

Hull & Moore: We explore humility in the chapter on servant leadership—servant leaders focus on supporting others to lead, aka leading from behind. They are humble stewards of their organizations and people. Humility is defined by scientists as (a) viewing oneself accurately [conscious], (b) appreciating others’ strengths and contributions [positive], and (c) teachability, or openness to new ideas and feedback [agile]. 

To date, a large review of 100 research studies on humility in leadership suggests that humility doesn’t improve the leader’s performance, but it does improve others’ performance. It’s worth cultivating humility because of its positive impact on others. But not always. The value of humility for leaders is contextual. In low-stakes situations, humility is helpful to others. 

In high-stakes situations, followers prefer less humility and more out-in-front, confident, and directive leadership to get everyone safely through a rocky ride. Having a broad-based understanding of choices, actions, and perspectives is hands-down better than applying one approach to leadership in our complex world. Each capacity, like servant leadership and humility, has its value, place, and limitations. 

Question: How should leaders navigate modern challenges such as the rise of AI or economic uncertainty? 

Hull & Moore: Applying the nine leadership capacities is a good way to transform today’s challenges into strengths. The most effective leaders are adept and flexible in adapting their response to accelerating change. They are agile in awareness, relating, resonating, sharing leadership, and leading transformation. All the while they model resilience and wellbeing, avoiding burnout. 

Our book is arriving at an important and pivotal moment: the world needs good leaders more than ever before. We are bringing science to life in a way that helps everyday leaders feel supported and strengthened. Then they can bring the best of humanity to bear on these crucial and universal challenges.
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Jeffrey Hull, PhD, has focused on leadership for over 30 years, as an HR leader with multiple corporations, cofounder of a leadership development consultancy, nonprofit executive director, and coach to leaders across the globe. He brings years of translating science into leadership as a consultant, psychologist, and teacher at New York University and Harvard Medical School. 

Margaret Moore, MBA, blends leadership, coaching, and science, including thirty years in C-suite roles, co-leading four successful startups in biotechnology and coaching, and two decades of professional coaching and coach training. For 25 years, she has been a prolific translator of science into coaching, training, and leadership practice. 

Thank you to the book’s publisher for sending me an advance copy of the book.