Dominant Leader Vs Overly Helpful: Which Style Drives Success?

One of the biggest challenges in leadership is using your power and influence to meet everyone’s needs, a balanced leadership approach. Balancing helpfulness and assertiveness is key to building lasting, positive relationships. Being overly helpful can distract you from important responsibilities while being too dominant can make you seem self-centred and erode trust. This prompts an interesting question about dominant leaders Vs overly helpful ones: which style drives success?

In today’s interdependent business world, it’s crucial to understand your personal preferences to foster strong relationships with suppliers and partners. Within a business or organisation there is also a high level of interdependence between teams. I often hear complaints from senior directors about teams not supporting each other, as individuals tend to focus on their own team’s needs while neglecting the needs of others.

When I coach managers and directors who aren’t meeting performance expectations, I often find they struggle with wanting to help their teams while neglecting their own needs. This imbalance can create dependency among team members and lead to resentment, causing the manager to “flip” and become demanding or harsh, especially if they are uncomfortable enforcing rules and boundaries (for more on this click here).

Avoid Emotional Explosions

Being excessively helpful can create the expectation that you will always meet others’ needs, leading you to neglect your own. When you suddenly become dominating, it often surprises others because they aren’t aware of your unmet needs. This dynamic frequently appears in personal relationships, where one partner takes the other for granted until an emotional outburst occurs. This shift to dominating behaviour may seem unreasonable, but it stems from unnoticed self-sacrifice. That’s the problem with this stuff – it’s often operating at an unconscious level.

To build lasting relationships at work and at home, we must be more aware of the power we wield and how effectively we meet both our needs and the needs of others. This means finding the right balance and pursuing ‘Mutual Help’.

The Paradox of Mutual Help

As many regular readers know, I now work with a very interesting assessment tool developed by Dr. Dan Harrison. His expertise in mathematics, personality theory, counselling, and organisational psychology has led him to make a unique and significant contribution to assessment methodology.

There are many different Assessment reports available in the Harrison System and one of my favourites is the Paradox Report®. A paradox, derived from the Greek words for “against” (para) and “opinion” (dóxa), is a statement that appears contradictory or counterintuitive but reveals a deeper truth.

This report uses Dan’s unique methodology to combine pairs of primary traits in a way that distinguishes four sub-traits.  Each primary is either ‘dynamic’ or ‘gentle’.  If the dynamic trait is too strong and not balanced by the gentle trait, it can become an ‘Aggressive Imbalance’. On the other hand, if the supportive trait is too strong and not balanced, you can get a ‘Passive Imbalance’.  These imbalances can lead to less effective working relationships and interfere with a person’s success. When you effectively combine two paradoxical (complementary) traits, you can demonstrate versatile behaviour in a variety of contexts that leads to positive outcomes for both others and yourself.

The two primary traits in the ‘Power’ Paradox are Assertive and Helpful:

• Assertive (dynamic trait) is the tendency to put forward personal wants and needs.

• Helpful (gentle trait) is the tendency to respond to others’ needs and assist or support others to achieve their goals.

The illustration of the paradox is provided below.

Balances and Imbalances

The four sub traits in the Power Paradox® are:

Mutual Help (Balanced Versatility) – involves actively pursuing solutions that benefit all parties involved by combining high assertiveness with high helpfulness. This leads to highly effective behaviours that build enduring mutually beneficial relationships and strong teams.

Self-Sacrificing (Passive Imbalance) – occurs when you prioritise others’ needs over your own, characterised by low assertiveness and high helpfulness. This can lead to personal burn-out and making others dependent on you. Under pressure, this trait may flip to the opposite and become dominating because you feel taken advantage of.

Dominating (Aggressive Imbalance) – arises when you assert your own needs while neglecting the needs of others, marked by high assertiveness and low helpfulness. This undermines trust and builds resentment in others. Under pressure, this trait can shift to self-sacrificing as you may feel sympathy for others or judge them as helpless, believing they can’t succeed without your support.

Needs Avoidance (Balanced Deficiency) – The tendency to lack assertiveness as well as helpfulness (Low Assertive and Low Helpful).  This trait fails to address the needs of others or express personal needs, making it particularly ineffective as it diminishes personal energy and drains the energy of the team.

It’s important to note that a strong aggressive or passive imbalance can lead to rigid thinking and behaviour, causing individuals to focus solely on the positive aspects of that trait.

For example, a domineering person may view assertiveness as a virtue while perceiving helpfulness as a weakness that others will exploit.  Likewise, a very helpful person may have a belief that being assertive is rude, arrogant and condescending.

This means they may struggle to be more assertive and remain trapped in self-sacrificing behaviour until they eventually burn out.

Increasing Self-Awareness

Recent insights on leadership emphasise self-awareness as the key to success. If you can’t lead yourself due to unconscious personal tendencies, how can you effectively lead others? Identify what you need to become more aware of to enhance your effectiveness.

To explore these issues and discover your position on the Power Paradox, along with the 11 other paradoxes in this unique assessment, contact us at info@talent4performance.co.uk.

You can access an example Paradox Report here.

We also facilitate team reports so you can identify the strengths and imbalances in your key teams. This can lead to powerful insights that increase collaboration and effectiveness.

Check out the short 150-second video about this paradox on LinkedIn: 
What is the secret of sustainable relationships?

Remember, especially as you consider how you exert your power . . . Stay Curious!

With best regards,

David Klaasen