Individualized Consideration: Leading the Person, Not Just the Role

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

We close our tour of Bass and Avolio’s (1994) Four I’s with the one that scales worst and matters most: Individualized Consideration. It is the practice of treating each person on a team as an individual with distinct needs, motivations, and potential, rather than as an interchangeable holder of a job title.

Coach, Not Just Manager

Bass and Riggio (2006) describe Individualized Consideration as acting as a coach or mentor, listening for each follower’s particular needs for achievement and growth, and delegating tasks as a vehicle for developing individuals, not simply to offload work. Whitmore (2017) makes a related point in his coaching model: a good coach asks more questions than they give answers, on the assumption that the person being coached usually holds more of the relevant information than the coach does. Applied to leadership, this means resisting the temptation to manage everyone the same way just because it is administratively simpler.

Different People, Different Support

During a difficult restructuring inside an e-commerce company, I watched two colleagues with almost identical roles need almost opposite forms of support. One wanted early, direct information so they could plan; the other found early detail overwhelming and needed reassurance broken into smaller steps. A manager who insisted on a single communication style for the whole team would have served one of them well and the other badly. Individualized Consideration meant having two different conversations that led to the same outcome: both people staying engaged through a hard period.

What the Research Shows

My own MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017) found that perceived individual attention from a leader was one of the strongest predictors of employees’ willingness to support an organisational change, ahead of factors like seniority or tenure. People do not commit to a change because a plan is well written; they commit because someone noticed how the change would specifically affect them, and cared enough to ask.

Practising Individualized Consideration

• Ask each team member how they prefer to receive difficult news, before you need to deliver any.
• Delegate a stretch task that grows someone’s weakest skill, not just the task that is easiest to hand off.
• Keep a private note of what each person told you matters to them, and refer back to it months later.

References

• Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (1994) Improving Organizational Effectiveness Through Transformational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Bass, B.M. and Riggio, R.E. (2006) Transformational Leadership. 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.
• Whitmore, J. (2017) Coaching for Performance. 5th edn. London: Nicholas Brealey.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.