Adapting Style for Greater Success

 
You need to roll with situations and move easily in any directions. Success has to do with style, not just skill.

SKYLE = skill + style. Where skill joins with your style-of-delivering-the-skill you have powerful evidence for why people succeed or fail in their work. It’s not just what you know how to do, but how you do it that creates “fit” with your job, boss, team, organization and customers. We all have “skyle”s. If we’re experiencing “success” it’s probably because we’ve matched our “skyle”s to the needs and culture of our work and its customers.
 
Consider the K I S S A Model that defines the elements of success:

But there is a hidden land mine that professionals keep stepping on. Needless to say, stepping on any land mine is a career limiting event, but there is an insidious landmine that many step on (repeatedly) in their unsuccessful quest for good fit with their work.

They over-focus on skill alone and miss the power of “skyle”.

Your “skyle” (where skill and style of delivering skill come together) will more significantly drive your success because it describes a more complete picture of what you’re doing and how you’re doing it than a mere description of your skills. And right there is the perceptual problem. Professionals over-focus on skill alone and frequently mistake “skills” for “skyles” (skill and style together), therefore missing the crucial question “How do I appear to others when I’m using my skills?”

Genuine, timely answers to that question can make the difference between derailing from a position versus adapting to a more successful “skyle” match for what the situation needs. Creating a feedback rich environment for yourself is crucial. Be sure you’re asking for feedback about style not just skills. This can help you avoid the overuse of strengths to the point they become weaknesses (as perceived by others).

Coaching your leadership ability, or that of a whole team, means  you will gain new ways to adapt your:

Assessment tools will accelerate and focus this process. Coaching will add insight and interpretation for deeper value and immediate usability of the assessment results at work.

Having been in management, I don’t approach leadership as just a concept. It’s the ability to identify and inspire results from engaged followers. Leading is conceptual, behavioural and emotional. So is leadership coaching.

I combine the use of intuition (yours and mine) to see beyond the superficial and immediate aspects of challenges. Assessment data is very helpful but frequently produced in overdose amounts. My job is to help my clients refine it into the fewest high-leverage behaviours and ideas that will enable them to focus upon and improve success needed in their work at this time in their career.