ABSTRACT
Leadership has been brought down off its pedestal and made tangible, by dissecting it along five dimensions, the leadership roles, and ten challenges, the leadership tasks. This chapter describes how each leadership task has a leadership paradox at its heart and that leadership styles are a reflection of emphasizing one side of a leadership paradox over the other. It examines which factors commonly inhibit leaders from becoming more agile and presents ways to strengthen one's leadership agility. What leaders have on their agenda will strongly impact which style profile they require to achieve the intended results. This is actually a more sophisticated way of looking at situational leadership – the best suiting leadership style should not depend on the situation, but should depend on what leaders want to achieve given the situation. Therefore, leaders typically assess the situation, then determine their leadership agenda and then flexibly make use of the leadership styles required to realize their agenda.
