Leadership doesn't come in one shape, one voice, or one style and pretending it does is why so much leadership advice falls flat.
Speak Leadership breaks down the many forms leadership actually takes: quiet leadership, crisis leadership, servant leadership, the leadership nobody notices until it's gone.
Each episode explores a different dialect of leading how it sounds, how it fails, and how to speak it fluently in your own team, business, or life.
No jargon, no one-size-fits-all playbooks just honest conversations about what it really takes to lead.
Fiedler's Contingency Theory: The Leadership Model That Says You Can't Change Your Style
Most leadership theories tell you to adapt your style to the situation. Fred Fiedler's research, from the mid-1960s, made almost the opposite argument: a leader's core style is relatively fixed, and the real lever is matching the situation to the leader, not the other way around. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Fiedler's Contingency Theory and why it still holds up as one of leadership research's more provocative claims.
We break down the Least Preferred Coworker scale that splits leaders into task-motivated and relationship-motivated, and the three factors that determine how favorable a given situation is for a leader — leader-member relations, task structure, and position power. We explore the model's central, counterintuitive finding: task-motivated leaders perform best at the extremes, in genuine crisis or in highly favorable conditions, while relationship-motivated leaders perform best in the ambiguous middle ground most workplaces actually live in.
We dig into Fiedler's most distinctive recommendation — rather than training leaders to become universally flexible, organizations should diagnose a leader's fixed style and engineer the situation or placement to fit it. We close on the uncomfortable implication that some leadership placement failures aren't a training problem at all — they're a mismatch problem.
Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.
Topics covered: Fiedler, contingency theory, leadership style, task vs relationship orientation, leadership placement, situational favorability.
9 Sept 2026
Double-Loop Learning: Why Organizations Keep Solving the Same Problem Differently
A thermostat that turns on the heat when a room gets cold is solving the problem. A thermostat that also asks whether the target temperature is right in the first place is doing something different. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Chris Argyris and Donald Schön's 1978 distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning, and why most organizational problem-solving never gets past the first kind.
We explore why double-loop learning — questioning the underlying strategy or assumption itself, not just the specific error — is so much rarer than single-loop fixes, since it requires people, often senior leadership, to question ideas they're personally invested in. We break down "defensive routines," the unconscious habits organizations develop to avoid examining threatening assumptions, like treating repeated failures as isolated bad luck rather than a pattern.
We dig into a specific and costly trap: repeated single-loop fixes to a problem that actually needs double-loop examination, where an organization's confidence it's "handling" the issue can paradoxically grow with every successful patch, even as the real source keeps generating new instances of the same failure. We close on the uncomfortable idea that a track record of successful fixes isn't proof of good management — it can be proof the underlying strategy was never actually questioned.
Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.
Topics covered: double-loop learning, Chris Argyris, organizational learning, defensive routines, strategy, problem-solving.
7 Sept 2026
The Vroom-Yetton-Jago Model: Why "How Should I Decide This" Is the Wrong First Question
Leadership training spends a lot of time on what makes a good decision, and almost no time on a genuinely more useful question: who should actually be involved in making it. In this episode, Andrew and Hannah dig into Victor Vroom and Philip Yetton's 1973 model, and the finding that leaders who default to one consistent decision-making style — always deciding alone, always consulting, always seeking consensus — get measurably worse outcomes than leaders who match the process to the specific situation.
We break down the spectrum of approaches, from deciding alone with existing information to full group consensus, and the diagnostic questions that actually determine which fits: how much decision quality matters, whether the leader already has enough information, whether the team's genuine buy-in is required for the decision to actually work, and whether the problem is structured or genuinely ambiguous.
We explore the model's central, practical finding: over-consulting a decision that could have been made quickly alone wastes time for nothing, while under-consulting a decision that needs real buy-in can sink even a technically correct answer during implementation. We also cover the later refinement adding time pressure and the developmental value of involving a team even when it isn't strictly required. We close on why a decision-making style that built trust in one situation can be exactly the wrong choice in the next.
Speak Leadership explores the many forms and dialects of leadership.
Topics covered: Vroom-Yetton-Jago model, decision-making, participative leadership, team buy-in, leadership style, organizational behavior.
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