What is Integrated Leadership and Why is it Important?

This past week I’ve been reading “Touchpoints” by Douglas Conant and Mette Noorgaard. In short, it’s a book about how the two make a remarkable improvement in their company by delivering a “Touchpoints” leadership style.

I will not sum up the whole book because I have only reached half of it, but there’s this immaculate point that sticks in my head, a balance between assertive and adaptive leadership. From an assertive point of view, we assume humans as economic and rational beings who do things for their own good. On the other end, the adaptive perspective sees the altruistic character in humans.

These contradictions translate into a very different leadership style. Assertive leadership focuses on competition, giving orders, absolute growth, and aim for effectivity. Meanwhile, adaptive leadership is more about collaboration, engagement, gradual growth, and community activation.

That statement brought my mind back to my leadership journey from 2017 until the first half of 2018. During that time, I saw myself as an assertive leader. In fact, I believed that it’s the most effective way to lead people. However, this method made things fall apart and at some point, I started to realize my members got more tired each day. I began to understand that I’ve been too rough, so I learned and set my mindset to be more empathetic and altruistic.

Did I succeed? Well, I got better as a leader but I was way too late. I’ve lost their trust already and when I slowly got their respect back, my time was up and I had to hand-over my Vice President role. So in 2019, I ended my leadership journey in college with self-disappointment. If only I knew better, I would give so much more positive impact on my team. The lesson learned, I’ve faced my truth as a bad leader once.

Now, learning from my experience and the “Touchpoints” book, as a leader we actually need to combine the two leadership characteristics because it is indeed our true nature to be both. As written in the book, “integrative mindset has been practiced for centuries. Just like the old Tao philosophy, the assertive Yang and the adaptive Yin are both contradictory and complementary, together they become a wholeness”.