No amount of adjusting his body language would make him clearer or more widely heard until he could first help his colleagues to change, or at least challenge the culture of the organisation, so that they all felt more comfortable with a different style. His colleagues found him a threat because of the level of uncertainty implicit in much of what he wanted to do. He was much more comfortable with uncertainty than his colleagues were or than their culture allowed. Since we published The Future of Leadership, we have come to realise that the leadership styles we identified are actually descriptions of organisational cultures too. We think of them as three paradigms of how uncertainty is tackled in organisations.
All organisations face uncertainty, no matter what culture they have.
The leader believes he or she can control uncertainty because they have expertise, know what the organisation should be doing and how to do it. In the organisation itself, expertise is usually highly valued, and executives are expected, as they rise within the system, to know more than those beneath them about how things happen. A good example would be a firm of consulting engineers or auditors. Their business is built on selling reliability and expertise to the client, who for the most part wants any uncertainty or experimentation to be done on someone else. The right answer is valued, mistakes are to be avoided.