Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership: You Can Do Both

Forceful Leadership and Enabling Leadership as Opposing Virtues

Even though forceful and enabling are opposites, they are not necessarily incompatible, contradictory, or mutually exclusive. Robert Quinn (1991) understood this when he created a “competing values framework” for defining leadership using such “oppositions” as “a cooperative, team-oriented style” and “a dynamic, competitive style.” Carl Jung (1976) juxtaposed “thinking” and “feeling,” recognizing that individuals may prefer one or the other but never suggesting that one precluded the other. Daniel Levinson and his colleagues (see Levinson, 1978) discussed midlife transitions in terms of pairs of personal qualities or conditions such as “masculine-feminine” and “attachment-separateness.” ...