Leaders are at their best when they truly see the individuals on their team, recognize their unique value, and harness their motivations and strengths to unleash peak performance, develop a cohesive team, and achieve remarkable outcomes.
Great leaders inspire employees, galvanize teams, and influence attitude and behavior to spark high performance and spur transformation company-wide.
Most leaders develop their leadership style or management style by watching whoever managed them first, keeping the parts that seemed to work, and adding habits picked up from firsthand experience or a book or a program along the way. Designing it deliberately instead, around the Motivations you already run on, produces the same results for a fraction of the energy, and your team can feel the difference before you explain what changed.
The kind of work you do all day costs more energy than the hours you put in
Two kinds of leadership fatigue look identical from the outside:
- The first follows a brutal quarter and clears after a week away.
- The second returns within days of coming back rested, shows up after meetings you ran well, and persists while your team is performing.
Workload explains the first type of fatigue, and the content of the work explains the second.
DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, drawing on 10,796 leaders and 2,185 HR professionals across 2,014 organizations in 50+ countries, found that 71% of leaders have experienced significantly higher stress since stepping into their role, up from 63% in 2022.
Among those stressed leaders, 54% are concerned about burnout and 40% have considered stepping away from leadership, compared with 20% of leaders reporting less stress. And Gartner’s April 2026 survey of 2,947 employees and managers found that 47% of managers say more is expected of them than a year ago.
Where a leader physically works turns out to be a poor predictor of who burns out. Stress runs highest among leaders working on site at 74%, against 72% for hybrid and 66% for remote, while burnout runs higher among hybrid leaders at 57% and remote leaders at 56%. The people with the most flexibility report less stress and more burnout, which suggests the cost is coming from the content of the work rather than the conditions around it.
Most leaders inherit their management style from whoever managed them first
Leadership modeling happens early and sticks.
The first manager who seemed competent becomes a template, industry norms fill in the gaps, and a widely shared assumption does the rest — that leadership looks like decisiveness, pace, and process control. Adopting them as a default, without checking whether they fit you, is what creates the problem.
Teams notice when a leadership style is performative rather than natural, and it shows up in how they rate the people leading them.
Bain and Company, in survey work with the Economist Intelligence Unit, found that fewer than half of respondents agree their leaders are inspiring or drawing out motivation in their people, with even fewer saying their leaders build engagement or model the organization’s culture. Bain’s conclusion is that inspiring leaders are made rather than born, which means the gap those numbers describe is a fixable one.
An unstable stretch makes an inherited leadership style harder to abandon.
The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey, conducted by The Harris Poll among 2,017 employed adults, found that 54% of U.S. workers say job insecurity is significantly affecting their stress levels. Leading a team through that kind of stretch pushes most people toward whatever approach feels safest and most familiar, which is usually the inherited one.
Competence hides the cost of leading against your own Motivations
Leaders create employee experiences, and the quality of those experiences is what determines how hard employees work, how satisfied they feel, and how long they stay. The best way to prevent disengagement is to level up leaders.
A borrowed leadership style is hard to spot precisely because you can run one well. You learn the moves to make, the results come in, your reviews are strong, and nothing in the feedback you get suggests a problem. The cost shows up as a premium you pay privately to produce the same output someone else naturally produces without hardly any effort.
The difference is found in their internal Motivations.
A Motivation is what drives a person toward work they find satisfying, and everyone has all 32 Motivations scored and ranked in a specific, unique order.
- Work that draws on your highest-ranked Motivations produces energy.
- Work that demands your lowest-ranked ones drains your energy, even when you’re good at it, and even when you’ve been doing it for a decade.
Those 32 Motivations group into eight Motivational Dimensions, and most inherited leadership styles pull heavily on two or three of them. Running your role through Dimensions that sit near the bottom of your ranking produces a specific kind of depletion. Effort that should feel like traction feels like friction instead — recovery takes longer than the workload justifies, and the parts of leading you’d expect to enjoy start to feel like obligations. None of that shows up in performance data until much later.
What it looks like when a Visionary leads like a Driver
James Laws, Co-Founder and CEO of Saturday Drive, described the pattern after his team took the MCode assessment:
“Before I had my team take the MCode assessment, I felt challenged as a leader. Discovering that I am a Visionary helped me realize that I was modeling my leadership after the styles of a Driver or Orchestrator — my two least dominant Dimensions. From that day forward, I focused on what I do best: Recognizing the untapped potential before us and shaping our future. I am now more excited and energized, and my team has a clear direction to drive toward.”
A Visionary leading through Driver and Orchestrator behavior is one of the most common mismatches there is, and the mechanics of it explain the cost.
Drivers are driven by momentum and completion, so leading like a Driver means setting finish lines, holding pace, and applying pressure that activates rather than overwhelms. Orchestrators are driven by bringing pieces into working order, so leading like an Orchestrator means sequencing, structuring, and holding a system together.
Both approaches look exactly like what most people picture when they picture a leader, but Visionary Motivations point somewhere else entirely.
A Visionary notices what others walk past and reshapes those observations into what could be, then needs three things to keep functioning: New material to notice, an audience who receives what they see, and the authority to act on it. A Visionary who spends their days sequencing other people’s work and enforcing deadlines has cut all three, which produces a leader who looks competent and feels flat.
Laws describes what changed when he stopped: More energy for him, and a clearer direction for the team.
Eight Motivational Dimensions and the leadership style each one makes natural
But what makes a leader effective? And how can you become a more effective leader?
Every Dimension produces a distinct kind of leader, and the version that costs you least is the one built on the Motivations you already rank highest.
- Achiever-led leadership sets and raises the bar. It works by naming a standard worth clearing, holding the team to it, and recognizing excellence specifically rather than generically.
- Driver-led leadership creates momentum. It works by defining finish lines, breaking long work into visible phases, and taking on the problem nobody else will touch.
- Influencer-led leadership mobilizes people. It works by translating the work into what will change for the humans on the receiving end, then making sure the team sees the effect they had.
- Learner-led leadership builds the team’s understanding. It works by explaining the reasoning before the instruction, teaching what the leader has figured out, and giving people problems deep enough to develop real expertise.
- Optimizer-led leadership raises the floor. It works by defining expectations explicitly, closing the gap between how things work and how they should, and owning the standard rather than policing it.
- Orchestrator-led leadership holds the system together. It works by sequencing complex initiatives, handing people whole domains instead of task lists, and keeping the pieces in working order as conditions change.
- Relator-led leadership builds the unit. It works by making the team a team, naming who the work serves, and creating the conditions where people extend themselves for each other.
- Visionary-led leadership shapes direction. It works by noticing what’s coming before the data confirms it, articulating where the team is headed, and identifying potential in people and situations others overlook.
Handing off the draining parts of your role strengthens the team
Leading from your own Motivations requires giving up the parts of the role that drain you, which is where most leaders stall. Instinct says a leader should be capable across the whole job, so admitting that sequencing or standard-setting or momentum-holding costs you disproportionate effort feels like admitting a deficiency, even if it’s not true.
Teams register performative leadership even when they can’t name what’s off:
- DDI found trust in managers has dropped from 46% to 29%.
- PwC’s 2025 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, covering 49,843 workers across 48 economies, found that only 53% of workers feel strongly optimistic about the future of their roles, with non-managers at 43% against 72% for executives.
- Gallup’s data shows manager engagement falling from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025 while individual contributor engagement stayed roughly flat, meaning managers have lost the engagement premium they used to hold over the people they lead.
Three moves make a leadership handoff work.
- Name the specific parts of the role that cost you most, in concrete terms rather than as a general complaint.
- Identify who on your team is drawn to that exact work, since the sequencing you find tedious is what an Orchestrator wants authority over.
- Transfer actual ownership rather than the tasks alone, because handing someone a checklist while keeping the decisions produces the same friction with an extra step.
Motivational intelligence tells you which parts of leading to build around and which to hand off
Motivation Code’s motivation-based assessment, also called the MCode assessment, produces a leader’s Motivational ranking directly. It takes about 30 minutes and is backed by 65+ years of motivational science and research, and more than 1.8 million analyzed achievement stories.
Then, our 8 Dimension books take you beyond your personalized report to go deep into what drives you, how you’re wired for work, and who you are at your best. Each book also provides Dimension-specific insight for leaders, so they can lead every member of their team effectively, even if they are motivated differently.
And if you want to empower your entire team, consider an MCode Team Alignment Workshop. Every team experience starts with a private Impact Session for the team leader, so they can better understand who they are as leaders and how they can use their natural advantages and strengths to be more deliberate, dynamic, confident leaders.
From there, the team workshop experience takes the team through six topics, including optimizing roles for team success and building the team’s motivational culture, so the handoffs you identify have somewhere to go. It runs virtually for distributed and hybrid teams or onsite for in-office teams, and both formats include assessments for the whole team, companion workbooks, a custom Team Motivation Map, and a private debrief with afterward.
Book a Team Alignment Workshop to find out which parts of leading your team belong to you and which ones belong to somebody else.
