Leadership Positioning – Its Components & Types

Everything, whether one says it or not, doesn’t communicate. It doesn’t matter if you plan for that thing to happen. Leadership will get positioned in other people’s minds. And, if someone expects to take their leadership positioning in their control, it begins with the composition of a positioning statement.

What Is Leadership Positioning?

Leadership positioning is related to how well and what a participant/leader in a conversation performs in real-time. According to Davies and Harre, it’s a discursive process in which selves are uncovered in conversations as visibly and non-objectively coherent participants in jointly formed storylines.

A leader must remember certain things to maintain one’s leadership position in the market and in the consumers’ minds. He should never boast about his position or his firm as it will negatively impact the customer’s mind about him and his firm.

He should choose to initiate new and multiple brands rather than changing the existing one’s positioning. Also, he must accept that change is inevitable. He should be willing to adopt change and not try to resist it.

Leadership positioning influences the negotiation of privileges and commitments of speaking and behaving in a conversation. This, in turn, allows the participants to ascertain a situated moral order that is open to change. People often intentionally draw pull on their resources, such as their discursive and social skills for functioning on leadership positioning.

In the interaction, each participant possesses his/her multitudes of resources, prerogatives, and power that are assembled into former episodes. Each of the episodes is a fraction of the storyline. The participants’ are oriented to their identities, which, in turn, influences the process of positioning.

Leadership positioning can also be advocated as the central concept to experiment with how identities unravel in talk or how is it drafted to the audience.

Relation Between Leadership Positioning And Leadership Work:

Leadership positioning is directly or indirectly related to leadership work because one can understand leadership work by analyzing how most individuals position themselves and other individuals in an interaction. This argument is supported by the data produced by a team of academic researchers after doing an ethnographic study.

The data also says that leadership positioning is not merely indispensable for unfolding the leadership but also for allowing a more nuanced estimation of leadership work. It opens the eyes of the researchers toward the variation of resources that are comprised in this process.

Application Of Leadership Positioning Theory:

Utilizing the Leadership Positioning Theory, one can examine the circumstances under which he can effectively position a state as a regional leader. Through this theory, one understands how social or psychological processes construct and maintain moral orders.

Regional leadership positions are observable through the regional leader’s speech acts and the storylines through which the communications among the provincial leader and the other provincial actors are described.

Different Types Of Leadership Positioning:

Interactive Positioning:

Interactive positioning is when a person who says positions another person.

Reflexive Positioning:

Reflexive positioning is when a person who says, positions himself.

Performative Positioning:

It’s a kind of leadership positioning that will have an immediate impact on activities.

Accounting Positioning:

It’s a kind of leadership positioning in which individuals might be compelled to accept or evaluate their positions.

Factors On Which A State’s Positioning As A Provincial Leader Depends:

  • How stronger is its eagerness to lead?
  • How sharper is its capability to lead?
  • How much greater is its acceptance of leadership.

Difference Between Leadership Positioning And Message:

One must not consider leadership positioning and messaging the same they should not get confused. One must remember that positioning is strategy, whereas message is implementation. One can do an excellent job by trusting intuition in crafting a leadership message.

One’s intuition pulls together experience or knowledge in a Nano-second. However, one’s odds of making his/her message right will take time to think through his/her positioning. It will then build his/her messaging off that.

Components Of Leadership Positioning:

Target:

Target refers to those people who your leadership will influence. The best targets are those that are both wide and deep. To attract your target people towards you, you must think broadly. This way, you can not only include those people in your target with whom you communicated directly but also those with whom they, in turn, have communicated.

It includes peers, family, pals, media, activists, board members, banks, shareholders, etc. You must also dig deep to understand your target’s fears, confidence, and expectations.

Frame Of Reference:

The frame of reference refers to the kind of leader you opt to be. The world possesses three types of leadership- interpersonal, scientific, and artistic. You have to choose one among them for yourself, which you want to focus on. Some people blend the varied facets of these three, and it frequently works well.

Benefit:

Benefit refers to the process through which you will be able to influence your target.

Reason To Believe:

Your followers will believe in your words only when “what you say” will match “what you do” or “who you are”. So, begin elucidating your underlying principle. And finally, spelling out your central message points will build trust within your target towards you.

Wrapping Up:

Thus, leadership theory, as well as research, are needed to put on vigilance three critical discursive practices, and they are sensemaking, playing, and positioning. And maintaining leadership positioning is the most vital of all three of them. It will help you comprehend leadership work better and lead you towards success.

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