Alyssa is the founder and managing director of a software company specialising in HR and payroll solutions. She works harder than anyone else in the building. During critical project phases she is in before anyone arrives and out after everyone has left. She sets an extraordinary standard by example and expects the team to match it.

The results are mixed. The company is successful by most measures. It also has higher turnover than it should, a culture of visible exhaustion, and a technical debt problem driven partly by decisions made too quickly by people trying to keep up with the pace.

Alyssa is a pacesetter. It is her default leadership style, and it is doing damage she does not entirely see.

What pacesetting does to a team

The pacesetter leads by doing rather than by developing. The standard is set through personal performance rather than through coaching or direction. The implicit expectation — "work at my level" — is motivating for some people and unsustainable for most.

The cultural consequences accumulate over time. When the bar is defined by the founder's output, everyone else is permanently below it. When high performance is demonstrated through long hours rather than good judgment, people optimise for visibility over effectiveness. When there is no explicit feedback, just the example of someone who seems never to stop, people fill the silence with anxiety.

The quality consequences are subtler but real. In the rush to maintain pace, complexity is underestimated, corners are cut, and decisions that warrant careful consideration get made quickly. Technical debt accumulates not because nobody cares about quality but because the pace leaves no space for the work that would prevent it.

Goleman's six leadership styles

Daniel Goleman's research on leadership styles — published in the Harvard Business Review and now extensively cited — identifies six distinct modes that effective leaders use, each suited to different situations:

Commanding (sometimes called coercive): decisive and direct, effective in genuine crises, counterproductive as a default because it suppresses initiative and morale over time.

Visionary (sometimes called authoritative): provides inspiring direction toward a clear goal, effective in periods of transformation and when teams need orientation.

Affiliative: prioritises emotional bonds and team harmony, creates safety, valuable when trust has been damaged or the team is under stress.

Democratic: builds consensus through participation, develops ownership and commitment, most effective when the direction is unclear and the team's perspective is genuinely valuable.

Coaching: focused on long-term development, helps individuals identify their strengths and work on their weaknesses, requires patience and cannot be rushed.

Pacesetting: sets high standards by example, effective in the short term with highly skilled and motivated teams, corrosive over time when applied broadly.

Goleman's key finding was that effective leaders are not characterised by mastery of one style — they are characterised by flexibility across styles and the judgment to choose appropriately for each situation.

What Alyssa might do differently

For Alyssa, this means recognising that the pacesetting style that built the company is not the style that will sustain it. The transition requires developing fluency in styles she currently underuses — particularly coaching and affiliative — and making decisions about where pace actually matters and where it does not.

It also requires developing the self-awareness to recognise when her natural instinct (to set the example herself) is serving the team and when it is substituting for development work she could be doing instead. Leaders who produce capable, autonomous teams are more effective in the long run than leaders who produce dependent, exhausted ones.

These are skills that take time to develop and require honest feedback about current impact. They are not acquired through frameworks. They are acquired through sustained, reflective practice — ideally supported by a coach who can provide the perspective Alyssa is too close to the work to generate herself.