Have you ever felt completely overwhelmed as a leader? Like you’re always putting out fires and barely keeping your head above water? Maybe your team feels the same way; stressed, exhausted, and unsure what direction you’re all moving.

If this sounds familiar, you might be caught in the cycle of reactive leadership. But, understanding proactive vs reactive leadership can transform the entire feel of your team and improve how you achieve goals.

Proactive vs reactive leadership impacts every part of an organization, from team performance to a manager’s career growth. Although a mix of proactive and reactive qualities is helpful for leaders, a proactive leadership style tends to pay off over time.
 

What is reactive vs proactive leadership?

A reactive leader responds to problems as they arise. A good analogy for this management style is a firefighter, they show up at a burning building and spring into action, putting out fires as they go.

This leader may display a natural talent for solving problems on the spot. Their team may seem excellent at rallying to tackle each crisis as a collective, creating innovative and inspiring work in a frenzy of focused, collaborative energy.

But reactive leadership isn’t always sustainable. It takes its toll on everyone, leading to burnout, stress, and a cycle of exhaustion.

A deeper dive into Reactive Management

Let’s talk about how this plays out with some real world examples of reactive management styles.

Let’s say you’re in charge of a customer service team. Your company has been getting complaints because their shipping times are slipping. Instead of looking into why your customers are having to wait longer, your first reaction is to flood social media with apologetic statements, claiming that this is just temporary, and hoping that things sort themselves out.

After a couple of weeks, it turns out that this is definitely not a temporary glitch; the increased wait time is affecting customer loyalty. You jump into problem solving mode and rush to set a deadline for fixing this, threatening to fire someone if those shipping delays don’t get fixed by the end of the month.

This sounds like I’m exaggerating, but many of you know how real this scenario is. In many ways, the new trend for quick results has prioritized a reactive style of leadership across the business world.

Although some managers may thrive under this pressure for a while, continually working in “crisis mode” makes it difficult to set a strategy or invest in initiatives that could ultimately make their jobs easier and their team’s overall performance more effective.

Proactive Leadership focuses on the Big Picture

A proactive leader works to address challenges before they cause trouble. Proactive leadership is similar to preventative health measures; regular exercise, doctor’s visits, and healthy meals help ensure you are strong and capable before health issues can affect you. Although it takes planning and time investment, a proactive management approach is the secret sauce for achieving a relaxed and highly effective team that has a shared sense of vision and clear direction.

Let’s say your boss asks you to build the 2024 roadmap for the team. Instead of asking for the 2023 priorities so that your team can “continue on the path that they’re currently following,” ask to have all of this canceled. Why? To be honest, most teams I know feel a little broken this year. When you are always being forced to quickly solve problems, it leaves less room for brainstorming and considering where a team should be going.

After everyone panics (this will make your peers nervous at first), take a look at each proposed initiative on their roadmap and re-evaluate if they support where your team and company would like to be going.

For example, the executive team has repeatedly told you that security should be your highest priority. Has your team actually dedicated any real effort in addressing those known security gaps? What about innovation or building systems with longevity? These may seem vague at first, but asking about priorities when you’re in a calm and thoughtful state leads to greater innovation and long-term effectiveness. You’re unlikely to arrive at innovative strategies while sitting in crisis management mode.

Proactive Leadership Builds Trust

Proactive leadership isn’t just beneficial for company strategy, it helps in many ways. This approach improves employee retention, motivation, and morale. Proactive managers take the time to connect with their employees individually to discuss both career growth goals and learn how they are experiencing the team. For proactive vs reactive leadership, proactive leadership always wins because teams have a shared sense of trust.

 

Reactive Leaders vs. Proactive Leaders

Let’s look more deeply at how a reactive manager vs a proactive manager act. The goal isn’t to say that all reactivity is bad, reactive managers can have a variety of helpful traits, such as quickly resolving problems. But, the drawbacks tend to overshadow those positives in the long run.

Proactive leadership skills help a leader stay ahead

Reactive leadership means a manager continually solves problems, prioritizes quick fixes over effective, thoughtful action, fails to consider long-term effects when choosing solutions, fails to invest in processes or technology which could prevent future emergencies, doesn’t learn from their mistakes, ignores root causes after resolving incidents, blames the system for their challenges instead of being self-aware and proactive to get the best possible results, fails to learn or try new techniques, focuses their time on day-to-day efforts over the big picture and prioritizes the demands of leadership above the needs of their team. That’s a lot, isn’t it?

If you recognize more than three of these tendencies, this might be you. I am not making any of that up, I’m willing to bet many of you have seen a reactive mindset in your own work environment. It’s often the workplace leaders who are always posting rules and fighting fires who fit this mold.

Proactive people leverage time in a different way

So what can we do better?

Well, first think about where your team or company would like to be going. A lot of future-minded leaders use techniques like vision casting to define an objective for everyone. It’s about saying what everyone is working towards before planning projects to support it.

Once your goal is defined, you and your team need to know *how* to reach those goals.  I recommend prioritizing a focus on planning in advance by working closely with team members in an engaging environment with a shared sense of intent, leveraging resources before situations become an emergency, prioritizing coaching team members and investing in their individual growth (a common factor amongst great, highly sought after leaders) and evaluating every decision with an attitude that prioritizes long-term benefits over immediately alleviating problems.

Finally, proactively investing time to analyze mistakes or missteps, then using that information to build effective systems, processes and technology to improve overall organizational efficacy. Although these actions may require a mental shift, embracing the habits of proactive managers can reduce the urgent nature of reactive leadership.

The good news is that proactive leadership skills are developed through consistent action over time. The bad news for any business that lacks a clear vision, or changes leaders too often to have effective long-term planning, is that you’ll always  spend time developing leaders who leave your workplace constantly.

 

When to Use Reactive and Proactive Management

Okay, it’s a lot, isn’t it? You know how complex managing people can be and how difficult it can be to step back from urgent tasks, to look at what really needs to get done.

Why the Urgent-Important Matrix Helps Your Team

For proactive vs reactive leadership, this is critical. The Eisenhower matrix helps you and your team recognize that a task’s importance shouldn’t always be defined by its urgent nature. This helps your team and even individual contributors think ahead, then prepare accordingly.

As a bonus, by organizing activities into this matrix, your entire company gets a stronger sense of direction and clarity on their purpose. To illustrate, check out my Eisenhower matrix for proactive leaders below.

Important and Urgent	Important and Not Urgent
– Crises. – Pressing problems. – Deadlines. – High-severity events. – Emergencies.	– Relationships building. – Proactive planning. – Recreation. – Innovation and Design.
Not Important and Urgent	Not Important and Not Urgent
– Interruptions. – Pointless meetings. – Trivial matters. – Busywork. – Distractions and notifications.	– Time wasters. – Pointless activities. – Trivia. – Social media.

 

Developing Your Proactive Skills

There are concrete skills you can develop as you work towards proactive leadership styles.

How Coaching Builds More Effective Leaders

Working with a business or personal coach or a mentor helps build your capacity for effective, long-term thinking. It also helps with your capacity for emotional intelligence. In their recent study of one million global leaders, Anderson and Adams found that most struggle to deal with complex problems and respond emotionally rather than thoughtfully. So if this sounds like your situation, find a good mentor, an astute coach or even a senior leader whose experience can guide you.

Time management isn’t about cramming more things into your day

Effective time management lets you work more proactively and step back from reactive behaviors by organizing and managing time. It is also about giving the appropriate amount of time to important but not urgent tasks and proactively planning.

When we think about time management, what usually comes to mind? Often it’s a long list of everything that needs to get done. It’s painful to look at, and it never ends because we just continue to add to it.

I suggest the opposite, let’s be clear; give things less time. I am talking about identifying then minimizing the low priority activities in your role that aren’t adding much value.

 

Proactive Thinking includes analyzing mistakes

Most teams I have worked on that focus on development hold Post-Mortem meetings. To clarify, these are opportunities to analyze and brainstorm both how things worked and, maybe more critically, where mistakes were made after a project has concluded. By honestly looking at both positive and negative factors while in a reflective state, your team has a great opportunity to continuously improve over time.

 

Proactive Leadership in Action

Let’s use some specific examples from your workday, so that this feels concrete and relatable. How does this shift from a reactive to a proactive leader feel and how can you actually go about enacting these behaviors?

Let’s be honest, many reactive managers are high-performing employees that were promoted for the skills and qualities they demonstrated in their prior individual contributor roles. In the early phases of leadership, they often still operate similarly as they did before they were managers. If this is your situation, find opportunities to transition to proactive behaviors. Let’s discuss specific ways of approaching this.

Prioritize Regular Check-Ins With Your Team

Meet with every member on a weekly basis to ensure their happiness and engagement. Make it clear to each team member that they’re not bugging you by discussing even trivial things. Reactive teams frequently function in “crisis mode.”

Over time, people tend to internalize feelings of pressure, urgency, and a reactive nature which keeps their attention focused on today, or tomorrow, instead of having time and capacity to take their sights further down the road. By providing consistent opportunities to step back from urgency, they’ll begin to internalize proactive behaviors as the norm, building the team’s capability to both feel less stressed *and* accomplish better, long-term goals.

Reactive managers frequently “run the numbers” rather than trusting their team

Proactive leaders give their teams the tools, information and the skills to excel. This style of management gives team members freedom and trust, as they have been equipped with everything they require for success, enabling teams to operate in an innovative, creative, and focused mode.

I was recently in a meeting with a reactive manager, who was stuck in firefighting mode. Our procurement manager had given the green light to purchase textbooks for classes, and was looking for us to provide feedback. We were given 24 hours to come up with a book to use for the next 5-8 years in our classes.

This isn’t good for employee well-being, and the performance management of our team would be directly impacted by this decision. The lack of strategic planning meant that we couldn’t give it the proper time.

Proactively Address Team Conflict Before it Erupts Into Crisis

If two people are having personality conflicts or not pulling their weight, deal with it. This is critical. Many of you are very skilled at quickly finding solutions in a reactive management setting, but this urgency doesn’t always translate to conflict management.

These issues should fall into “important but not urgent.” In other words, step back from immediately finding a resolution when people bring issues to you; ask each team member how they would deal with the situation, encouraging your staff to contribute their opinions and share their experiences. Why? Because those conversations plant the seeds of the proactive approach.

Think of it like this, If you are always resolving conflict for individuals, how will they ever learn to solve future challenges without you?

By consistently demonstrating that these types of challenges aren’t actual emergencies that need an immediate, knee jerk response, the whole workplace begins to experience reactivity differently.

To be fair, some proactive thinkers may feel a constant pressure to anticipate all situations and challenges. It’s important to realize that the future will change for us and we cannot always perfectly plan our path, no matter how hard we try.

For those proactive leaders who occasionally struggle to accept situations as they are or feel compelled to make plans in advance for scenarios that will always exist in their leadership role, make sure they’re working with a trusted coach or mentor to refine their reactive skills. A leader should know what can’t be completely managed in advance.

 

The Proactive Mindset

Okay, I bet many of you feel overwhelmed at the sheer volume of potential changes we’re suggesting today.

You might even feel a bit anxious after realizing you really do fit the reactive management profile. No worries.  Think about this article similarly to how I approach the development plans for the students I am coaching on my varsity basketball team and teachers I mentor – the point isn’t to create a gigantic to-do list with goals for changing their nature. I guide them to pick one or two skills to focus their efforts, understanding that it will take months, if not years to achieve noticeable, impactful progress. These are the best ways of approaching how to get out of the firefighting nature of reactive leadership and transition to the long-term payoff of a proactive mindset.  So let’s keep things more attainable for you.

Set Yourself Up For Proactivity by Changing Small Things

When we plan in advance, what tasks are consistently the toughest? Which activities tend to throw your whole year off-schedule and throw the team back into crisis management? Do you lack time for proactively investing in things like building employee security, streamlining team processes and learning the latest and greatest technology or developing an individual contributor or potential team leader’s leadership capacity? If those considerations have made their way into your recent post-mortems, it may be because your workplace environment simply hasn’t given them enough focus. As an illustration, before our transition to remote working at the institute I founded, we frequently found that even tiny internet or software bugs took weeks, if not months, to properly fix. We always told ourselves that these gaps should have a higher priority, but our reactive nature always kicked in.

Once you recognize which skills and tasks require attention, prioritize proactive thinking about just one. What small action can you implement? Think through the implications; for the team, company and for you, both for today, and how this action could affect the trajectory down the road. For instance, in one of my coaching groups, I shared the advice of continually improving how operations issues are handled with the goal of minimizing emergency maintenance. We were joking about a Dilbert comic I shared, it centered on “the big picture” – but our joke made me recognize that by regularly discussing this point in our monthly sessions, I’d implemented a small action that made me feel proactive about this issue.

Ultimately, what actions a manager should take is difficult to say, but small, persistent effort and continually prioritizing the long-term goals in how you are interacting with the people on your team will set your path to more effective leadership . Although a balance of reactive and proactive is always a smart play in leadership, knowing what each approach does will let you manage those decisions intentionally, leading to an innovative, highly engaged, motivated team. Your team is only as strong as its leadership, so step back from those constant fires, find someone who can help with that, and think through what small steps you could take today to begin the shift to being a more proactive, effective, future-minded leader.

 

Conclusion and Next Steps

So when thinking about proactive vs reactive leadership, how does your work environment feel?

You’re working just as hard in both leadership approaches, but proactively thinking in advance will ensure better team results, minimize organizational stress, help with employee retention, build greater loyalty and trust among all team members, let everyone relax while knowing there are clear paths, processes, and procedures to navigate, even when challenging circumstances occur, and help set your company or team for long-term success.

Take charge by strategically prioritizing how you handle proactive vs reactive management techniques for the best possible results in your career and, most crucially, for the teams, peers and bosses who you lead and rely on your expertise and experience.

And remember, behavior change (and culture change) doesn’t just happen, you have to work hard to hit your performance potential.

If you’re looking for some personal development classes on leadership, we’ve got your back.

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