Understanding my leadership voice has been one of the most transformative steps in my leadership journey. The 5 Voices model developed by Giant Worldwide offers a powerful tool for self-awareness and understanding how we interact with others. In this post, I will focus on the Guardian Voice—one of the five leadership voices that plays a critical role in every high-performing team.
Whether you identify as a Guardian or work closely with someone who does, gaining insight into this voice can help you lead yourself and others more effectively.
Why Knowing Your Leadership Voice Matters
The way you lead directly impacts team dynamics and performance. The 5 Voices model provides a framework to understand the strengths, challenges, and communication styles of each leadership voice. When teams understand and appreciate their different voices, it fosters psychological safety—a key factor identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as essential for high-performing teams.
The Guardians are the champions of due diligence, resources and efficient systems and processes. Guardians will always speak up when they need answers to questions around how is this going to work.
Key Insights of The Guardian Voice
- The Guardian makes it their personal mission to deliver projects on time and on budget.
- They have a relentless commitment in a team to ask the difficult questions.
- They are passionate to get at the truth of a situation.
- As a voice they look at things in the present. Using experience, and what is concrete like your senses and data to make decisions.
- They excel at ensuring that strategies and decisions are well thought-out and grounded in reality.
Strengths:
- Pragmatic Realists – Guardians are grounded in the practical realities of the present. They ensure that teams are making decisions based on facts, data, and proven methods, which helps reduce unnecessary risk
- Stewarding Resources: They treat organisational money like their own and will want to ensure that time, money, and materials are used efficiently.
- Reliable Guardians are known for their reliability. They are dependable leaders and team members who once they have committed to it will see things through, on time and on budget.
Challenges:
Can be resistant to change – want to know everything has been thought through. What’s wrong with the way we doing it now? Big fans of a pilot project.
Risk Averse – While their attention to detail is a strength, Guardians can sometimes be too cautious, slowing down decision-making or progress.
Negatively Perceived – If acting in their default voice they can be right about the issue but come over with a wrong tone of voice and more like an interrogator. Can forget there is a human being on the other end of the conversation.
Leading as a Guardian
Your attention to detail is an asset as is your desire to understand clearly what is expected. Be careful that in your pursuit of meeting a deadline or budget you don’t burn your team out.
Key insight:
- Watch your communication – if you see someone as incompetent or not credible you will ask a lot of questions to satisfy yourself they know what they are doing. Be careful not to stack questions and look to encourage as well as critique. You can come across as overly critical.
Leading A Guardian
- Recognise their due diligence and commitment to ask the tough questions.
- When asking Guardians to take on tasks make sure you are clear with them in your expectations and what complete looks like. Ask do you have enough information to do this?
- At a leadership team level be prepared on big projects to initiate a pilot project to see if it works on a small scale.
Conclusion
Both Guardians and Nurturers are brilliant at the implementation side of all the ideas generated. Respect the Guardians on your team and help them soften their approach but affirm their superpower of small incremental improvements to systems and processes which make the whole organisation run smoothly. As a Guardian you will if you speak up in a good way potentially save your organisation a lot of money.
By knowing yourself as a Guardian, you can better leverage your strengths while managing your challenges. If you lead a Guardian, understanding their voice will help you create an environment where they can thrive.
This is just scratching the surface for a deeper dive into the 5 Voices model and how to implement it in your leadership, reach out and explore the tools that can help you unlock your full potential. Book your discovery call through this link: https://bit.ly/3zp3U06
Photo by Eder Pozo Pérez on Unsplash
