Conflicting leadership styles can drive innovation and challenge the status quo. It is important to acknowledge differences and encourage open-mindedness among team members. A blend of visionary and operational leaders can yield powerful results. Navigate differences by ensuring clarity of roles, highlighting each leader's area of expertise and aligning objectives to foster collaboration. Encourage dialogue and respect diverse perspectives, keeping the lines of communication open. Adapt leadership styles based on situations. By harnessing complementary strengths, you can create and leverage a high-performing team.

More importantly, one needs to identify the best suited management style for the organization, which normally follows the leadership style of the CEO. The culture is what sets the organization apart from also rans. A collaborative CEO is the best CEO as he gets the best out of his team. An authoritative CEO is the one who has complete command over the operations of the company and the future growth plans are in the comfort zone. The moment growth pressure is beyond the comfort zone, authoritative style does not work. Then understanding the styles of each key person is required so as to make them fit in and adapt to organization style.

It is not just about dialogue but about communication strategy to instill the required management processes in the habits of key persons. Hence it may look like over communication but it is ok to create a sort of propaganda and get buy in of all key persons. It will also help if the culture is set by starting with the WHY

Management culture is to be set as the objective, however an objective of customer centricity is more relevant as the organization works better when the customer is the focus of each management style. I would align every function towards end customer by creating internal customer orientation and make the two teams , Sales and Marketing, and Innovation lead the other functions. While setting expectations, it is recommended to monitor and record the adherence to organization style by key persons and make it a part of periodic appraisal.

However since the key persons can’t become aligned instantly, it is necessary to give them space to grow and till then better utilize their strengths and down play their weak areas and rather cover their weaknesses by supporting as a CEO or creating a mentor system among the key persons.

There are many leadership styles which are abhorred by traditional family owned organizations such as “Servant Leadership “, “empowered collective intelligence “, “Consecration of business purpose” which drive the organization’s zeal to succeed to new heights. One should be convinced of the purpose before adapting such styles. Lot of courage goes into building such cultures.