The business press is filled these days with paeans to the virtues of quiet leadership.  On May 5, the Wall Street Journal carried a piece titled "After the Revolt, Creating a New CEO." They suggest that Jim McNerny of Boeing, Mark Hurd of HP, and Martin Sullivan at AIG are "quietly redefining the top job."

Today, Kevin Cashman, in Forbes, tells us that "as the more heroic, charismatic styles of leadership were grabbing the headlines over the past decades, another more silently effective leader has been taking hold." Cashman, borrowing from Jim Collins, calls them "Tofu Leaders." In case you're wondering, that means they are "executives who are somewhat bland, mix really well with everything around them, and still provide necessary sustenance."

You can be forgiven if you believe this demonstrates that the days of the charismatic leader are numbered and that it's tofu leadership from here on out.  You'd be forgiven, but you'd be wrong.

Leadership hasn't changed. What's changed is the current fashion about what makes a good leader. But good leaders come in a variety of forms and styles, just like always.

Several years ago, I researched the behavior of top performing supervisory leaders. Two of the subjects of the study were Dennis and Bill.  They could not have been more different.

Dennis was as quiet and low-key as it's possible to be. Set off an explosion behind him and he'd turn calmly to see what the noise was.  Where Dennis was quiet, Bill was loud. Where Dennis was calm and deliberate, Bill was volatile and quick-deciding.

They were both good leaders.  That's why I was studying them. Their bosses, their subordinates and their peers all rated them as excellent.

If you don't want to trust my research, then consider the point of view of Warren Bennis. In his classic book, Leaders, he describes how he went looking for commonalities among excellent leaders.  Here's what he found.

"They were right-brained and left-brained, tall and short, fat and thin, articulate and inarticulate, assertive and retiring, dressed for success and dressed for failure, participative and autocratic. There were more variations than themes."

In other words, Warren Bennis and I found the same thing about leadership.  We found that there is no one effective leadership style.  That matches up pretty well to real life.

Look around at effective CEOs.  Think about Anne Mulcahy and Herb Kelleher and Bill Gates and Fred Smith and Shelley Lazarus and Steve Jobs. They're all effective. They have a variety of styles. 

A truth of leadership is that great leaders are first true to themselves.  Another truth is that they show up in all the variety humanity has to offer.

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Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

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