I was part of a very interesting conversation about leadership last week facilitated by Sean Richardson. Sean is the high performance coach and sports psychologist at the St Kilda Football club. He proposed that great leadership strikes a balance between support and challenge.

I think it’s a great model. I remember a team I was leading many years ago when I was working as a business consultant with Accenture. It was a software development team, and there were two guys in particular that I remember. Daniel was a gun, and Jeff was considerably less so.

My leadership style (although perhaps "leadership style" is overstating it slightly) was very different for the two of them.

With Daniel it was all about challenge. I gave him the hardest programs, the least guidance, the most autonomy and basically said go for your life, show me what you've got.

Jeff, on the other hand, needed much more support. His confidence was low, so I gave him the easiest programs, created very detailed specifications for him and gave him lots of encouragement. He flourished - and while he never became a strong developer, he wasn't a liability. And by the end of the project he would have run through brick walls for me.

So how do you know when to challenge and when to support?

Sean told us that the culture in AFL (that's the Australian Football League for anyone overseas) clubs is very high on challenge (often with lots of swearing involved) and very low on support, which isn't surprising.

It reminds of a great scene in Remember the Titans (one of my all time top 10 movies - although it must be said that there are about 30 films in my all time top 10). Denzel Washington plays the head coach of a high school football team in the 1950s, when they were first integrating black and white schools. He came down hard on all his players, and one player in particular didn't cope well. One of the assistant coaches came to his support, causing a big argument. Denzel (well, his character) said "I may be a mean son of a bitch, but I'm the same mean son of a bitch to everyone on the team."

In other words, I believe in a high challenge style of leadership, and I don't believe in changing it for different people.

I've been reflecting on the question I posed earlier - when to challenge and when to support. In the Love Your Business Model we say that leadership is about inspiring and uniting the team. However I think great leadership is more than that - great leadership has people feel better about themselves. It increases their self esteem.

Sometimes it takes support to have someone feel better about themselves - encouragement, empathy and letting you know you believe in them. Other times that won't make a difference. If someone is already confident, support may be relatively ineffective. But achieving something challenging, something that you didn't know you could, pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone will.

How are you supporting and challenging your team?