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There is a tension at the heart of every great leader's career. On one side sits tradition - the anchor, the identity, the thing that makes you recognisable and trustworthy across decades. On the other sits change - the necessity, the forward movement, the willingness to adapt before the world forces you to. Most leaders spend their entire careers lurching between the two, never quite finding the balance.
Queen Elizabeth II found it. And she held it, remarkably, for 70 years.
Understanding Queen Elizabeth II's leadership style means understanding this central tension - and how she resolved it not by choosing between tradition and innovation, but by being absolutely clear about which was which.
The Woman Who Put the Crown on Television
In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II did something that had never been done before in the history of the British monarchy. She chose to televise her coronation.
The objections were fierce. Many in the royal household argued that the sacred ceremony should remain private - that allowing cameras into Westminster Abbey would strip the occasion of its mystique, reduce it to entertainment, cheapen a thousand years of tradition. Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself was opposed.
The Queen overruled them all. Twenty-seven million people in the United Kingdom watched. Millions more across the world. It was the most watched broadcast in television history at that point, and it transformed the relationship between the monarchy and the public forever.
Here was a leader who understood something that many traditionalists miss: that the purpose of tradition is not to limit access. It is to preserve meaning. The coronation's meaning - the weight of the oath, the gravity of the commitment, the moment a young woman knelt to receive the burden of the crown - was not diminished by being witnessed. It was amplified.
First Email. First Tweet. A Message on the Moon.
Queen Elizabeth II was the first head of state to send an email - in 1976, during a visit to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment. She sent a tweet in 2014. She contributed to a message that was physically deposited on the moon. She embraced every significant communications technology of her era with a curiosity and openness that surprised those who expected tradition to mean rigidity.
And yet she wore the same style of bright, single-colour coat for six decades. She attended the same church, followed the same annual calendar of events, maintained the same schedule of audiences and engagements. She kept corgis. She walked at Balmoral. She watched the racing at Ascot. Year after year, decade after decade, with a consistency that her people found deeply reassuring.
This is not contradiction. This is strategy.
"I am the last bastion of standards." - Queen Elizabeth II
She knew exactly what she was holding firm on - and she knew exactly what she was willing to move on. The bright coats were not vanity. They were visibility: a deliberate decision to make herself instantly recognisable in a crowd so that the people who had waited hours to see her could find her. The consistent calendar was not rigidity. It was reliability: a signal, year after year, that she was still there, still committed, still showing up.
What Queen Elizabeth II's Leadership Style Teaches Us About Change
Many leaders make change harder than it needs to be because they confuse their methods with their values. The method is how you do something. The value is why you do it. When the world shifts - and it always shifts - your methods must flex. Your values must not.
Queen Elizabeth II's values were clear: duty, service, constancy, dignity. She would not compromise those. But how she served - whether via telegram or Twitter, whether through formal state banquets or informal conversations with pop stars and athletes - was infinitely adaptable.
Steve Jobs understood this. He built Apple on an unwavering commitment to beauty and simplicity. But how he delivered beauty and simplicity changed completely from the Macintosh to the iMac to the iPhone. The value held. The method evolved.
Cristiano Ronaldo's commitment to excellence has never changed across his career. But his playing style has evolved, his role has shifted from wide forward to central striker, and he has reinvented his training methods multiple times. The standard held. The approach adapted.
The Anchor and the Sail
I think of Queen Elizabeth II's leadership style as an anchor and a sail working in perfect tension. The anchor kept her - and by extension, the institution she led - from drifting into irrelevance or losing its identity in the churn of a fast-changing world. The sail caught the winds of change and used them rather than fighting them.
She understood that the Crown's authority rested not on its distance from the people, but on its consistent presence within their lives. A monarch who refused all change would have become a museum piece. A monarch who abandoned all tradition would have become just another celebrity. She was neither.
When she visited Ireland in 2011 - the first British monarch to do so in 100 years, in the context of a relationship scarred by centuries of conflict - she wore an emerald green gown. She bowed her head at the Garden of Remembrance. She spoke a few words of Irish. Every gesture was deliberate, every symbol chosen with extraordinary care. This was not improvisation. It was the product of a leadership style that understood how to use tradition as a bridge rather than a barrier.
Three Questions to Ask About Your Own Leadership Style
Queen Elizabeth II's approach to change offers a powerful framework for any leader trying to navigate an uncertain, fast-moving world. Before your next significant decision, ask yourself these three questions:
What am I holding constant because it is a genuine value - and what am I holding constant simply because it is familiar? Comfort and conviction can look identical from the inside. They are very different things.
What am I changing because it genuinely serves the people I lead - and what am I changing because it is fashionable? Innovation for its own sake is not leadership. It is restlessness dressed up as strategy.
Do the people I lead know what I will never change? The Queen's constancy was not just a personal quality. It was a communication. People knew what they could rely on. In times of uncertainty, that knowledge is invaluable.
The Standard That Never Moved
Towards the end of her reign, someone asked the Queen what she would like to be remembered for. The question was almost unnecessary. She had already answered it, not in words but in 70 years of behaviour.
She would be remembered as someone who kept her word. Who showed up even when it was hard. Who found a way to remain relevant across seven decades of extraordinary change without ever becoming someone different from the person who had taken the oath at 25.
That is Queen Elizabeth II's leadership style in its purest form: a standard that never moved, expressed through methods that were always willing to.
If you want to lead with that kind of authority - the kind that lasts not just through a quarter's results but across a lifetime - begin by deciding what your standard is. Write it down. Make it specific. And then hold it, as she did, through everything that comes.
The methods are yours to choose. The standard is the thing you must never let go of.
I explore this balance in depth in The Job Well Done: The Queen's Way to Successful Leadership, drawing on the moments where the Queen chose tradition, and the moments where she chose bold, decisive change. Both choices, every time, were in service of the same unwavering purpose.
Discover all nine leadership principles in the award-winning book that brought the Queen's framework to life.