How well do you know your own leadership style?

What is Leadership Style?

A simple definition refers to leadership style as the manner in which you lead others. I would argue it also includes how you lead yourself firstly, and then knowing yourself, how you communicate, impact and influence others.

What Constitutes Leadership Style?

Your leadership “style” reflects you as a unique individual with all your lived experience, personality traits, communication traits and personal preferences and biases.  It also encompasses the core personal values that you acquired as a child, your set of beliefs, both helpful and hindering, the rules for living that you endeavour to align to. Naturally, your style reflects your signature working strengths talents and skills; how you use them to achieve what is important to you and any organisation you work for.  It also encompasses your emotional intelligence, and your presence (both physical attributes and aura).

There has been some useful classification of primary leadership styles, particularly the six styles identified through significant research by Goleman et al, which is the subject of a follow-on article to this. However, whilst these classifications can be a very useful starting point, if not used appropriately and in a holistic manner, they can be reductive. By that, I mean that people naturally get attached to labels in terms of personality & leadership profiling. Again, whilst this can be useful, in my extensive leadership coaching experience, people can over-attach to these labels as a “de facto” representation of their preferences and use them as an excuse why they cannot engage with a particular activity or task. This can have a net effect of people limiting aspects their leadership development capabilities.

Your Style is Unique

The important point, however, is that your style, how you manage and lead both yourself and others, is as unique to you as your DNA. There is no one on this planet, past or current who possesses the same style as you. What is truly important about your style is the impact and output it invokes in both yourself and others.

Here’s Why it Matters

In his book “Leadership that gets results”, Daniel Goleman, draws on research involving nearly 4,000 executives, to explore the leadership styles that contribute the most to organisational success.  One of the core conclusions was that organisational climate contributes to approximately 30% of organisations profitability, and that leadership styles have a direct impact of the quality and maintenance of this organisational climate, whether it be a positive or negative working atmosphere. In the same book, Goleman stresses that leadership style isn’t simply an accident based on personality, but something that can be shaped by practice and need for quality, and adapted to fit any situation.

In another piece of research – Why Leadership style matters: A closer look at transformational leadership and internal marketing, Akbari M. et al (2017) the authors found that the adoption of an appropriate leadership style improves job satisfaction of employees. In the same research they posit that

“leadership style, management, and management actions (i.e., participatory management and developing work groups) play a key role in developing social capital, so that it can improve employee trust and increase their involvement.”

Bushra (2011) believes that successful management of employees is largely dependent on the quality of leadership in organizations (Bushra et al. 2011).

With real insight you can hone and adapt it to make the most of the various elements to optimise it for influencing, persuading, and encouraging yourself and others to deliver on often complex and challenging tasks required to realise an important work project allied to a business priority. What this means ultimately is being able to leverage your unique style and flex it in the most effective way dependant on situation and stakeholders involved. This means making a conscious effort to widen the scope of your natural leadership style and add to it through conscious efforts and consistent practice and feedback, to ensure you have optimised it to both proactively manage and respond to a plethora of different business situations and contexts.

In my experience the more effective and “conscious” leaders tend to be ones who continually work on developing themselves. They spend time doing the necessary groundwork, to truly understand who they are as a leader, where and how they lead well and have a positive impact, and where they don’t’. They learn to work on their style to expand its range and application for greater influencing and impact. The ability to hold the mirror up and not look away at some of your darkest corners requires both courage, honesty and an acceptance of one’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities.

These leaders actively seek out mentors, trusted colleagues in their network or within their team to give them the feedback that will most add to their own insight. Some leaders opt to work with an individual or individuals outside their own network such as an experienced leadership coach, who has the expertise to help them without any of the “patterns and baggage” that can come with close working relationships.

Reflecting on Your Leadership Style – Three Ways to Do This

When is the last time you reflected on your leadership style? If you want to make a start, here are my top three tips to start understanding it better.

1. Ask a trusted colleague or someone in your external stakeholder network what three words or phrases they would use to best describe your style of leadership? Ask for specific examples where possible.

2. Start a routine of reflection at the end of a working week, before restarting your working week. Some key questions you might ask yourself include: –

• Overall, how did I show up and deliver as a leader this week? What were the highlights?
• In what situations was my natural leadership style working well – what were the elements of my style that came to the fore?
• In what situations did I think that my natural style was compromised or frustrated? What was happening? What are the reasons this is so?
• What can I learn from these experiences about how to hone my style more effectively?

3. Compile a list of the core elements of your own leadership personal style. Complete a regular audit of these, using a simple an honest self-rating. Choose one of the lower scoring areas and the one you are aware of that needs some work and start making micro changes to adapt and hone.

Always seek specific and consistent feedback on any professional and personal developments you are working towards. Otherwise, you will have no realistic “yardstick” to measure the results of your efforts.

With an open mind and genuine motivation to both understand and develop your leadership style, you will reap the benefits in a multitude of ways.

emintell will be presenting a leadership style masterclass on 10th June 2021  @12:45 – 13:45 BST | 11:45 – 12:45 UTC. To register to attend this no-cost webinar click here.