Understanding Leadership Styles
When you get a new boss, it’s important to quickly learn his or her leadership style. When you are the new boss, it’s important for your team to understand your leadership style. It’s also important that you know each member of the team and what their strengths are and how their leadership style complements your own.
Every year, I read the biographies of great leaders. I have fun categorizing them and guessing their preferred style. I also write down the characteristics I admire in each person as a way to emphasize to my subconscious what I would like to emulate.
As you would expect, each style has pros and cons. I remember taking this test and finding one leader micromanaging every last detail. She took charge and it was her way, period. There was no room for discussion. “That’s someone I could never work for,” I remember thinking. But, when a crisis hit, guess who we turned to? We knew that she would deliver results, fast. There wasn’t time for relationship-building. We needed someone who could move the needle, fast.
That’s when I realized that no one style is perfect. Each of us has skills and styles that are needed for just the right situation.
Matching that situation to our skill is a challenge, but when it happens, everyone sees maximum performance.
When I ran across the infographic below, I thought it was a solid overview of various leadership styles and the pros and cons of each.
What’s your preferred style?
If you want to know what type of leader you are, take our quiz by clicking here.
Infographic provided by Webpagefx.
