There are a plethora of labels depicting leadership styles, mainly emanating from book and program marketers. You’ve heard them - laissez faire; consultative; democratic; authoritarian; transformational etc.
It seems that rarely are the people being led asked what their leader is like and rarely do we ask the leader themselves – with the exception of the dreaded 360° feedback process.
These 360° feedback processes usually have between 30 and 160 questions that the poor responder has to answer. Then they are analysed and a report is created giving the leader a stack of “opportunities” to work on.
They were clearly designed by a team of psychologists and engineers who live largely in a theoretical world.
The processes are loved by technocrats.
Only an engineer with extreme left brain dominance and obsessive compulsive disorder would enjoy unpacking those results and then set about working on them.
The leaders I prefer to work with are real world people who balance their attention given to achieving the vision with the well-being and performance of the people helping them to achieve the vision.
I find them to be the smartest leaders.
They know they can’t do everything on their own.
They know that the organisation’s culture is the organic ingredient to achieving the vision. Everything else is inorganic and whilst essential, secondary and useless without the right culture.
They are life-long learners and courageous enough to be open about what they don’t know.
They genuinely care about their people as much as they do about achieving their vision.
They keep learning about the skills needed to influence and persuade people to be their best.
They keep skilling up on how to deal with unacceptable behaviour and performance whilst keeping trust and respect. That’s where leadership is most tested. And where leadership mostly let’s itself down.
They understand that leadership engagement is the key to employee engagement and they understand what the employee needs to be both engaged and motivated.
Most of all, they operate from their best self, not their ego.
What do you think?
