3 steps to discovering your leadership style

What is your leadership style?

The discovery comes first with exploration. Your perception of a leader may be one specific personality type.

I know many people think that a person like Donald Trump is a very strong leader and is the type of leader they need to become, if they are to be a leader.

They would be wrong because this is just one personality and one way of leading people. Looking at the other end of the spectrum is Apples current CEO Tim Cook. Nor could he be any more different in his style. Tim Cook is a person in the background orchestrating what happens instead of being the centre of attention.

Step 1

What type of person are you?

Knowing yourself helps to shape the way you lead people. If you are not true to yourself, then it will come across as false and people will see through this very quickly. There are many different effective methods of leading and fit your personality style. You just need to research how a person of your personality type is the most effective in leading.

Step 2

Know the people that you are leading. Do you understand how they react to your direction or instructions? If you are barking orders and they don’t like this, then there will  resist. On the other end of the scale if you just expect them to say nothing and they read your mind, this will not help a person that needs constant feedback.

It’s not about a wrong or right way, it’s about how you can be the most effective as a leader, ensuring that you are not wasting copious amount of time. Take some time to notice their reactions.

Step 3

How people are motivated is critical to a leader, it is an essential skill to lead. David McClelland’s work identified three motivators all people have.

They are:

Achievement - Need for task achievement
Power - Need for control and influence
Affiliation - Need for pleasing people and social relationships

To read more you can start with Wikipedia - Need Theory 

Combine this with the fact that people are predominately motivated with the stick or the carrot. The “Stick” means trying to get away from something happening, so if they focus on the negative effects completing something. The “Carrot” means they need to be enticed to do something what are the positive effects of completing something.

If you can be specific to people’s motivations people will want to follow your lead. Taking your own motivation is very important if you want to be able to keep your people motivated.

Now go through the steps and explore how you can find yourself even more as a leader.