Knowing what type of leader you are isn’t just deeply illuminating on a personal level. In the workplace, having a keen understanding of how you lead others can determine if the methods you employ are effective, impactful, and beneficial to your team and your organisation as a whole. Knowing your leadership style can also tell you a lot about how much reach and influence you have, enabling you to have more control over those factors. Finally, being aware of the way you lead can aid you in identifying areas of improvement and ascertain what changes you need to make to become a better version of yourself.
Indeed, knowing what type of leader you are or want to be can prove extremely advantageous. With the right leadership coaching, you can easily discover your leadership style and cultivate the qualities that will elevate you from being a good leader to a great one. These steps can also help reveal your unique way of leading:
Identify Your Values
Knowing yourself is the first step towards identifying your leadership style. It requires an in-depth examination of what makes you, you.
Your values form the backbone of your behaviour. They are the measure by which people will gauge your personality. Your values can also give others insight on the way that you think as well as how you conduct yourself.
It is your values that will ultimately determine how much trust and support people are going to be willing to give you. In addition to informing others about how you’ll react to certain scenarios, your values will also show the people that you work with whether you’re someone that can be depended on or not. They will also be the determining factor that others will use when they ask themselves if they’ll be willing to let you guide them.
Core values such as respect, honesty, integrity, and vision will all affect the way you interact with and direct the members of your team. You can develop and cultivate them through a leadership program led by an experienced and dedicated coach.
Know Your Personality Traits
Your personality traits are also a foundational element of your behaviour. Just like your values, they can influence every aspect of your life, both at work and outside of it. At the same time, they can determine your unique leadership style. Hence, understanding your personality well is critical to gauge how you will rally people to your cause and drive them towards a common goal. Doing so can also guide your decision-making process, how you deal with challenges and stressors, and your interactions with others.
Ask yourself, what motivates you to do things the way you do? What are the traits that your peers, friends, and family members most commonly attribute to you? How do these traits affect how you act and resolve issues? You can also take various personality tests to determine what your most dominant traits are, taking you one step closer to harnessing them more meaningfully in your professional life.
Determine Your Strengths and Weaknesses
There are some leaders out there who believe that leading only with their strengths is the best way to fulfil their roles. However, you can become an even greater force by growing intimately familiar with your weaknesses.
Knowing where you fall short doesn’t just empower you with knowledge on what you can do better. Being open and honest about your flaws also shows the members of your team that you’re authentic and real. You can also use your deficiencies to energise and galvanise others towards also improving themselves.
Gather Feedback
No matter how many online quizzes and assessments you take, you’ll never have a full and holistic view of your leadership style without the feedback of your team members. We all live with certain pre-conceived biases and will never be truly able to judge ourselves objectively. In addition to self-evaluation, you will also need the critique and commentary of those that you lead so that you can form a clear picture of your leadership style.
There are many different ways to solicit feedback from your people. You can have it come up during casual conversation or collect and collate it more formally through suggestion boxes or surveys. The most important things that you should remember when gathering feedback is to be open to criticism and not to be afraid of delving into specifics. Facing their evaluations head-on shows fortitude and willingness to improve in a leader.
Knowing oneself is how the great can become greater. Identifying your leadership style is only one of the many first steps that you’ll have to take if you want to guide others with purpose and reach a common goal. To complement the lessons about yourself that you’ll learn throughout this journey, you can try attending a leadership development program that will empower you with further knowledge on how to become a more confident and self-aware leader.
Enhance your leadership skills to become an effective leader by knowing first what type of leader you are. If you want to know your leadership type, send Justin Maree Cox a message today.