What Is Your Leadership Style?

When interviewing a candidate for a leadership position one of my questions I like to ask is “Describe your leadership style?” It amazes me how few people actually know what their leadership style is, let alone being able to articulate it to others. There are a million leadership books out there and no one book is the golden ticket to leadership success. However, without understanding your leadership style. how do you expect your team to understand what kind of leader you are or strive to be?

For me, I have adapted the servant leadership model. I personally and professional relate to the 7 competencies associated to this model. Some of these competencies are more innate in nature and for me those are:

• genuine connection

• effective communication

• self awareness

• develop others

I tend to tap into those more naturally in my day to day interactions, but also find joy in coaching, guiding, mentoring and reflecting.

Being a new leader many years ago, I struggled with strategic thinking and being achievement-oriented. These two competencies mentally drained me. I made sure my professional mentor was strong in these two areas which forced me to learn/grow to become a more well-rounded leader. Agility was an area that I always felt was a weakness of mine, but for the past two years, the pandemic has forced me to become more comfortable with the uncomfortable. I was unable to run from change, instead I had to embrace it more so than ever before because my team needed it. They needed me to embrace change with confidence while having the self awareness to admit when I didn’t have all the answers and the confidence to know that we had an incredibly strong team that would weather the storm of the forever changing pandemic especially in a health care setting.

So, I will ask you, what is your leadership style? If you don’t know or can’t articulate it, let’s work together to find a style that feels natural to you. It’s important to remember that there are pros and cons to any leadership style, so let’s focus on the pros and appreciate the cons.

For additional information on Servant Leadership:

https://www.greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/