Know Your Leadership Style and Why It’s Important

What is Leadership Style?

Your Leadership Style reflects your core values that determine what you desire and strive to attain. It impacts:

How you define success
What drives you
How others can best work with you
The culture and work environment you create

Your motives and values provide a view on your personality from the inside. These typically aren’t directly observable or understood by others until they’re revealed through your actions.

What Does Your Leadership Style Reveal?

Your Leadership Style may be concentrated or spread among several areas of interest:

**Status** – responsiveness to attention and praise; desire for success and accomplishment

**Social** – helping others; social interaction; openness to change

**Financial** – need for structure and predictability; interest in money and material gain

**Decision-Making** – self-expression; knowledge and research; data and intuition

In these areas of interest, your Leadership Style reveals your:

Drivers – things that motivate you and how you tend to motivate others
Fit – how well you fit and align within an organizational culture
Leadership Focus – the environment you will create for your team
Unconscious Biases – your perceptions of what is desirable or undesirable

Why Is Leadership Style Important?

Working in alignment with your core, must-have, non-negotiable values is critical to professional satisfaction. When misalignment occurs and these core values are challenged or compromised, the result is often increased stress, decreased engagement, and diminished performance.

Knowing your core motivators is vital to your own self-awareness as a leader. It’s also critical to understanding differences between what drives you and what inspires others on your team.

For example, you might be motivated by recognition, enjoy the occasional victory lap, and want to celebrate team and individual successes publicly (drivers).

How will your style play with a colleague who believes the reward for strong performance is the intrinsic satisfaction they generate themselves for a job well done and who is put off by what they perceive to be showboating?

They will probably feel out of alignment (fit) with the culture you create (leadership focus), and you likely will not understand why they are so modest and shrink in the spotlight (unconscious biases).

Instead, consider a different approach with this employee, such as acknowledging them privately in a one-on-one or as part of a team celebration that allows them to share the spotlight with others.

How to Learn More about Your Leadership Style

If you want to learn more about your Leadership Style and its impact on your team, consider taking an assessment such as the Hogan Personality Assessment. You’ll learn about your motivators and values as well as the behavioral strengths that serve you well day-to-day and those aspects of your behavior that you are likely to overplay and that can derail your performance.

Leading Edge Coaching & Consulting offers the Hogan Assessment as part of its Leadership & Executive Coaching and Career Transition & Outplacement Coaching programs. To find out more, schedule a complimentary Discovery Call today.