Leadership Styles and Training

What is a Good Leadership Style?

Leadership style is the way leaders guide a group towards an objective. It includes their ability to communicate and direct team members, and how they motivate success. But what does a strong leadership style look like? Here are some key characteristics to focus on.

Embrace Your Individualism

Good leaders come in many forms, and each has a distinctive leadership style that flows from their unique personality. They may share common leadership qualities, but no two leaders will exhibit them in exactly the same way.

This is why good leaders often appear to have an edge that sets them apart. To the outside observer, it may be hard to pin down exactly what makes them special. However, the leader most likely knows what it is, and ensures they develop and maintain it.

Communicate Your Vision of the Future

Leaders take people from one place to another. In other words, they steer a team towards their vision of the future, whether the vision is exclusively their own or the shared vision of a wider leadership team.

Your leadership style should include the ability to paint a clear picture of objective success that is tangible, realisable, and attractive.

That said, don’t fall into the trap of placing more emphasis on the destination than the journey. Your team needs to know they are building a strong bridge to reach the other side, so make sure you have a practical plan for delivering success.

See Clearly From All Angles

There is one essential quality for every leadership style: be the person who sees everything. That means viewing the objective, strategy, and efforts of your team from as many different angles as possible, and in the context of a broad range of influences.

Seeing from different angles includes understanding the perspectives of team members, who will be viewing the objective and its challenges from their own unique position of experience. Seeing through their eyes gives leaders the broadest possible understanding of the situation.

Champion Innovation

Innovation is a broad concept with many nuances, but it generally means the ability to see new objectives that deliver value to people’s lives and new solutions to existing challenges.

There are many phrases associated with innovation, such as ‘thinking outside the box’, which simply means looking beyond conventional approaches. Leaders with an innovative leadership style often set objectives by considering what next?, and achieve them by asking ‘what hasn’t been tried?’

Have a Can Do Attitude

Leaders get things done. A strong leadership style tends to include qualities such as commitment, determination, persistence, and resilience. Together with a keen ability to solve problems, leaders create an environment of forward progress and achievement.

That’s not to say every change they create is pleasant or welcomed by others. The ultimate success of an objective may require a disruptive approach that breaks things down before it builds them up again. The mark of a good leader is their ability to guide the team through this turbulence.

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Be Positive

Hand in hand with a can-do attitude is a tendency to look toward the positive rather than the negative. Positive leaders often succeed at a quicker pace because they are inherently looking for ways to progress.

Never feel pressured into appearing positive about something that concerns you though. Positivity is an ethos that helps you identify stepping stones toward solutions. As a leader, you need to remain realistic and truthful about people’s objectives and ideas.

Speak Out and Be Understood

Leaders need to lead, which is why boldness and communication are essential. Most importantly, a leader must be able to clearly communicate the objective, and ensure team members understand how their jobs contribute to its achievement.

However, they also need to say the things that need to be said, even if it creates conflict. In some situations, conflict may even be necessary to resolve difficulties and improve resilience.

Keep the Momentum Up

Leaders continually move forward. When teams run into barriers and challenges or simply get bogged down in detail, leaders can use their unique perspective to help steer the team towards a solution.

To maintain momentum, leaders are willing to take risks and stand up for what they believe. A strong leadership style is one that ensures every team member is sufficiently inspired to achieve the objective.

Treat Everyone as an Individual

Good leaders understand that a team is a jigsaw puzzle of unique pieces. To inspire and motivate the team to succeed, you must appreciate that every team member has their own relationship to the objective, with different needs and opinions.

Understanding the person helps you identify their capabilities and the unique challenges they face. From this position of understanding, you can subtly tailor your leadership style to bring out your best. In fact, good leaders can often introduce team members on a first-name basis rather than by their job description.

How Can Training Help Me?

Everyone can develop their leadership style, whether stepping into a new leadership role or looking to enhance their contribution to an existing one. You don’t need to be a director, or even in a commercial organisation to benefit from courses that help you to build a stronger leadership style.

Above all, keep in mind that not all leaders are the same, and nor should they be.

Here are a few tips to help you develop:

• Get to know yourself, particularly your beliefs, rules, and patterns. Beliefs can be concepts such as wanting everyone to be treated fairly. Rules are what you consider minimum acceptable behaviours to be. Patterns are the actions you tend to take in certain situations. Understanding these can reveal a great deal about your leadership style.
• Identify the leadership style of role models. What qualities inspire you? What can you adopt that would fit into your own approach?
• Training courses How to Get the Most Out Of Your Leadership Training can identify your current leadership style, and help you enhance it using a clear action plan.
• What is your LQ (leadership quotient)?
  Take our 15-minute assessment. What is Your LQ (leadership quotient) to identify your leadership skills.

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