Identifying my personal leadership style

During the class of Leading and Managing people, I learnt that leadership is simply defined as the action that guiding a group of people to achieve a common goal.

To find my personal leadership style might not be easy, because there are countless leadership styles and each presents a different set of traits and skills. However, all of them have something in common that the effective and successful leader should have ability to inspire others.

“Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing.” – Mary D. Poole

After studying the chart of leadership styles (Australian Leadership Foundation, 2015), I found that I am a participative style leader, which means that I am competent of working with group members who clearly understand the common goals and their roles in the task. Instead of taking autocratic decision, I am more likely to involve other people in the process, because I believe two heads are better than one, and I think the team members would be more committed to the tasks which they involved in the relevant decision-making.

My biggest strength is listen carefully. I would listen to the team members because they are the ones that tell me if I go wrong at any point of time, and I believe that listening will make sure that I connect with the team members on a personal level, which will improve the performance of team. Building good relationship with others is my second strength. According to my previous experience, making good relationship and creating harmonious environment within a team is one of the most important leadership strengths. I always try to accept my mistakes, sometimes I failed, but I understand that patience is very important especially in hard times. I do not want to blame others mistakes, that will make it worse. I choose to sit down with team members and try to solve the problem together, and I try to learn from it and improve as a leader. If success is shared, then the failure should be shared too.

My weakness is that I get nervous when speaking in front of team. Also, I am not quite good at allocating tasks to others, which embodies in my problem of taking many responsibilities at a time and getting loaded up. I also have poor decision-making skills, in some cases I am hesitating to make a sturdy decision before getting enough data on hand and sometimes I rely too much on my intuition.

Had being worked in multicultural environment for several years, I could polish my leadership style and management capability. I followed participative leadership style because of the strong influence from my previous workplace, the Manager I worked with was a participative style, she was very successful as a leader in achieving the team goals and I was strongly influenced by her behaviours such as giving instructions, empowering people and providing satisfactory to all the team members. I totally agree with Mary D. Poole said that “Leadership should be more participative than directive, more enabling than performing.”

                               

References

Australian Leadership Foundation (2015). Leadership Model & Tools. Retrieved from http://leadership.org.au/resources/leadership-models-tools/

Participative Leadership (2016). Changing minds. Retrieved from
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/leadership/styles/participative_leadership.htm

Robyn Benincasa (29 May 2012). Six Leasership Styles and When You Should Use Them. Fast Company. Retrieved from
https://www.fastcompany.com/1838481/6-leadership-styles-and-when-you-should-use-them