What Type of Leader Are You?

DISCLAIMER:  One of my more rambling Blogs - meant to help me 'work a thought out' to learn from it.

I share it here, in the hopes that it might shine some light on a situation you may be facing.  SW

I'm having difficulty starting this Blog because my thoughts and opinions and memories of experiences are all over the place... But it's really on my mind this topic of 'Leadership'.  There are some of the traditional types of leaders to choose from:

•   It's my way or the highway!
•   I want to know what you think, I need your feedback but ultimately...it's my decision
•   I'm giving you complete freedom to get this done...I have other things to do.

I think what I am more interested in is the breakdown of Emotional Leadership.  Actually,  until I wanted to write this Blog I didn't even know they had a category for this and that they have specific names.  I did some research and apparently there is a man named Daniel Goleman and he has a whole 'thing' around this 'emotional intelligence' and how it can be applied to Leadership.  He differentiates between TYPES of Leaders and STYLES of Leaders.  

Here are the  STYLES of Leadership:  

Commanding:

Visionary:

Affiliative:

Democratic:

Pacesetting:

Coaching:

I will summarize a nice little chart below that compares all of these, but for my own purposes I think I am most interested in exploring Visionary - Affiliative - Coaching.  These seem to have a positive effect but I have to wonder, if these aren't coupled with a balance of teaching, correcting, and actually offering practical skills, if these types of Leadership Styles actually show long term success.  

For example:  I am familiar with a leader who is great in his own right and with a Visionary - Affiliative-Coaching style of Leadership he has inspired and motivated large crowds of people to 'keep on keeping on'.

When things were tough, when people couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel and when we couldn't believe in ourselves his encouragement carried us over until we could see the light and we could believe in ourselves and those around us.  

He could take a person who had raw potential and could inspire them to try.  He was very relational and he created harmony through a common goal. His end result was to hold you up, until you started to believe the hype and could fulfill that vision.

This sounds great right?  

Well not so much, when it came to being organized, communicating clearly, and teaching .  Others took on that role.  While he was inspiring us to believe, someone else was teaching us how.  While he was looking to the future, someone else was in the moment and handling the day to day issues.  

When he left the company, those that he had 'raised up' or 'mentored' were some of the most positive people and their self - confidence was off the chart but their ability to lead a project, delegate responsibilities, follow up on tasks and communicate the details were non-existent.

What is more important? Is that real Leadership success?  Is it a question of priorities? Where is the balance?   I look at this type of Leadership and I think that it's needed, but it can also be so hurtful to those that you "Lead" if you can't follow through.  When our Leader left, he left behind great people but with no skills.  So now we have projects with no real clarity or direction.  We have no communication between the managers and sadly enough we don't have those types of people in the organization who can do these things because they got frustrated long ago and moved on to other projects in the building.  

I recognize that these STYLES of Leadership are needed and can have positive outcomes but I really believe that this kind of relational - orientated Leadership has to parallel some sort of organizational - orientated Leadership.   

MBA-LEADERSHIP-TYPES Software Strategy Model Framework Analysis Management

My last thoughts are this:  Balance...Yin/Yang...Right side/Left side - It's all about putting the pieces together. This last leader was fantastic at the People Focus(left side of chart above) but in order to be really successful you HAVE TO be able to balance that with Task Focus.(right side of chart above) 

Being Task Focused is the other half of the complete picture.  It's about the organization as a whole and tackling those Leadership skills and behaviors that are needed for success.  I like to think that I am a balanced leader. In probability I can tend to get task focused, and I could need some mentoring in Business Leadership.  I guess the point is - We can all improve somewhere - the first step is recognizing what we are missing and then pursuing it in order to create a more balanced leader.  What are you pursuing today?  Where are you lacking?  Who is in your life that can help you in an area where you can improve?  I wish you the best of luck as you continue on this journey.

**Would you like to know a fun fact?  As I was closing the article down and sharing my feelings I went to Google to find an image for my BLOG and the above chart showed up which PRECISELY summed up what I was struggling with understanding.  It's amazing how small a world we really do live in.  

Thanks for reading, please feel free to post a question, comment or your own experience of unbalanced leadership and how it turned out for you.  

Styles Chart (as referenced above)