Developing your management and leadership style are keys to growing your career and reaching your full potential. But few business leaders know how to foster these skills in their teams. That means you need a mentor or coach skilled at helping leaders grow their skills to build leaders from within existing team members.
If you’ve found yourself frustrated with a lack of direction and feedback on how to take the next step in your organization or you’re unsure how to guide and empower your employees, leadership skills are likely the answer. Here’s how aspiring executives can build the soft skills needed for growing their Leadership Skills.
Recognizing the 2 Most Important Business Elements
There’s an undeniable truth in business. Everything revolves around people and results. To succeed, you need to know how to lead people while delivering results. The style you naturally gravitate toward for management and leadership will have a direct impact on both people and results.
But first, you have to learn your natural styles to develop them further while also adding a few leadership skills to your natural repertoire.
Leadership Styles Defined
Without any training, every leader will naturally fall into one of these leadership styles.
- Coach: focuses on ensuring team members reach their full potential by working with them to identify strengths, weaknesses and improvement areas.
- Visionary: sees an organization’s potential and inspires team leaders to help the company reach that potential through action plans and goals.
- Servant: naturally inclined to ensure employee satisfaction and company morale while being talented in helping employees feel valued and fulfilled in their work.
- Autocratic: relies on their own instincts to instruct team members without asking for feedback or input.
- Hands-off: these team leaders are natural delegators and allow team members to make decisions independently.
- Democratic: asks for feedback and input from team members by encouraging fresh ideas and unique perspectives.
- Pacesetter: provides attention to goal achievement instead of team building and enjoys a fast-paced environment and efficiency.
- Transformational: uses a mix of visionary leadership and democratic to build a company vision based on employee input while helping teams identify their strengths and weaknesses to problem solve and grow as an organization.
- Transactional: engages in using incentives or financial rewards to motivate teams to reach goals but also offers strong mentorship to team members.
- Bureaucratic: often less creative and focused on following rules. While these leaders accept input and feedback, they rarely act on that feedback.
As you read through these styles, one or even a few might resonate with you. Now the key is in finding a mentor coach who can cultivate those skills in you to help you reach your full potential.
The Difference Between Leadership Traits and Personality Traits
If you’ve ever taken a personality test and found that you’re more introverted or soft-spoken, that does not mean you weren’t born to be a leader. Leadership traits differ from personality traits.
Even people who in large groups might be considered quiet can excel in business because they know how to get the most out of their teams.
That’s not to say there is no value in learning your personality traits as they can point toward your leadership and management style. If you enjoy checking items off your to-do list, you might gravitate more toward a pacesetter leadership style. But that’s not to say all achievers are pacesetters because some achievers might find satisfaction in helping others succeed.
Identifying and Building on Your Natural Management and Leadership Style
Once you know what type of leader you are naturally, you can cultivate those abilities to further develop your soft skills. For example, coaches can work on developing their ability to set up plans for high-performers to help them find even greater success.
Servant leaders might need to work on their ability to ask team members the right questions about their work without inserting themselves into the day-to-day activities to still give employees the power and freedom to make decisions independently.
However, some leaders can read through the styles described above and struggle to recognize the type that best aligns with their natural leadership skills. That’s where a coach or mentor can help immensely.
Your Management Coach works with executives and managers to help them grow their careers, grow their teams and grow the company by identifying their natural management and leadership styles and building upon their unique abilities.
Stephen Eric Wright has held many leadership positions from director to president and CEO. He has coached thousands of leaders at many types of businesses and helped fast-growing companies prepare for rapid expansion with effective leadership practices.Schedule a call with Stephen to learn more about how he can coach and train you and your company’s managers to succeed while working with your natural leadership skills and abilities.
