#130
Purpose: The purpose of this project is to identify your primary leadership style or styles.
Overview: Consider how your leadership style impacts the people around you and how you can adjust it to more effectively lead people with styles different from your own. Deliver a 5- to 7-minute speech at a club meeting to share some aspect of your leadership style or leadership styles in general. You may choose to discuss your style preferences when working with others, your style and how you can adapt it to situations, or leadership styles in general and how they impact a group.
Speech Title: Discovering Oneself
Script:
Fellow TMs and guests, a very good evening to all of you.
A few years ago, I remember giving a job interview. We had this GD round, group discussion. The topic was about leading versus being a team player. I got excited, immediately jumped on the bandwagon and said yes I'm a wholehearted team player. I do whatever it takes to be collaborative. <pause>
Then towards the end of the GD I realized that the world is filled with all sorts of leaders and that I’m the only one who said I'm "in a team".
Fast forward a few years later to October 2020, I came across Toastmasters - 'where leaders are made'. A week ago I was in the same GD-like situation. But here, I was forced to know what my leadership style is. How can I know my style if I haven't even led anyone? Would I even have a style? I thought oh okay, they have given a pretty lengthy questionnaire. Answering it based on who I am today, I can at least know where to begin.
Interestingly, the result didn’t show 1 or 2 styles that were the closest matches. It displayed multiple and scored them differently. The results showed innovative, pace-setting, coaching and authoritative styles, among others.
Me? Authoritative? Doesn't sound like it.
But as I read through the descriptions of each leadership style, there were stories forming at the back of my head. You know that feeling when you read something and you instantly relate to it?
I started reading top to bottom: innovative style - 18 points. It says this leader encourages innovative ideas and invites collaborative conversation. Have I ever done this? I could recall one instance at work. I was a junior in the team while the rest of the members were seniors. I wasn't happy with the current set of projects we were doing. As in, I felt we could do so much more given the nature of our product. So i proposed that we as a team have brainstorming sessions for about 2 hours every Friday evening. I set up a calendar invite for 1 month. That's 4 sessions.
Turns out we came up with more than 12 ideas and we could act on 5 of them in the immediate week. As Robert Austin, the author of 'Why Managing Innovation is Like Theater' quotes: "Whenever you have no blueprint to tell you in detail what to do, you must work artfully."
I read through the next style - Coaching
This was easy to relate to. This is not just something I am today but also someone I want to be. It says this leader motivates by challenging the individual but is less effective when those being mentored are adverse to change. I had the opportunity to mentor two interns, one within my team and one outside. The outside person was easier to mentor and till date I'm continuing to mentor her as she converted to full time. I won't say it was difficult to mentor the guy within my team because he was adverse to change.
I will admit that I did not do a great job in empathising with him and knowing where he lacked in technical expertise to get the job done. I knew I wanted to be a good leader and coach but now I know I will work harder to understand more about it. A football coach once said “Leadership is more about responsibility than ability!”
Next on the list was Pacesetting style. A leader who focuses on productivity and motivates by setting high standards of performance, and then leads by example. This time, I not only recalled examples from work wherein I created a "best practices" document and upheld the bar but also at home, where I set a threshold of at least how clean the house should be and motivated my husband to follow the same via leading by example. I'd clean something and then tell him: see this is what it should look like.
As Stephen Covey writes "What you do has far greater impact than what you say."
Lastly, there was Authoritative style.
This leader provides long-term direction and focuses on end-goals. Then I realized oh this is what they meant and not authoritative in a bureaucratic sense. Maybe I haven't had the opportunity to employ this yet, but I feel I am invested in the long-term vision of my team's product. This again, is applicable not just for work, but also in my personal life, where I enjoy asking myself - where do you see yourself in 5 years, 10 years and so on? Working towards future goals is something that motivates me to achieve things today.
Now that I went through these styles and related anecdotes, I could gauge that maybe there is no one style that resonates with me, it was more like i can be a pacesetting leader in one situation but I will need to be a coach in other situations. <pause>
All in all, I’ll leave you with a few things to remember. Firstly, there is no one particular style you can attribute to someone. Even if it's a dictator like Mussolini I think his questionnaire would have still showed him more than 1 leadership style.
Second, it's not a label attached to you that if one questionnaire says you have so-and-so style that it means you are that. And last but not least, as I said before, different circumstances warrant different methods.
It's up to you to figure out what kind of personality you would want to emulate.
As Henry Ford said “You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”
Thank you. Over to you TMOD.
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