What's Your Leadership Style?

Leadership is a social process of influence that moves others to become better. It reflects who you are—your identity, roles, characteristics, energy, and values—and the consistent behaviors you show.

Know your leadership style and others' styles to improve decisions about work, relationships, finances, and goals, and adjust communication for stronger relationship and task outcomes across contexts.

Create an identity map to define who you are as a leader, listing roles and adjectives with feedback. Make self-assessment iterative to grow and influence change in yourself and others.

Identify your leadership style by observing yourself and others as a scientist, noting behaviors and emotional impacts, to understand followership and influence by how you make people feel.

Observe yourself and your audience to shape agile, adaptable leadership that moves people toward a shared outcome by flexing between styles like coaching, servant, and inclusive leadership.

Define leadership by embracing strong followership: observe, reflect, and consciously choose whom you follow, then amplify your followership to shape your leadership style.

Explore and define multiple leadership styles, including servant leadership, analyze their impacts with examples, and reflect on personal use by considering life models to embrace adaptable, non one-size-fits-all leadership.

Explore servant leadership, a service-first style that prioritizes team wellbeing and employee growth, while noting reciprocity pressures and risks of exhaustion.

Explore transformational leadership, where leaders set a clear vision, articulate a path, and inspire followers to act beyond self-interest to drive change, as seen with Oprah and Malala.

Explore inclusive leadership, as you learn to recognize biases, seek diverse viewpoints, listen actively, and weave diversity, equity, and inclusion into decision making.

Explore authentic leadership as transparent, genuine, and guided by a sense of purpose, embodying congruence and self-awareness to build trust, express truth, and inspire followership.

Lead with a hands-off, trusting style that empowers followers to decide, fostering autonomy and innovation. Acknowledge that this style may yield lower productivity, conflict, and uneven trust.

Discover how a coaching leader guides teams through open questions, empathy, and experimentation, unlocking talent, collaboration, and growth while focusing on learning and reflective practice.

Explore how a democratic, participatory leader invites everyone to participate in decision making, facilitates consensus, and maintains transparency and morale, while managing time and conflicts.

Identify how a bureaucratic leader, or transactional style, emphasizes rules, structures, and hierarchy to drive efficiency and productivity, sometimes at the expense of creativity.

Examine autocratic leadership, where leaders dictate policies and decisions, limiting autonomy and voice, yet sometimes driving a fearless, charismatic vision.

Identify your leadership style through self-reflection and feedback, recognizing that agility across styles shapes empathy, vision, and clear communication to generate followership.

Embody your leadership style by choosing a favorite shirt from your closet, naming it, and reflecting on how it shapes your leadership—servant, coaching, or transactional.

Cultivate congruence by aligning inner beliefs with outward actions, build trust through consistent truth-telling, and practice daily self-reflection like the Flower of Power exercise to reveal your authentic leadership.

Seek specific feedback on your leadership style to build self-awareness and situational awareness. Practice open-ended questions, active listening, and reflection to refine your impact and followership toward a vision.

Develop your leadership style by leveraging role models through the hero list exercise, noting attributes and insights to map themes to your preferred leadership styles.

Survey the context by assessing how others feel, what they want, and cultural nuances, then calibrate your leadership style with agility to meet evolving demands and garner followership.

Explore your leadership style through a hands-on experiment that gathers anonymous feedback via a web-based survey from ten peers, interprets the data, and calibrates your approach.

Explore how self-awareness, situational awareness, practice, agility, feedback, and experimentation shape leadership across styles; cultivate empathy, curiosity, and good listening to navigate others' styles.

Explore how a caring teacher's inclusive leadership shaped belonging and self-worth, and practice comparing bureaucratic, authoritarian, and other styles to craft your own leadership approach.

Reflect on your leadership style, maximize its use, and align your actions with congruence by speaking your truth and being true to who you are.