“True leadership is about pulling forth the gold in everyone and believing in people before they deserve it."- Michael Brodeur

Have you ever wondered how you can discover your leadership style and how you naturally lead?  If you look at the overall concept of leadership, leadership is a vital skill that influences how you lead yourself, how you lead your family, how you lead a team, an organization, and also how you lead an entire community. To lead well, you need to understand how you lead naturally.  Understanding your leadership style is not just about knowing how you lead but about uncovering ways to inspire, motivate, and guide yourself and your team members effectively. This journey of self-discovery and development can help you become a more impactful leader. In this article, we will explore how to determine your leadership style by delving into self-assessment, reflection, feedback, and some practical application.

When it comes to understanding what your leadership style is, it is important to first define what the term leadership style really means. It’s quite simple, in essence, a leadership style describes how individuals interact with their teams, make decisions, and achieve goals. 

With that said, here are 4 ways you can discover your leadership style and how having a coach can benefit you!👊

1. Take a quick online quiz:

Taking a quick online assessment can help you understand how you are wired, the lens through which you see the world around you and, in turn, how you interact with others. FREE and effective assessments can be found online. A good place to start is at destinyfinder.com.  

👉Take this quiz and discover more about how you see the world around you!

Your results from the FREE survey at Destinyfinder.com can serve as a springboard from which you understand how you act and interact with others, and with members of your team.  Taking such a survey can keep you from wasting time, energy and ineffective and futile guesswork.   Think about it for a moment, why waste months and years, if you can get a head start from now.

Another effective online survey is taking the Gallup CliftonStrengths test. This is a robust test that will enable you to identify the strengths you possess that energize you as a leader, as well as how you can use your strengths to lead yourself and others effectively.

2. Reflect on qualities:

Is there a visionary leader in your community who has leadership qualities that you value and admire?  Then, maybe consider the leadership qualities you admire in that individual and see how their qualities align with both your core values and your skills.  You can also take out your favourite journal and write down and reflect upon some key questions that can reveal and identify patterns and themes in your leadership behaviour:

• How do you approach decision-making?

• How do you handle challenges or conflicts?

• Do you communicate your vision and mission clearly?

• What do you prioritize in team settings: results, relationships, or processes?

How you answer these questions can shed light on your style of leadership and how you interact with others.

3. Reflect on key leadership moments from past experience:

What leadership roles did you previously hold at your job, or when you worked voluntarily? Your previous leadership roles can show you a lot about your leadership style in how you lead yourself and others, as they will reveal  how you handled decision making situations, how you dealt with co-workers or team members.  Your previous leadership roles, whether formal or informal, can reveal your default style and areas for improvement. As you think of key leadership moments from the past, think of situations where you stepped into a leadership role. What were your successes? What were your failures? For each experience, you can consider these key questions:

• What approach did you take?

• How did you handle decision making?

• How did others respond to your leadership? Did your team feel motivated and inspired, engaged or disconnected and confused?

• Did you have any difficulty delegating tasks?

• What were the outcomes, and how did these outcomes align with your goals?

• What do all these aspects show you about your leadership style?

4. Seek input and feedback from others:

Ask a peer or a co-work, or a member of your team at work for their honest reflection on both your leadership strengths, and also about the areas you could improve in and get better at. This is important because leadership is not only about how you perceive yourself but also about how others experience your leadership. 

In addition to this, have you ever wondered how seeking coaching can benefit you to further understand your leadership style?

How could seeking a coach cause you to grow as a leader and in your leadership style?

1. Increased self-awareness:

Self-awareness is the foundation of effective leadership. Assessing your personality, values, and preferences will provide insights into your natural leadership style. For example, when you communicate with your team, are you more directive or collaborative in your style? Do you prefer making quick executive decisions or do you prefer making decisions after careful consideration and lengthy discussions with your team members? A coach can be a benefit because they can act as a mirror to help you see yourself as you truly are, and where you are at in your leadership.  In addition, a coach can help you identify your strengths, behaviours and the areas you can improve in, which will enable you to understand how you impact others. A coach also has the capacity to draw out the brilliance you already have within you;  which over time, can help build greater confidence in how you lead others.

2. Enhanced skills:

Booking a coaching session with a coach can help enhance your skills and capabilities as a visionary leader in how you communicate, make decisions, solve problems, and also in how you can be a better proactive leader. This is important for you and the project you are working towards, because your team members will be inspired under your leadership when your leadership style goes past being only transactional in its nature. Think about it for a moment, your team members will thrive the most when your leadership style goes beyond being a transactional leadership style, as they will sense that you care about their growth and that you are there to support them in their part of the overall project.

3. Tailored growth:

Seeking a coach will accelerate your growth as a leader and in your leadership style because it targets unique challenges and goals for self-development for more honed leadership skills. A coach will help bring out your inner brilliance and help you identify your personal values, what principles guide your decisions, what motivates you as a leader and how your core values influence your priorities and the interaction with your team. This is vital, because as a leader. you not only need to understand what you bring to your team, but also why you do what you do.  The “why” factor can keep you motivated in your vision as a leader over long periods of time.  This is crucial to any visionary project which is built over long periods of time by a visionary leader.

4. Improved performance:

A leader like yourself can achieve better results with coaching, both individually and for your team and for the greater vision or project you are creating.  Think about it for a moment, if you can lead yourself and your team more effectively, this will create more efficiency, where your team can achieve better results over time, which can, in turn create a greater space for creativity and innovation within your team and for your project or vision.

To discuss your survey results from destinyfinder.com, and to book a 20 minute free coaching session for life purpose coaching, click on the following link:

https://inspiredtoimpel.com/coach

To learn more about destinyfinder.com, click on the video below: