What Kind of Leader Are You? 

Ever wonder what kind of leader you are? 

Are you the type of leader to forge ahead on an ambitious startup with a small team and a shoestring budget? Or is your leadership style better suited to a highly structured and well-established organization? 

Do you have the ideal personality to help lead a business in the midst of a major transition? Or do you see yourself as a steady captain guiding a big ship through open waters? Do you have what it takes to remain steady even when those waters get stormy?

Answering these questions requires a deeper understanding of your own leadership style. This understanding can also help you identify and seize opportunities that match your skill set and identify working situations where you have the best chance to thrive. 

In the discussion that follows, we offer a few tips for figuring out what kind of leader you are and what kind of leader you have the potential to be. 

Why Understanding Your Own Leadership Style Matters

Before you can get down to figuring out what type of leader you are, you have to ask yourself an important question right up front. Does it really matter? Who really cares what type of leadership style you bring to the table? It’s just about getting the job done, right?

Spoiler alert: It obviously matters. After all, we did write a whole article about it (to say nothing of the innumerable academic volumes which have been written by scholars on the subject). 

But why does it matter? What is the actual value of understanding your own leadership style? 

According to an article from Harvard School of Professional & Executive Development “These styles have a significant impact across the workplace, team morale, and company culture. Understanding which style aligns most closely with you is essential to maximizing its effectiveness and your potential as a leader.”

Below are just a few reasons ways that understanding your own leadership style can improve your effectiveness and potential as a leader:

• Self-Awareness: The logic behind this one is a bit circular. But in short, to be a good leader of any kind, you must be self aware. You must understand how your words and actions are perceived by others. Whether your goal is to command respect, convey authority, exhibit empathy, or inspire loyalty, the ability to do so depends on how you present yourself. Understanding your leadership style is tantamount to understanding how this presentation is coming across. This understanding, in turn, can help you mold your presentation to achieve specific aims as a leader. 
• Adaptability: One of the core benefits of understanding your own leadership style is the ability it gives you to make adjustments. Identifying a preferred leadership style is not meant to box you into a single approach. To the contrary, this understanding should provide you with the ability to make adjustments, to adapt to your surroundings, and to practice leadership styles that may differ from your own. Ultimately, knowing your own leadership style as well as other proven leadership models can provide you with the agility to lead in any situation. 
• Development: Knowing your leadership style can also be a valuable way to set benchmarks for your own professional growth and development. As we’ll discuss in a section below, part of the process of identifying your leadership style involves assessing your own strengths and weaknesses. This assessment can provide you with a basis for building on your strengths and confronting your weaknesses. 
• Authenticity: In order to command the respect and dedication of those you lead, it’s important to come across as genuine. People can sense sincerity just as they can feel disingenuousness. In order to inspire others to do their best, one must lead with authenticity. Achieving this level of authenticity begins with an honest self-appraisal of your leadership style. 
• Compatibility: While an effective leader will be both adaptable and receptive to professional development, it’s also true that some leadership styles simply thrive in certain settings. Some leaders excel best in transformational roles while others do their best work while stewarding large, bureaucratic organizations. Some leaders are built for hands-on engagement while others are built for big picture decisions. Understanding your leadership style also means recognizing and seizing the situations where you are likely to do your best work. 

6 Common Leadership Styles

Now that we’ve convinced you of their importance, what are some of the most commonly cited leadership styles? In reality, the number of “leadership styles” out there is infinite. Organizational psychologists and management theories have proffered countless ways to classify real-world leadership. 

Below are just a few that seem to be among the most commonly cited, at least in the blogosphere.

• Autocratic leaders will typically exercise strict control over decision-making, policy, and organizational culture. Autocratic leadership is often viewed as rigid, authoritarian and unilateral. The Harvard Business Review refers to this style as “coercive” leadership and notes that while it may be initially effective in driving uniformity, obedience and productivity, that it can ultimately have a corrosive impact on the employee morale, output, and long term organizational viability. That said, there may be a place for coercive leadership in acute crisis situations which demand quick and decisive action. 
• Bureaucratic leaders are not necessarily the source of strict control and oversight, but they are often a vessel for enforcement of these conditions. Bureaucratic leadership involves preservation of procedures, regulations, and organizational hierarchies. This type of leadership can be an important channel for maintaining order, organization, and procedural consistency in large institutions like government agencies, healthcare groups, or multinational corporations.
• Democratic leadership provides a strong contrast to both the autocratic and bureaucratic styles described above. Democratic leaders take steps to involve personnel at multiple levels of the organization in the decision-making process. While this approach may not be preferable for high-level organizational decisions, it can be particularly effective in creative, collaborative, and educational areas of an operation. 
• Transactional leadership is an approach to leadership that is powered by a construct of rewards and consequences. This is a construct that most of us are familiar with–one in which financial incentives, bonuses, promotions, and salary increases may all be directly correlated with performance and outcomes. This can be particularly effective in settings where performance and outcomes can be readily quantified such as in sales or marketing. On its own, however, this approach to leadership may fall short of creating an organizational culture based on shared goals and personal commitment. 
• Transformational leadership is an approach that encourages active engagement, shared commitment, and innovation throughout an organization. A transformational leader will typically deploy a combination of vision, energy and charisma to help motivate others. This approach can be a great way to create a sense of ownership among team members, to inspire confidence, and to foster continuous improvement. 
• Situational leadership is something of a catch-all, a leadership style that is characterized by its adaptability to context and conditions. Situational leaders will have the ability to modify their leadership style as is called for in a given scenario. Situational leaders recognize that different relationships, working dynamics, and settings may call for stylistic adjustment. Provided you have a strong sense of when and how to pivot between leadership strategies, there are few real drawbacks to this type of versatility. 

While helpful, the styles indexed above really only scratch the surface. The truth is that leadership is highly nuanced and highly individual. Few real leaders fit neatly into one single category. These styles are useful for helping you better understand yourself as a leader, but may not necessarily be as useful for classifying yourself.

Indeed, this is one of the core ideas underpinning the Success Portraits Personality Test (SPPT). Leadership styles, and working styles in general, are informed by highly individualized combinations of traits. Indeed, the SPPT denotes that there are 19 personality traits that can be used to help make this assessment.

And of course, every leader will score differently across each of these personality traits. Every prospective leader will present with a unique permutation of personality traits. It is how we combine these traits and leverage them in different contexts that dictates who we are as leaders. 

In short, there’s a bit more to identifying your own leadership style than just wedging your identity into one of the categories above.

How To Know Your Own Leadership Style

So how can you be sure that you’re effectively evaluating your own leadership style? 

Employment site Indeed outlines a step-by-step process that we think is pretty useful. In the briefest possible terms, Indeed advises the following:

1. Identify your traits and abilities as a worker, an employee, a team member and a leader
2. Understand your own core values and beliefs as they relate to leadership 
3. Observe other leaders and their unique styles of leadership
4. Practice different styles of leadership
5. Request feedback from your team members and mentors

Taking the First Step with a Personality Assessment

The very first step of the process outlined above is to gain an honest appraisal of your own personality traits as they relate to your professional life. This speaks to a recurrent theme in our discussion—the reciprocal relationship between leadership potential and self-awareness. 

The goal of our Success Portraits Personality Test is to help facilitate the former with a healthy dose of the latter. Our personality test is designed to both quantify and analyze your traits as a worker, an employee, a team member, and a leader.

Our self-administered assessment lets you test yourself for 19 key personality traits, including traits like Vision, Assertiveness, Business Acumen, Core Self-Evaluation, and more. And with our suite of downloadable reports, you can also get personally tailored advice on how to channel these traits into professional advancement. For instance, the SPPT For Individuals includes a downloadable Coaching Report. The Coaching Report leverages your personality scores to create a career development plan based specifically on your dominant personality traits. The Coaching Report uses both your strengths and deficits to light a customized path toward improved performance and career growth.

As we’ve noted throughout, the academic discussion on leadership style is not meant to force each of us into a specific leadership classification. To the contrary, it is to improve our understanding of our own capabilities as leaders, and even to build upon them. We believe the assessment and reporting made available through the SPPT For Individuals can be a helpful starting point toward both of these goals.