Beyond Styles: Tips to The Heart of Leadership

Today, we’re going to start a mini-series on leadership style. Leadership styles refer to the behavioral approach employed by leaders to influence, motivate, guide, and direct their followers. A leadership style determines how leaders implement plans and strategies to accomplish given objectives while accounting for stakeholder expectations and the well-being and soundness of their team.

You may have heard that the five most common leadership styles are autocratic (authoritarian), democratic (participative), laissez-faire (delegative), managerial (transactional), and transformational (visionary). But I’m going to approach it from a different angle.

To be a good leader, be approachable, accessible, and real. Don’t be aloof or secretive. Live life as an open book, hate hypocrisy, and love integrity. Most would agree that kind of leader is refreshing. They have nothing to prove, no secrets to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, no pretense or air of self-importance, never feeling compelled to remind you of their qualifications for the job. We need more transparency and openness of this kind today.

Leaders who live their lives in the open have nothing to guard or fear. But if they are always on the move, forever hiding behind locked doors and drawn blinds, the public has reason to suspect they’re not genuine. Be careful about following a leader who is inaccessible and invulnerable.

One of the secrets of the leaders’ success can be stated in three words: they plodded on. They led the same way, whether the winds were at their back or blowing hard against them. Opposition and hardship didn’t matter.

Let’s put that into practice.

1. How do you currently perceive your leadership style? Do you tend more towards being approachable, open, and transparent, or aloof, guarded, and insular? Reflect on how this affects your team’s perception of you and your effectiveness as a leader.
2. How do you handle opposition or hardship, and what leadership style do you employ? Would adopting a more transparent and persistent approach, as suggested above, have altered the outcome?

Excerpt taken from Insight for Living by Chuck Swindoll.