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Transcript
Now, when I say that people have lied to you about leadership styles, I’m not necessarily saying they’ve done it intentionally, but a lot of people are just misinformed and don’t understand leadership styles and leadership, so they’ve given you the wrong information. And so they keep teaching you things that aren’t true, and if you follow them, you’re not going to be as effective a leader as you could be.
But to really understand how you’ve been lied to, we need to dive into the background and look at the other misconceptions that are often given, so then, at the end, you can truly understand what the big lie is.
What leadership styles are
So first we need to understand what leadership styles are. And leadership styles basically is just a theory of leadership that some people have about what makes an effective leader, and it focuses on behavior.
Now when you say leadership styles, so many people say different things about it. If you search the web, you’re going to get a gamut of things of what people consider leadership styles. There’s how task and people oriented you are. There’s the different stages of employees and how you adjust yourself to the different stages your employees are in. Then there’s the one whether your style is to lead in front of people or beside people or behind people.
And then the most common ones are the ones where you have a list of different styles you can be and you find out which one you are to live, which when you look those up even, what people consider styles from one place is completely different from another. And then there’s the idea of style, that everybody has their own style based off personality.
We’ll hit the last two most because that’s what most people think about when they think of leadership style.
The “find your style” style
One of the biggest explanations about leadership styles is the idea that you could be autocratic, democratic, laissez faire, delegative, affiliative, bureaucratic, and so on. Again, depending where you look, you’ll get a different list of ideas. And the idea behind this is that you’re naturally one of them.
And you need to discover which one you are so you can be the best you you can be as a leader.
There’s actually quite a few things wrong about that. One of them being that if you’re any one style, you’re going to fail as a leader. Those are actually different functions that you just need to do as a leader.
Every leader should be building relationships with their team. Every leader should delegate. Every leader at times should get other people’s input and at times make decisions. Most of those, except for like bureaucratic, transactional and so on are just things that you do as a leader. It’s your job.
Think as if you were a carpenter
Think about it as a carpenter. Let’s say you are a carpenter and you just love to cut wood. Oh, you just, you just love it. If because you loved it, that’s all you did, you’re not going to be an effective carpenter. Not only that, that’s just a function that you do.
You measure wood, you nail wood, you screw wood, you hammer, you do everything. All of those things are functions. It’s not your cutting style and it’s not your, oh, I’m measuring style now because I’m switching to that.
No, you’re just doing your functions as a leader. It’s true that you may have certain leanings to certain things. You may love coaching people. That may be your passion. You may love building relationships. You may love commanding and telling people what to do. I don’t know. That could be your leaning.
Just because you lean a certain way
But just because it’s your leaning doesn’t mean that’s what you should do. Again, just because you like cutting wood doesn’t mean you should always do it.
Not only that, just because you lean a certain way doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Some people lean toward being a jerk… doesn’t mean they should be a jerk. Sometimes we lean to things because of ego or because of insecurities.
We think we’re better than everybody, so we lean to autocratic so we can tell everybody what to do. Or we’re insecure so we do the same thing. Or we get everybody’s input diplomatic because we don’t want to make the wrong decision. We’re insecure.
It’s good to know which way you lean, not so you can always do that, just so you can be aware what your leanings are so you can make sure you’re doing all the things you need to do and not just what you like the most.
And it’s not about your inclinations, it’s about what your team needs at the time.
The personality style
The second most common explanation of leadership styles is that you have a certain style based off your personality, and so on. That each person’s different because of their personality and so their leadership’s different. And there’s some truth to that.
But the problem is we often get the cart before the horse. We do the tactics instead of the principles behind the tactics.
You see leadership isn’t based on your personality. It’s not based on your strengths. It’s not based on your preferences. It’s based on principles
You can think about principles versus styles in the context of playing guitar or even sports or marketing. Now, you can just go and start doing a bunch of Facebook ads or whatever you want to and just hope you’re lucky. That could be your style, but the thing is if you don’t know the principles behind marketing. you’re not going to be effective doing Facebook ads or really anything because you don’t understand the principles.
Same thing with soccer. You can kick the ball however you want to. You can run backwards all you want to across the field because that’s your style, but you’re not going to be effective soccer player because you’re not following the principles. Same thing with guitar or anything.
With leadership, principles come first.
The biggest lie about leadership
And you see, that’s the biggest lie that comes with leadership, that leadership is about you, your style, your preferences, your strengths, and that it revolves around that. That whatever you are, whatever you want seems to be okay today as long as it’s you, and that’s completely false.
Leadership is about principles, and you do principles first, and then you can adjust your style based off the principles as long as you’re following the principles. But more than that, leadership isn’t about you and lowering the mission and lowering the team to meet your preferences or your style or your strength.
It’s about you becoming what you need to be for the mission and the team. So that may mean learning stuff in areas that you’re weak in or doing things that’s not your preference or that you don’t lean toward. It’s about you becoming what you need to be, not lowering things to meet you. one of service.
