710: Leadership

Leadership is one of those topics that seems to come up time and time again. Back in episode 486, we examined what it means to be a supervisor, and the fact that only one-third or so of people aspire to any kind of leadership at all. Even with that, however, it’s often true that those who become leaders may or may not have wanted to be named that, or are even officially in leadership positions.

Once you are in a leadership position – if you want to be or not – there is no dearth of options of what kind of leader you might be, number of books to read about leadership, or even entire degrees of every level you can get in leadership studies.

The HubSpot blog outlines seven different types of leadership styles, ranging from democratic to autocratic, strategic to transactional.

Meanwhile, the Association for Talent Development instead breaks leadership up into five styles – managerial, relational, motivational, inspirational, and transformational.

Blog WiseToast goes even further, with 12 different types of leadership outlined and The Executive Connection outlines nine common leadership styles.

While there’s crossover in all of these, there’s also a drive here similar to ones we have talked about in the past – a drive to categorize and organize the experiences we have, ways we interact with others, and ways we think about ourselves in a way that may be useful to us. The power of that kind of examination, however, comes not in the fact that we can name our leadership style (official or not) as one thing or the other — the power comes in using that information, feedback, and  framework as a jumping off point for determining how we want to interact with that world.