Chances are, if you have applied for any leadership role, you have gotten this question in one of your interviews. It’s a great interview question, because it is sounds simple on the surface, but reveals so much about how an individuals thinks, acts, and leads. On one hand, most of us think our leadership style should come to us naturally like a second nature. We may think we follow certain leadership principles (e.g., being open and collaborative or having high expectations), but we rarely attribute those principles to a personal “style” or “framework”. 

And yet, most successful leaders develop a clear framework by which they guide their leadership decisions and practices. Some natural leaders may have connected the dots “by looking backwards” and formed their leadership frameworks after they have become successful leaders. Others have to go through the deliberate practice of studying, experimenting, and honing their leadership principles until they have a clear definition for their leadership style. Regardless of which camp you are in, it is a good practice to think deliberately about your leadership style for several reasons:

• It gives you a more intentional way to lead your team.
• It helps you make hard decisions under stressful situations.
• It enables you to raise the next generation of successful leaders to pass the torch on to.

In this post, I share some of the guiding principles that I have adopted in my leadership. Remember that while most of these principles can be generalized, it is important that your leadership style be a good fit to your personality, experience, skillset, and the organization you are at. The key is not to stick to one single management style at all times, but to recognize that different situations require different strategies, and to stay situationally aware and self-aware to adapt your style to the situation at hand. 

While my strategy depends on the context we are in, my leadership is driven by a few core principles:

• Leading with the strengths: It is better to focus on the team’s strengths, and delegate the tasks to the individuals who are naturally more inclined to it.
• Emotions matter.

Lead with Empathy

The goal of empathy is to build mutual respect and trust into your relationships by seeing the human in everyone and promoting psychological safety. There are three types of empathy:

• Cognitive empathy: the ability to understand how a person might be thinking.
• Emotional empathy: the ability to share the feelings of another person.
• Compassionate empathy: goes beyond understanding and sharing emotions, and motivates action to help the other person.

When leading a team, you need to practice all three types of empathy. Eventually, go beyond your relationship with your team members and make mutual respect and empathy a priority at the team level.

To bring empathy to the team, you also need to manage emotions in the team. Check in with the team regularly. Offer an example  for others to follow, by showing composure during stressful times. Demonstrate the behavior that you expect from your team members, such as dignity, restraint, diligence, and self-awareness, while remaining authentic.

Intentional Transparency

The goal of transparency is to promote trust and increase morale and build a sense of togetherness in the team. Intentional transparency means facilitating the flow of information at a level and frequency that is intended to make the team more productive and benefit both the team as a whole and the individuals. Transparency is not limited to what happens at/to the company. As a leader, you also need to provide transparency in how you set goals for the team, how the team processes are established, what evaluation criteria and metrics are used to measure success for individuals and the team.

Make useful information available in an efficient way. Share information and ideas that matter — because effective communication means you’ll need to convey compelling information that leads to more informed actions and decision-making. Bring transparency to manage and mitigate conflicts.

As a leader, it is your responsibility to communicate up, down, and across. In all these directions, transparency is key. When choosing what to share and when to share, pay attention to the following factors:

• Does the audience need to be consulted about an item, or just informed.
• Does the audience need to know this now, or later.
• What level of detail is most helpful in this context? What is the most useful level of abstraction for this audience.

Enablement

As a leader, your biggest assets are your team. You want to keep them engaged, motivated, and at the peak of their performance. This can be achieved by enabling them to do their best work, and continue to improve. 

Enablement happens in different levels and stages:

Enablement through encouraging growth:

• Stay engaged in your team’s success.
• Foster a growth mindset, and value expertise. Help people develop their skills.
• Maintain a message of positivity and hope.
• Help the team identify their goals.

Enablement through effective planning and delegation:

• Remind the team of the purpose of their work.
• Play to your team’s strengths: delegate the work and support them to succeed.
• Help them plan and strategize to move towards their goal.
• Clear obstacles such as lack of information, internal and external dependencies, red-tape, etc.

Enablement through feedback:

• Give feedback on performance. Talk through the feedback to make sure it is fair, clear, actionable (in that order).
• Offer appropriate rewards along the way to encourage good behavior.

Bias to action in decision making

I believe groups can often make better decisions than any one person operating on his or her own. Furthermore, many decisions need “buy-in” from the people affected by them if they’re to be implemented successfully, and it’s hard to get this buy-in if people haven’t been involved in the decision-making process. On the other hand, there are situations where delaying a decision can lead to opportunity loss or losing momentum in action. Therefore, the decision making process depends on the situation, which leads to four main types of leadership:

• Supportive leadership – The focus is on relationships. You show sensitivity to individual team members’ needs, and consider the team members’ best interests. This leadership style is best when tasks are repetitive or stressful.

• Directive leadership – With this, you communicate goals and expectations, and you assign clear tasks. This style works best when tasks or projects are unstructured, or when tasks are complex and team members are inexperienced. The Directive leadership also may work with people who miss deadlines, in departments where conflict is an issue, or in teams that rely on quick decisions being made.

• Participative leadership – With participative leadership, you focus on mutual participation. You consult with your group, and you consider their ideas and expertise before making a decision. This approach works best when your team members are experienced, when the task is complex and challenging, and when your team members want to give you their input.

• Achievement-oriented leadership – Here, you set challenging goals for your team. You have confidence in your team’s abilities, so you expect your team to perform well, and you maintain high standards for everyone. This style works best when team members are unmotivated or unchallenged in their work.

The most important take-away is that a single decision making process will not work in all cases. You will need to develop the situational awareness and self-awareness to understand when you need to make a decision for the team and rally them behind it, versus when it is a good idea to follow a democratic process and seek input from everyone on the team. 

More specifically, in a crisis, know how to take control and monitor the situation closely. But that only works on rare occasions which justify extraordinary measures, and only when the team feels like you are subjecting yourself to the same rigor and intensity as the rest of the team (we are in this together).

On the other hand, during normal times, it pays to be giving the team more liberty in making decisions, seeking a participative or even supportive leadership style. The challenges is to avoid becoming too remote, even with a high-performing, highly autonomous team. Change can occur at any time in business, so your organization’s requirements for your team might shift after your initial brief.

Final thoughts

The leadership style of an effective leader depends on a few factors:

• Personality, previous experiences, and skillset of the leader.
• The situational factors such as complexity and status of the project.
• Culture, skillset, and motivation level of the team.

There is no “best” way to lead. Instead, focus on a few core principles, and then adjust the strategy depending on the situation at hand. 

For instance, in the early days of Altitude, I used to adopt an Achievement-oriented, and sometimes even Directive leadership style. With a startup mindset, I set challenging goals for the team. I had confidence in my team’s abilities, so I expected your team to perform well, and I maintained high standards for everyone. At times, I just communicated goals and expectations, and assigned clear tasks.

At CoinList, I worked with a team of experienced engineers, and some of them had more experience than me about the space and the problem at hand. So I shifted my style to a more participative style. I consulted the team on most decisions, and at times was mostly in a support role.