February 2010
Leadership Development Ideas -Developing Your Own Leadership Style: The Key to High-Impact Leading
(Reflections from "Courageous Leadership" by Bill Hybels)
In a recent training session where we helped leaders discover and ‘own’ their own unique style of leading, a tall, gangly, quiet guy who was one of the participants noted, “I never really saw myself as a leader, even though my wife and others kept telling me I was. I always thought that a leader was an up-front, gregarious person who easily spoke to large groups. That’s not me.” He was able to understand and own his personal leadership style and left the session smiling.
Hybels says that he’s learned that leadership ‘has many faces.’ He quotes author Gary Wills (A Certain Trumpet) who describes different styles of leadership and theorizes that, historically, certain leaders have had unusually high impact because their particular style meshed perfectly with the specific need in society. True enough. Not all leaders can lead equally well in all situations. As leaders we need to understand the value of our own styles and seek to apply our style to those situations and tasks that call out to us. We all lead with dramatically different styles. Hybels' challenge for us is to identify our particular style and the styles of other leaders on our team, and match each style with specific leadership needs in our ministry. Here is a thumbnail of the styles (for a more in-depth look at these styles, get ‘Courageous Leadership’ by Hybels). See if you can find yourself in one or more of the following leadership styles:
- The Visionary Style: What distinguishes the visionary leader is that he or she has a crystal clear picture in mind of what the future could hold, and casts powerful visions and has enthusiasm for turning those visions into reality.
- The Directional Style: This leader doesn’t get much press, but is able to choose the right path for an organization-being able to sort through all the options, and is able to point the ministry or organization in the right direction.
- The Strategic Style: This leader have the ability to take an exciting vision and break it down into a series of sequential, achievable steps, allowing an organization to march intentionally toward the actualization of its mission.
- The Managing Style: This leader has the ability to organize people, processes, and resources to achieve a mission, all the while monitoring and fine-tuning it along the way.
- The Motivational Style: These leaders are the modern day Vince Lombardis, having the ability to keep their teammates fired up, especially when the going gets tough. Spend some time with these folks and you’ll be able to climb mountains.
- The Shepherding Style: This leader is a man or woman who builds a team slowly, loves team members deeply, nurtures them gently, supports them consistently, listens to them patiently, and prays for them diligently.
- The Team-Building Style: This group has a supernatural insight into people that allows them to successfully find and develop the right people with the right abilities, the right character, and the right chemistry with other team members.
- The Entrepreneurial Style: These leaders function optimally in the ‘start-up’ mode and begin to lose energy when the venture is up and running, and requires on-going management. If they can’t regularly give birth to something new, they lose motivation.
- The Reengineering Style: This leader thrives on the challenge of taking a troubled situation-a team that has lost its vision, a ministry where people are in the wrong positions, a department trying to move forward without a strategy-and turning it around.
- The Bridge-Building Style: This final style makes important contributions to large organizations such as para-church ministries, denominations, and educational institutions because they have the unique ability to bring together under a single leadership umbrella a wide range of constituent groups, helping a complex organization to stay focused on a single mission.
Read the other articles in this issue:
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