LEADERSHIP

What is leadership? Leadership depicts what’s in a leader.

What is a leader? Leader, to me, serves to create environment for others to follow and grow.

Are there lots of types of leaders? Yes, there are. I think if 9 billion human beings on earth present as leaders, we will have 9 billion leadership styles. Nonetheless, there are some common traits in many, so psychologists have polarised these traits into clearly seperate styles.

On my side, there are two types of good leadership: environment creator and last-mile decider. Environment creating leadership, as the name suggests, emphasize on creating a common environment for team members to flourish. They deliver a vision and clear goals to be achieved. From there, they acquire, motivate, encourage, empathize and push their members to obtain those goals.

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

What they do not do are giving detailed guidelines and controlling. Members of the team are left with great level of independence and strong will to go forward with little or no direction.

The other leadership style is totally different. I call it last-mile decider. This person will not let things slip out of their hands to a single minute. He or she has a very clear structure and work process, thus strictly applying these on their subordinates. As having such system, they initiate demanding KPIs and controlling system to meet deadlines.

Both of the styles have pros and cons as all other psychological models on leadership. Nevertheless, extreme or inflexible application of any is not a good idea, but rather a balanced combination.

Any leadership stems from needs of working with people, emphasizing critical gravity of understanding who you are working with, technical ability, personality, skills and attitude alike.

It is recommended that you are both while remaining extremely thorough understanding of the persons you are working with.