Leadership Styles: What’s Yours?

How do you prefer to lead? How do your colleagues lead? Or your boss?

Are you more of a Chairman, or a Banker, or a Professional or a Salesperson? Each style has it’s own unique blend of strengths, weaknesses, growth opportunities and threat-response behaviours (SWOT behaviours).

This post includes a test to reveal your preferred style.

A couple of points to get started:

• We all have attributes of each of the styles…but we also tend towards a preference; we have a direction in which we lean.
• It can be useful to understand your own preferred style but also the style of your team, your boss, your organization.
• All the styles are equally good and no style is inherently better than any other.

I use the labels chairman, banker, salesperson and professional as shorthand. The words are style descriptors, not job descriptions.

So it’s entirely possible to be an excellent salesperson with a professional leadership style, an outstanding chairman with a salesperson style and so on.

Identify your leadership style

There are five questions below, each with four options or answers. Read the questions and select the option that most appeals to you. Then select the second most appealing option, and finally the third. The remaining option is then your least favourite.

Allocate four points to your favourite option, three points to your second choice, two points to your third choice and one point to the remaining choice.

Work quickly and intuitively.

A good boss:

a) Is charismatic. A good communicator. Is empathic. Believes that work should be enjoyable.

b) Is decisive and strong. Understands how to achieve results. Sets a clear direction for people to follow.

c) Is supportive. A team player who gets everybody on board. Has a clear vision of the future based on a shared understanding.

d) Is intelligent and understands the issues involved. Has a high degree of respect for the individual.

A good employee:

a) Is enthusiastic and open. Gets on well with colleagues. Is positive and optimistic.

b) Does what is necessary to get the job done. Follows the rules. Speaks their mind.

c) Is cooperative and flexible. Gets people involved. A good team player.

d) Is thoughtful and knowledgeable. Is not easily distracted. Requires little control and is self-reliant.

A good organization:

a) Is an enjoyable and satisfying place to work.

b) Is successful and works hard to achieve its objectives.

c) Works towards a common goal with shared values.

d) Provides a stimulating environment for people to learn and grow.

People should be managed by:

a) Personal attention and coaching. One-to-one meetings with the manager.

b) Being given clear responsibilities and expectations. Economic rewards for doing well.

c) Being rewarded for achieving common goals and their contribution to the organization.

d) Being given a mission and the space to carry it out.

When managing change it is important to:

a) Communicate the change clearly to all involved.

b) Set clear goals so that people know what is expected of them.

c) Build a coalition and get everybody facing in the same direction.

d) Get input from the people involved and develop a high-quality plan.

Now add up the number of points for each option:

a) …
b) …
c) …
d) …

The maximum score on any answer is therefore 5 * 4 = 20. The sum of all answers must be 50.

All done? Spoiler warning…don’t read further until you have completed the test!

If you scored highly on the a) answers, then you might have a preference for the salesperson leadership style. The type b) is the banker style. The type c) is the chairman style and the type d) is the professional style.

Now sort them into sequence. What’s your preferred order? Chairman, Banker, Professional, Salesperson: CBPS? Or SCPB? Or maybe CSBP? Do you have a strong preference for a particular style?

The Styles

Let’s start with the strengths and then move on to a more detailed analysis.

The Salesperson is communicative, empathic, confident, a relationship builder and charismatic.

The Banker is assertive, decisive, realistic, stable and strong.

The Chairman is supportive, flexible, a visionary, coalition-builder and co-operative.

The Professional is determined, intelligent, self-reliant and thoughtful.

And…as we shall see…you can have too much of a good thing!

Each style also has weaknesses, growth opportunities and threat-response behaviours — We’ll look at the full SWOT characteristics in more detail in paragraphs that follow.

The Salesperson

The salesperson is charming, makes friends easily, is sociable, easy going and charismatic. The salesperson may have a preference for a visual style of thinking, may talk quickly and be good at thinking on his feet.

The high energy and humour of the salesperson can, however, appear superficial and even arrogant. He is not everybody’s cup of tea and serious thinking people may be put off by his high-speed repartee and seeming high confidence. His natural optimism can lead to unrealistic expectations that in turn may influence his planning and business forecasts.

When threatened, the salesperson can become aggressive and use his verbal ability and whit as a weapon. When confronted with an authority figure, such as an aggressive boss or even an assertive customer, he can become uncommunicative, changeable and even depressive.

Fear of rejection may form a major drive for the salesperson — he hates it and will go to great lengths to avoid it. Admitting rejection is also a challenge and the salesperson may forget to mention the deal that was not won or the target that was missed.

The salesperson’s areas for growth are assertiveness, humility and profundity. He needs to develop his ability to respond with depth and earnestness to situations.

If you have the salesperson type in you, then you’ll have little problem in convincing others to follow your lead. Your optimism and charisma will encourage others to follow you.

The Banker

In contrast to the salesperson, the banker is assertive, serious, realistic and strong-minded. The banker will have no problem taking decisions, as long as the parameters within which she must work are clear. The banker follows instructions exactly. She excels at execution and makes a great operations manager. She is solid and trustworthy and people always know where they stand with her. The banker is generally stable and can be relied upon to do what she says she’s going to do.

The banker’s assertiveness can, however, turn into forcefulness and unpleasant stubbornness. Her stability may have the downside of a lack of imagination and creativity. The banker is not very good at thinking outside the box, and needs clear rules, instructions, systems and conventions for her work. Where such systems do not exist she will create them — if she’s allowed to. She is neat and tidy but can also be compulsive and habitual.

The banker feels threatened when confronted with an event for which she has no ‘rule-book’ to follow. In the ensuing mental confusion the banker may become unrealistic, applying the rules she knows to a situation where the rules will not work. Eventually when it becomes clear that the rules won’t achieve the desired result, the banker becomes weak and indecisive, not knowing what to do.

The banker needs to soften her strengths by learning to be creative and empathic. She needs to understand that flexible thinking and talking ideas through with others can lead to new solutions.

The banker is great at execution but less creative than the salesperson. Once convinced of mission, she will be dogged in her determination to see it through. The realistic side of the banker’s personality will ensure that change is achievable and that targets are met.

If you have the banker in your profile, then people will follow your lead because of your track record and because they trust you.

The Chairman

The chairman understands the process of consulting with others and building consensus. He is your best supporter. He is a visionary, but his vision of the future is a shared one and is based on mutual understanding.

He is a strong character and is self-confident. He understands people, can listen well and motivates others through helping them realize their potential. He understands how to bring the potentially diverse parts of an organization together into a coherent whole.

In order to get his way he may go too far down the political route and adopt a scheming and manipulative style. People respect him for his talents and his patience in an otherwise chaotic environment, but may become suspicious of his motives when his politics become too overt. In pursuing his idealistic goals, other more pragmatic managers may lose patience with endless rounds of meetings. It may take a salesperson to break through the ensuing quagmire.

When threatened with defeat or with a stubborn banker or professional, the chairman may react in an aggressive and dictatorial fashion. When consensus fails then he may resort to a ‘my way or the highway’ approach. This inflexibility may lead to his own downfall, as he eventually becomes melancholic and defeatist.

The chairman needs to learn to ‘chill’ a little and let go on occasion. He needs to be realistic about what is achievable. He must temper his tendency for consensus with decisiveness.

The chairman is good at orchestrating change and keeping a watchful eye to ensure that all the arrows are facing in the same direction — that everybody is aligned and engaged. He may initiate change but the original idea is likely to come from an external source. If you are part-chairman, then people will respect your authority and trust you to lead them through difficult times.

The Professional

The professional is a clever individualist. Her peers accept her as a leader due to her superior knowledge and experience. The professional is intelligent and thrives on intellectual challenges. Run of the mill is boring. She likes to think through problems and arrive at smart solutions. She prefers to work alone or with teams of like-minded people.

The professional is not easily managed, except by another professional. In striving for the perfect solution, the professional may overlook the need to be realistic and stay within budgetary restraints. She doesn’t like to be proven wrong and will defend her opinion to the point of stretching the patience of her banker, chairman or salesperson colleagues.

When threatened, the professional gets tough and hard-nosed, defending her point to the death. When confronted by an authority figure from whom she knows she cannot win she may turn passive and disinterested — she would rather leave the organization than give in to a regime or a decision with which she does not agree. The professional may also become political when threatened — cleverly trying to build a coalition against the perceived threat.

The development areas for the professional include realism and team-playing to complement her strengths of perfectionism and self-reliance. Sometimes sacrifices need to be made for the common good. Although the professional may accept logical argument, it may still go against the grain of her true feelings.

The professional’s intellect is invaluable in an organization. She adds intellectual rigour to the decision-making process; looking several moves ahead and interpreting the consequences of decisions. As a leader of change the professional will be thorough and the vision and plan will be well thought through.

If you have the professional in your profile, people will follow your lead with respect for your intellect and expertise.

Your Environment

How would you answer the questions from the point of view of the culture of your organization? How similar are they? If the differences are too wild, how comfortable do you feel working there? Can you change the organization? Do you need to adapt your style? Or do you perhaps need to move on?

Try the same for your boss. Or your colleagues.

The Leadership Style Test

Many large organizations use some kind of psychometric testing (such as MBTI or DISC) — even though it comes with a health warning not to be taken too literally and to use professional coaching for serious interventions.

The CBPS test is a lightweight survey — an accessible way to ease into the conversation — with yourself or with others.

Conclusion

Getting to know your self is a lifelong journey. Getting to know the styles of your colleagues, your boss and your organization may help to improve your own performance and that of your team.

By observing and learning to identify the leadership styles you can uncover what drives people’s behaviour; what the intention may be behind their words and why they do what they do. And, of course, why you do what you do.

Also at: amazon.com | amazon.co.uk | bol.com | blog

The Leadership Style CBPS test may be freely used and this article copied including this notice using any medium without change https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

I use he, she, his, hers, chairman and salesperson for rhetorical ease and not to imply any gender preference.

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