Understanding Your Leadership Style
What is my leadership style? This simple question gave me an existential crisis. The more I thought about it the more it engulfed me. I remember taking a quiz to understand my leadership style, and honestly, I don’t even remember the results. I realized that much like my personality, my leadership style is also evolving over time. The equation I share with each and every person in my life is different and so is my leadership style when I am dealing with them. Each and every person wants to be treated in a certain way, wants to be spoken to in a certain way and having just one way to deal with everyone is not my leadership style. When I look back and think about my life so far, I can think about a lot of things that define me as a person now.
My dad is an ex-serviceman, he worked in the Air Force which meant that we used to travel a lot. I have changed 7 schools and a lot more friends. You never know if your friend will be in the same city as you after the long summer break. Though this might seem sad I see a silver lining in this situation. This experience has exposed me to a lot of different types of people, belonging to different communities, different cultures, and different ideologies. This made understanding people a lot easier. Even as a child I would have long conversations with people and try and put myself in their shoes and try to see the world through their eyes. This experience made me empathize with people as well as adaptive.
When I was in fourth grade, we had a story in our English class, wherein a dove sees a honey bee in the water, unconscious. The dove picks up a leaf and places the bee on the leaf which ends up saving the bee’s life. In turn, the bee helps the dove when he is in need. The moral of the story was ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’. I don’t know why but that story stuck with me for a long time. Coincidently a few days after reading that story, I saw an unconscious honey bee near my classroom. I told my friends that we should help the bee, and we picked it up and placed it on a leaf. It wasn’t moving, so one of my friends told me to place it on a flower instead. I took the suggestion and placed it on the flower. Another friend told me that I should probably drop some water around it just in case it’s thirsty and we did sprinkle a few drops of water on the petals of the flower. The school bell rang, indicating that the break is over and it’s time for my next period so we rushed inside our classroom. After the class, my friends and I ran towards the garden to see if the bee was alive. To our surprise, we couldn’t find the bee. What I didn’t know at that time was that the bee was already dead. It was a windy day and the bee’s body probably fell somewhere and was eaten by the ants. But I was an extremely optimistic kid, I was naive. I convinced myself and my friends that the bee recovered and is not dead and has probably joined her friends in the beehive. This might be the lamest story you have ever read, but at that time it was a pretty big deal for us. Though it was my idea at first, it soon became our idea. I guess my friends were as stupid as me if not more.
The key take away from this story is that each and every one of us were involved in this activity, and though it was an emotional situation for us back then, we still managed to have a lot of fun. The story might not have had a happily ever after ending but we sure convinced ourselves that it did. I guess what I am trying to say is, no matter what the situation is, I make sure I am having fun along with people around me and building relationships with them.
Your leadership style mirrors your personality. Yes, your personality evolves over time but some traits remain constant. In my case, it was empathy, adaptability, encouragement, relationship building and most importantly happiness. And if you are not happy with a particular trait you possess you can always work on it. One of the most important traits of a true leader is self-awareness and self-regulation and if you have them, all you need to do is put in that little effort to make a big difference!
