Three Leadership Styles
You can show more leadership by flexing between three styles:
- Promoting a better way, advocating a change in direction
- Leading by example, going first, being the best
- Engaging leadership, drawing ideas for a better way out of others
For more on these 3 styles of leadership, see Three Kinds of Leadership
The mission of this website is to create a deeper understanding of how to be an engaging leader.
How to be an engaging leader
- Actively seek input from others
- Stop asking only analytical questions
- Ask what others think and want
- Value the input of others
- Be facilitative, not the answer-giver
Why be an engaging leader
- Engagement fuels motivation
- Shared ownership & commitment
- Better decisions
- Greater trust and openness
- Fuller empowerment
- More creative thinking
- More bottom-up initiative
- Stronger team spirit
Partially engaging leaders propose their own solutions and then ask what others think of their ideas. Not many people will question their boss so this is often just a rubber stamp exercise. Saying "I have an open door policy" is another half-way measure.
The concept of engaging leadership upgrades traditional participative leadership by placing more emphasis on being proactively engaging.
The more you operate as a solution generator, pushing your own solutions, the more you are operating as an individual contributor with authority rather than as a leader with the goal of getting the best out of others, the best thinking and commitment.
Here, you will learn how to be a fully participative leader by asking engaging questions. The two most engaging questions are: "What do you think?" and "What do you want?" Each of these questions has several variations. The fully participative leader knows the difference between engaging and analytical questions. Asking only the latter is for those who want to make the decisions themselves.
See Engaging Leadership A good place to start. See also Directive Leadership for comparison. Next, have a look at how Engaging Questions work.
Other topics include how to celebrate success and conduct more engaging performance appraisals. In addition, there is some material on how to build your confidence, how to feel more positive and feel more fortunate.
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