Whats Your Leadership Style

Proclaiming, Encouraging, Equipping, Supporting , what’s your Leadership Style?

"Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without strategy,"- General Schwarzkopf unintentionally spelt the essence of true leadership! Leadership in spirit is influential, courageous and visionary. True leaders lead by empowering their followers and command respect by virtue of their strength of character. They practice persuasion through informal authority instead of coercion.

Leadership is partly instinctive and partly learnt. The PTL model of leadership provided by Personal Transformation Limited, (a human capital transformation firm) brings out the factors that make a good leader and reflects upon the design and development of leadership.

PTL Model of leadership
According to the PTL model of leadership, a collaboration of three factors, namely-passion, temperament and character helps master the craft of leadership. Passion is reflective of a person’s leadership gifting which is determined by his inner drive. Temperament reflects a person’s behavioral instincts while character determines his personal maturity.

Every leader has a unique composition of passion, temperament and character that becomes his "leadership style". Of these three factors "passion or leadership gifting" plays the central role in determining a leader’s style of leadership. Passion is the inner most drive of a person and reflects an individual’s motivation and path he chooses to achieve it. This explains the difference in leadership styles.

Awareness about one’s individual style enhances the overall effectiveness of a leader. This knowledge also provides insights into the strategies that can be employed to build on strengths and overcome weaknesses. Leaders can also choose to imbibe the positive aspects of other leadership styles if they wish to do so.

There is nothing "right" or "wrong" about a particular leadership style. They are merely different in approach and leaders can adopt one of the choices depending on their motivation, drive, organizational culture and overall objective. In fact all seven leadership styles connect with each other in one way or the other. Discovering this connection helps create an ideal blend.

Leadership styles Proclaiming style of leadership

Leaders who practice the "proclaiming" style are largely values-driven and hold a strong opinion or perception about every issue. As they are straightforward and clear about what they want they react strongly. They do not believe in violation of values, which are firmly ingrained in their
value system. Proclaiming leaders have a distinct style of conduct. They are impressive and convincing speakers. Their charm and communicative skills help them win corporate negotiations.

Equipping style of leadership

As the name suggests, leaders who practice the equipping style are constantly indulged in equipping themselves with knowledge, skills and information. These leaders will remind you of your statistics professor. They rattle out figures and numbers with amazing accuracy and condemn people who talk without a strong statistical base to support their argument. Equipping leaders put forth their views in the form of reports, curricula, guidelines and proposals. Highly meticulous and organized, they expect the same from their followers too.

Encouraging style of leadership
Encouraging leaders are driven by the growth of their followers. They like to see people growing, doing well and prospering under them. Success of others gives them a high. Leaders practicing this style are committed to unleashing the potential of their followers and leading them to self-actualization. Encouraging leaders don the role of a mentor, extending unconditional support and encouragement. These leaders are extravagant when expressing positive emotions like recognition, appreciation and praise. Their parent-like attitude makes them share a bond of affection and love with their followers.

Empathizing style of leadership
Empathizing leaders wear feelers for others. They are highly sensitive to the needs and aspirations of people around them. Their decisions-are largely people-centered and hence are almost always accepted without any resistance. They may seem sentimental and emotional, however they maintain their humanity without compromising on work. These leaders are genuinely happy with the success of others and brood when failure touches their followers. People working under the empathizing leaders feel wanted giving a boost to their self-esteem. Empathizing leaders also demonstrate insights and assertiveness in their actions.

Directing style of leadership
Corporate vision is the sole motivator for leaders practicing this style. All their actions are governed by their drive to accomplish the goals and vision of their company. They mean business. Their communication is centered around strategies that could help achieve the ultimate objective. Directive leaders are clear in thought and concise in action. Directive leaders are like rudders that bring a straying ship back to its path. They are constant reminders of the very purpose of a corporate’s existence and keep the entire organization on track.

Investing style of leadership
Investing leaders are clever and probe to the point of conviction. They dwell on finer points and prefer to bring out weaknesses rather than celebrating success. They believe that success is a corollary of weaknesses eliminated. Being great communicators their conversations are crisp but
subtle.

Supporting style of leadership
Supporting leaders are people-centric. They are caring. Their actions speak for them. These leaders enjoy complete employee confidence and do not feel the need to give explanations or reasons for their decisions. Trust and faith are far too strong. Awareness about leadership styles is critical for effective leadership. A leader who knows his style of conduct is far more successful than his ignorant counterparts.

Steve Job's Stanford Commencement Address - 12th June, 2005

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal.

Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

How Heavy is a Glass of Water

Take few minutes of your busy hours to read this.

Hope you may solve many things..... How heavy is a Glass of Water.

A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised aglass of water and asked, "how heavy is this glass of water?" Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, "Theabsolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to holdit."
"If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day,you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight,but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes." He continued, "And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomesincreasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on." "As with the glass of water, you have to ! put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we're refreshed, we can carry on with the burden.

"So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down. Don't carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you're carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can."Relax; pick them up later after you've rested. Life is short liven. Enjoy it! And then the lecturer shared some ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

• Accept that some days you're the pigeon, and some days you're the statue.
• Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
• Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the Middle of it.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• Never buy a car you can't push.
• Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.
• When everything is coming your way, you're in the wrong lane.
• Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
• You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
• A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour . . . . .

Different Strokes...

Imagine you're in London's Heathrow airport. While you're waiting for your flight, you notice a kiosk selling shortbread cookies. You buy a box, put them in your traveling bag and then patiently search for an available seat so you can sit down and enjoy your cookies. Finally you find a seat next to a gentleman. You reach down into your traveling bag and pull out your box of shortbread cookies. As you do so, you notice that the gentleman starts watching you intensely. He stares as you open the box and his eyes follow your hand as you pick up the cookie and bring it to your mouth. Just then he reaches over and takes one of your cookies from the box, and eats it! You're more than a little surprised at this. Actually, you're at a loss for words. Not only does he take one cookie, but he alternates with you. For every one cookie you take, he takes one.Now, what's your immediate impression of this guy? Crazy? Greedy? He's got some nerve! Can you imagine the words you might use to describe this man to your associates back at the office?Meanwhile, you both continue eating the cookies until there's just one left. To your surprise, the man reaches over and takes it. But then he does something unexpected. He breaks it in half, and gives half to you. After he's finished with his half he gets up, and without a word, he leaves.

You think to yourself, "Did this really happen?" You're left sitting there dumbfounded and still hungry. So you go back to the kiosk and buy another box of cookies. You then return to your seat and begin opening your new box of cookies when you glance down into your traveling bag. Sitting there in your bag is your original box of cookies -- still unopened. Only then do you realize that when you reached down earlier, you had reached into the other man's bag, and grabbed his box of cookies by mistake. Now what do you think of the man? Generous? Tolerant?

You've just experienced a profound paradigm shift. You're seeing things from a new point of view. Now, think of this story as it relates to your life. Seeing things from a new point of view can be very enlightening. Think outside the box. Don't settle for the status quo. Be open to suggestions. Things may not be what they seem. Is it time to change your point of view?