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Leadership Self-Analysis As per MOMS assessment my dominant leadership styles are “Coaching”, “Coercive”, and “Affiliated” and my least preferred styles are “Pacesetting’, ‘Visionary and “Democratic” in that order. I expected to see myself high on coaching as I use that style a lot at my work, hence I was not surprised to see that as my most dominant style in self-assessment. I did not expect to see my coercive style usage to be high and visionary style usage to be low. In fact, I was under the impression that I am more authoritative than coercive. I try to set vision for the team and make lot of effort to involve people in my decisions. Old need to observe myself if I instead of setting vision for the team, am becoming too directive and task oriented. Also, Initially I was also surprised to find myself mid-high on affiliated style as I am not a very social person. However looking deeper into the style I did realize that am generally very friendly with team members and always care about their emotional needs and promote interactions within team. Based on this I feel this assessment accurately captured my style usage as mid-high. I did expect my pacesetting and democratic style usage to be low as I do not use them a lot.
Based on this profile I see myself having strengths in using coaching and affiliated style often and limiting my use of pacesetting style. However I still have to work on reducing my use of coercive style and increasing my use of visionary style. If I am able to overcome these 2 weaknesses I feel would be very close to ideal leadership style of using good mix of authoritative, coaching, affiliated and democratic styles. Two months back I had to create plan for our 1 month sprint for the team. My team has 6 people reporting to me. Most of them are very junior and with little experience. Ad 2-3 days to finish the whole exercise in which I had to figure out deliverables and work assignments for team members. Primary criteria for successful leadership was to get key deliverables scheduled for the sprint, ensure team members were not surprised by deliverables assigned to them and were fully motivated and capable of accomplishing these tasks. My leadership profile of combination of coercive and coaching helped me here as I was able to identify right tasks for the team members quickly and give them necessary coaching and mentoring on how to accomplish them.
My affiliated style also ensured I knew what my team members liked and what they did not like. Team members were generally happy with the clear direction and assignment. In the end we finished our sprint achieving all our deliverables. However everything was not as smooth as I had planned. As sprint progressed I found that some team members were not really happy with some work items assigned to them. Now I realized that should have solicited more input from them. Also, I found that team did not take initiatives to identify where we were taking wrong approaches to solve problems. Secularly had to intervene to help team find right solutions.
My coaching and mentoring style did help me ensure team was learning new skills, however I was worried why team was not learning on its own. As I reflect back I am realizing that even though members were junior authoritative style would have been a better approach. It would have been much better if I would have taken time to set a vision and use that to give direction to the team. That way, in case of mistakes team would have been able to take corrective actions on its own rather than relying on me. Also I found that even though team members were good at accomplishing their own tasks they were not collaborating well with others. An now see that I need to enhance my affiliated style usage further so that I can cultivate a better culture where people talk to each other bit more. As I look ahead I envision myself to be a senior executive at a Fortune 500 company. As a senior executive I would have lot more reports with much more diverse set of experiences. I would have to manage not only my reports but also whole organization. In such an organization I will still need to achieve organizations goals even though I would not be able to set each employee’s tasks.
Moreover, I would still need to ensure employees are happy and motivated without being able to interact with them directly on daily basis. My leadership profile has some strong areas like strong use of coaching style which will be very helpful in growing and building a strong team. However I would need to change much of my coercive style usage to visionary style usage. Without this change I would not be able to scale myself to the requirements of managing big organization as I cannot assign tasks for whole organization on my own. Also, I would not get proper feedback from employees on any changes which old help organization become better.
I would need to increase my use of affiliated style as well. This will be paramount to ensure strong collaboration between employees and a healthy work environment. Additionally, so far I did not have to use democratic style much, however I can imagine as a senior executive I will be dealing with be far more talented people than me and I will have to use democratic style to get buy-in on my ideas. Few changes I will make to prepare myself for future role are: Firstly I will start articulating my vision and strategy to team and start evangelize that to my team members, peers ND managers.
Secondly, I will solicit more input from employees to establish the positive feedback loop on any issues in organization. Thirdly, I will initiate more personal contact with employees and provide more social activities to help create culture of collaboration. Fourthly, I will start sharing more decision making with employees so that they can weigh their opinion on issues. Lastly, I would start looking closely at my leadership styles I use at different times and be more cognizant of impact of my leadership style and establish a feedback loop to constantly improve my leadership styles.