Is Leadership Really About “Style?”

There’s a lot of material out there about leadership “styles,” “personalities,” “strengths,” and a host of other things that are frankly off the mark – some of them way off the mark.  The notion is that if you look “inside” closely enough, if you understand more and more who you are and why you do what you do, you can become an effective leader.

There’s some truth in these materials that at times seem to dominate the market in leadership development.  These tools and instruments can have some value.  But not as a starting point.  If we begin here, we end up focusing too much on our personality.  We can too easily end up overfocusing on ourselves and on our “strengths” and flaws, as we’re led unwittingly to leadership narcissism.

Real, effective leadership is first about powerful principles and practices and second about personality and style.  There are things that work for leaders; we have to learn them no matter how hard it is for us personally, or we simply will not be good leaders.  And there are things that don’t work for leaders; we have to unlearn them no matter how hard it is for us personally, or we simply will be bad leaders.

We need to assess ourselves against the very best that leaders can be.  There really is a set of principles that works with actual human beings, teams, and organizations.  Once we know what these are, we can learn how to act on or adjust our personality and style to apply them in the most effective way.  There’s just no way to be a passionate, performance-oriented, ethical leader if we don’t know what that means, if we’re making it up as we go along based on the latest “hot” self-assessment tool.