Focusing on Leadership: Different Perspectives

I’m continuing my leadership learning journey and have a few new theories to share with you. This week, I’m going to talk about transformational leadership, authentic leadership, servant leadership, adaptive leadership and end with followership. The variety of theories and approaches to leadership is expanding, so there is really options to apply to any given situation a leader may find themselves in.

Transformational Leadership

The easiest way to describe this is a leader helping a follower become a better person. The leader is supportive and acts as a good mentor or role model. Transformational leaders inspire or motivate others around them. I learned from Northouse (2016) that there are four I’s regarding this type of leadership: idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration. Any one of these can be used by a leader to help transform a follower. Now if you aren’t a transformational leader, you might be a transactional or passive leader. Transactional leaders don’t lead on an individual basis and often swap things for reward, like contingent rewards. A passive leader is more laissez-faire or hands-off and doesn’t really lead at all.

By taking the multifactor leadership questionnaire, one might determine where they fit in to the transformational leadership theory. By taking this assessment, I learned that I am more transformational than the other two. By being more transformational, I tend to lift people up and show them what to do rather than dangle rewards to get them to accomplish something or avoid helping them completely.

Authentic Leadership

How many of us can relate to being authentic and true to self? Authentic leadership looks at leadership and whether it is “genuine and real” (Northouse, 2016, p.195). This really is all about ethical leadership and the fact that people are looking to trust someone in this leadership role. Part of being authentic is to learn and share through personal experiences to others around you. For instance, my daughter has a disability and I’m often drawn to help kids and parents through situations they may encounter. By sharing my story and struggles when my daughter was younger, I provide hope and they can see my true or authentic self here to help them along the way.

So are you an authentic leader? You can take the authentic leadership self-assessment like I did and find out. I score high on the assessment overall, but did notice that there are a few areas, balanced processing and relational transparency, that could be improved upon for me to improve my authentic leadership style.

Servant Leadership

Do you care about others? Then you might just have some servant leadership in you. This topic is a little harder to understand as most of us think of servants as followers, but here the servant is the leader. A trickle-down effect occurs here when people observe others doing something kind to help and then they do similar acts of kindness. You might remember the movie, Pay it Forward. It is centered around this idea. A friend of mine had started a club at her kids elementary school called Random Acts of Kindness Kids and these RAKK students would do a lot of volunteer work and she was teaching them through servant leadership. I think my favorite part of our learning about servant leadership was hearing Tom Peters ask “what have you done to be of service to someone in the past day?” That really made me stop and think about my actions today and whether or not I helped someone out. It is the idea of putting service before self that makes a good servant leader.

If you are curious about your servant leadership qualities, check out the servant leadership questionnaire and see how you score. Overall I scored high, particularly in behaving ethically and conceptual skills. Those two didn’t surprise me being an engineering and having to take an ethical oath and biannual ethics training. The lower empowering score though is challenging me to really take a look at my actions and see whom I can empower or be the unsung hero towards to make their day better.

Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive leadership really is what it says, helping others adapt to changes in their environment, such as a project team or department. This type of leaders needs to maintain follower focus on the tasks and goals amongst all of the changes and curve balls thrown their way. Heifetz used the analogy of a pressure cooker (2011). Think about it…everything or everyone is working on something together and the leader is the pressure cooker, keeping everyone contained and on track to get to the end of the product, or the nice meal if you are in the pressure cooker.

The adaptive leadership questionnaire might help determine how adaptive you are as a leader. I scored high on get on the balcony, regulate distress, and maintain disciplined attention. One category was medium high: protect leadership voices from below. There were two areas that scored medium low: identify the adaptive challenge and give the work back to the people. Understanding my scores will give me areas to work on to be more adaptive in my leadership skills.

Followership

This topic blends well with the book I told you about last week. None of us can be leaders without having followers so it really is an important aspect of leadership that is barely studied. I watched a TedTalk by Jane Bentley (2017), which I’ve listed below, where she talks about how we are all born to follow and she provides a great musical example.

As this is a newer topic, it is still being studied, but there is a followership questionnaire if you want to see what kind of follower you are. I scored an exemplary followership style, high on both independent thinking and active engagement. I’ve always tried to use my training and talents to move things in the right direction, with little accolades needed. Doing what is right has always been my motto, regardless if I was leading or following.

Hope you have learned more about different leadership styles. It is interesting to see how they can all be applied to different situations in our life. Do you relate to one? If so, comment below. I leave you with this clip from “Pay it Forward” (2011) and ask “how are you going to change the world?”: