How Leadership Style Assessments Drive Organisational Success

Leadership is the lifeblood of any business. A leader’s style can drive a team to greatness or act as a deterrent to creativity and productivity. Everything from how a leader communicates and delegates tasks to their decision-making directly influences a company’s efficiency and performance. But how can leaders better understand their style of leadership to improve and support their teams most effectively? Through leadership style assessments.

What Are Leadership Style Assessments?

Leadership style assessments provide focused reflection to clarify a leader’s strengths, limitations, and potential growth areas. By helping the individual better understand how they make decisions, communicate, and use emotional intelligence, these assessments paint a realistic picture of their abilities.

They know their strengths, they know their preferences, but leadership style assessments can help reveal things they may have never imagined. Cycle executives aren’t the only business leaders who can benefit from leadership style assessments — far from it.

Understanding Different Leadership Styles

• Transformational Leaders: Aim to inspire and motivate employees while making changes within an organization. Innovators who focus on creative solutions and transformational leaders encourage their teams to think outside of the box.
• Transactional Leaders: Focus on rewards and penalties to guide their teams, offering a well-established understanding of what and when to expect it.

• Servant Leaders: Focuses on employees first and the organization’s goals second. The goal is to create a positive environment while promoting inclusivity and motivation.

Personality tests help clarify an individual’s style of leadership by helping executives, managers, and business owners get to know themselves better, including their unconscious bias or perspective and how they often impact their teams.

Leadership style assessments help leaders raise their self-awareness. With insights into their most common operating modes, leaders learn to recognize the patterns that can impact — or enhance — their ability to perform.

Improving Self-Awareness and Adaptability

A leader who primarily exercises transactional leadership may discover a need to infuse some elements of transformational leadership to spark creativity. A Servant leader may determine that they need to counterbalance their capacity for empathy with the right amount of assertion to meet the organization’s goals.

• Increased ability to adapt: Adapting is a critical component of leadership. By equipping leaders with a better understanding of their style, leadership style assessments teach leaders how to adapt their style to the needs of their team in real-time, creating a flexible and more responsive style of leadership.
• Increased effectiveness in communication and relationship-building: When a leader understands their style, they are better able to engage in two-way communication and build strong relationships with their team. Given that leadership style assessments are transparent, leaders are able to lead from a place of understanding — and to signal to their team when to expect less- or more empathy in certain situations.

Enhancing Team Collaboration and Morale

A transformational leader with a team accustomed to predictable outcomes, for example, may gauge the team’s preference for more routine-friendly work conditions. With this insight in hand, a person high in transformational leadership can skillfully adopt transactional leadership behaviors, such as creating expectations and providing feedback relative to meeting those expectations.

Through the leader’s newfound ability to harmonize performance expectations with the team’s operating environment, morale, productivity, and collaboration can thrive, creating a natural workplace environment where everyone feels in sync during the workday.

• Increased team performance: Leadership style also comes down to meeting a team where it is. Leadership style assessments can unlock tailored insights that help a leader understand how they can shift their approach to address challenge areas within a team or workgroup.

• Increased leadership development: Many organizations use leadership style assessments as part of leadership development programs.

Supporting Leadership Development

Because understanding leadership style creates open lanes for leadership development discussions, it only makes sense that these programs drive further development in the areas of strength and opportunity disclosed through the assessment.

The newfound insight into an individual’s or team’s leadership style can also help an organization mitigate risk across its various workgroups by identifying future leaders who possess an abundance of certain styles, establishing a foundation for development in other desired categories.

• Increased implementation of goal-based strategies: Leadership looks different for every team and every situation. Given that leadership style assessments unlock insights that drive development, it stands to reason that using these insights to guide leadership strategy can help uphold specific team objectives and characteristics.

A high-growth organization, for example, may task a leader to help improve team performance during a high-pressure project. Rather than leading with a cookie-cutter approach, the leader can lead with intention by employing the most effective style for that particular subset of difficult circumstances: directive leadership, supportive leadership, or collaborative leadership.

Customising Leadership Strategies

In this way, a leader can craft an approach that not only generates the desired leadership results but also produces sustainable conditions for team well-being after the workday ends.

• Increased arsenal of leadership best practices: Leadership style assessments can act as a North Star for leaders navigating the complexities of leading large, burgeoning organizations in a global economy.

Leadership style assessments are much more than evaluation tools. They are about giving you the clarity, agility, and team strength that will enable you to lead at your best.

Embracing Leadership Style Assessments

The organizations that invest in leadership style assessments. Build a culture of self-understanding and improvement. They build teams that collaborate more effectively and are more adaptable to change. Whether you are building a team, starting a start-up, or running a global brand, understanding your leadership style will help you facilitate change.

Ready to understand how leadership style assessments can help you in your leadership journey? To help you build an organization that’s high performing and that people want to work in. A team that is customer-centric and driving for results. Then, let’s go.