Lead with purpose

Many times in my coaching and consulting work I encounter leaders who have stumbled into their leadership roles. They might be entrepreneurs whose great idea blossomed into a company with numerous employees. Or perhaps they were promoted to a leadership role in an organization because of their technical expertise, rather than their outstanding people and managerial skills. However, being talented at what you do (i.e. outstanding engineers, project managers, sales) does not necessarily translate into being competent in motivating and leading other individuals to a mutual goal.

Furthermore, even though leadership training and educational development programs are offered within a company, I suggest that many of these initiatives are too late to make the necessary impact on your value as a leader. They might enhance your skills, but your approach to your role needs to be carefully considered before you ever direct the actions of one employee. If you are even contemplating assuming a management position in your organization, your thoughts and behaviors need to be purposeful from day one. The first step in being an effective leader is deciding how you want to show up in this new role and acting accordingly. You need to think about not only what type of leader you want to be, but how to be open and flexible to modify your behavior based on the situations and people you need to manage.

Lewin's leadership styles
Although much time and effort has been spent defining leadership styles, the original research in this area was done by Kurt Lewin, in 1939. He defined three basic leadership approaches that remain relevant today. They are: autocratic leadership, democratic leadership and laissez-faire leadership.