Knowing yourself as a leader

Abstract

Learning objectives After reading this chapter you should be able to: ☑describe and reflect on your personality and interpret the consequences for your leadership approach ☑understand and be able to apply the concept of leadership traits to yourself and others ☑understand and be able to apply the concept of leadership styles to yourself and others ☑appreciate the role of communication and impression management to leadership ☑understand the role of emotional intelligence in leading others ☑engage in the debate about the impact of gender on approaches to leadership. Introduction This chapter encourages you to think about and evaluate yourself as a leader. By exploring several of the basic leadership concepts and theories it provides you with some tools for describing and analysing your leadership approach. The chapter starts by considering your personality, arguing that personality has implications for the leadership approaches with which we feel most comfortable, both in terms of adoption of our own leadership style and in terms of the leadership that we prefer from others. The two subsequent sections introduce traditional approaches to discussing leadership using leadership traits and styles. Although some would argue that these approaches are simplistic they are still widely used in popular discussion of leadership and can help us to think about what we mean by leadership. The next sections explore key aspects of leadership approaches including communication and emotional intelligence. Finally the chapter opens the debate on the issue of gender in leadership. Personality and leadership Before we can understand the approaches that we and others adopt as leaders it is important to understand leaders and potential leaders as people. Theories about personality are one way of understanding who we are, how to describe ourselves, and recognizing how we differ from others. Personality describes the properties of our behaviour that are stable and enduring and which distinguish us from others. There is a widespread belief that personality is related to job performance and career success. A number of personality theorists have attempted to create a description of the components and structure of personality. There are two main approaches, those that focus on personality types and those that focus on personality traits.