The Ultimate Leadership Style

I love leadership. But when I began, I didn’t even know what a leadership style was.

Way back when I was 15, a friend from church loaned me a book, Hand Me Another Brick: How Effective Leaders Motivate Themselves and Others, by the Christian author, Charles R. Swindoll. That book is a practical guide to leadership based on one book in the Bible.

From the moment I started reading it, I was hooked on leadership.

In the time since—a short 37 years—I’ve read a lot more about leadership and I’ve applied what I’ve learned to different leadership opportunities. Tonight, I’m going to share with you three lessons I’ve learned about leadership that will help you develop the ultimate leadership style.

Leaders Learn How to Be Leaders

Before we get into that, here’s a new definition of leadership for 2022 I came up with earlier this year for a LinkedIn post:

Leadership is getting a result while ensuring everyone has a great time along the way.

Daniel G. Taylor

Perhaps the earliest thing I learned about leadership is this: leaders learn how to be leaders. No one is born a leader.

Sure, some people are naturally charismatic, a style that gets equated with leadership because people are naturally attracted and drawn to such people. But you don’t need to be charismatic to be a leader.

What does it take to be a leader? All it takes is to develop a single leadership style.

Daniel G. Taylor

The first leadership role I had was as a teen leader in my church’s youth ministry. The first leadership style I developed was an altruistic one, based on moral strength and listening skills. I was expected to model behaviour that the people I was leading would aspire to follow.

Think about it like this. You’ve already developed a way to influence someone or a group of people to get a desired result. And you went about doing that the same way you did everything else you’ve mastered: you learned something.

What I’m going to urge you to do in this article is to develop several dominant leadership styles. That’s your takeaway.

When I did the Toastmasters “Discover Your Leadership Style” assessment for a talk on this topic, I found that while I have one style that has a score of 24, I also have two styles with a score of 23, and two more styles with a score of 22. The difference between those scores is so minor as to be irrelevant. I don’t have one dominant leadership style, I have five dominant leadership styles—and developing that many styles has been a deliberate strategy on my part.

You can watch my talk, “The Ultimate Leadership Style” here:

And all of the above leads to my second point.

Leaders Learn New Leadership Styles to Meet the Needs of Their Team

Every leadership style has a time when it’s not the most effective style to use. You can find your leadership style by taking this free assessment from the University of Southern California.

Sometimes, the best approach is to get buy-in from everyone on your team. At other times, time doesn’t permit that style and you need to take use the authoritative style and dictate what needs to be done.

For example, let me tell you a story from my time as President of City Centre Toastmasters. That club has always been a multicultural club. Different cultures have different ways of approaching leadership. I found that in our club leadership meetings, our Chinese members weren’t speaking up.

They came from a culture where you withheld your own opinion so you didn’t make leaders look bad in public. The concept is called “saving face.”

So what I did was arrange one-on-one catch-ups, and I found that when I used a coaching style, those same Chinese members shared ideas—and brilliant ones.

You have two approaches for developing new leadership styles. The first is to develop a new style as the need arises. The second is to always learn new styles, so you have a toolkit ready to meet any need.

Leaders are Readers

And how do you constantly learn new styles? It comes down to something you’ve probably heard before and my third and final point: Leaders are readers.

Leaders know the value of ongoing learning, whether that’s practical leadership skills from how-to books or biographies of the greatest leaders from throughout history.

Let me tell you the story of just one of the prominent leaders from history known as a reader: Napoleon. Napoleon had a personal librarian. Every time he went out to a battle, Napoleon took a portable library with him. But even when he was starting out, because of the extent of his knowledge gained from reading, his superiors entrusted Napoleon with an unusual amount of responsibility for one so young.

This begs the question: Are you a reader? And by being a reader, I don’t mean audiobooks. That’s not reading, that’s listening. Completely different thing; a completely different mental skill set. What I mean when I say are you a reader is, do you make time to sit down and read a book each day?

If you’re looking for book recommendations, each month I publish an email newsletter, The Leader’s Bookshelf, with my reviews of what I’ve read in the previous month. To get this newsletter—and my weekly email newsletter—please fill out the form below.

So let’s come back to this idea of the ultimate leadership style.

Conclusion: Learn New Leadership Styles to Become an Outstanding Leader

What is the ultimate leadership style? The ultimate leadership style is one where you have a repertoire of different styles you can call on to meet the needs of your team at the moment.

In conclusion, leaders learn how to be leaders. No one is born a leader. A good leader develops one leadership style. But one style gives you all the upsides and counters none of the downsides of that particular style. An outstanding leader, therefore, constantly seeks to develop new leadership styles so they become strong in the weaknesses of their dominant style.

So let me ask you: Do you want to be a good leader or an outstanding one?