Your leadership philosophy is the way you lead, influence, and inspire others in your circle of influence or under your responsibility to grow, develop and/or achieve goals or milestones. It is using your personal style, knowledge, and experience to move a person or group in a particular direction, get from point A to point B or behave in a certain way
Have you thought about your own leadership philosophy? If you were to Google this topic you would find a number of articles and posts about the differences in leadership philosophy and how to develop one. This post is to get you to stop what you are doing and spend some time reflecting on who you are leading and where are you leading them to. You must recognize, whether you are leading your children, co-workers, people from your church or synagogue, community group or friends, you are doing so in a particular way. How you communicate with them, motivate, discipline, reward or define success all come into consideration.
Researching and writing down a personal leadership philosophy can be both fun and challenging. It can also be very rewarding if you take the time to find areas of improvement. Some of the terms you will encounter when researching leadership philosophy will include coach, mentor, delegator, strategic, autocratic, democratic, laissez faire and so on. Take some time now to sit and think about your own personal leadership style. Who you consider to be a good leader, real or fictional, and why? Did they actually accomplish their goals they set out to? I challenge you to write a list of 20 leaders you admire and examine why you admire them. Focus on specific actions taken to overcome obstacles or break new ground.
My own personal leadership philosophy is highly inspirational, and solutions oriented. I believe it is important to accomplish a few wins early to build up teamwork and “buy in” and then move on to very large tangible goals under a realistic timeline. The team should be inspired to work towards goals, so they self-motivate. Motivation on its own will wear off however when a teammate self-motivates, because they are inspired by the vision, often the reverse will happen, and they will motivate the leader.
You have to know where you are in order to get better.