Needing help!

Your go-to leadership style:ENERGIZER

You know how to create and articulate a strategic vision. Both amiable and determined, you generate energy and draw on the energy of people around you. As a result, you are good at building enthusiasm and inspiring strong efforts and performance in others. Colleagues are likely to find you cooperative, positive, and team-focused, and your leadership style may help them see the purpose and meaning in the task at hand. Nonetheless, your determination may at times blur into relentlessness, and you are so forceful in presenting your ideas that you may inadvertently steamroll through conversations with your team. So you may be perceived as charismatic and courageous, yet dismissive of people who don’t think like you.

Potential blind spots:

• Being patient. Your high-energy, future-focused approach compels people to get on board with your plans. But the same internal driver that constantly pushes you forward is likely to reject anything that might slow you down. Recognize that your impatience can be detrimental, particularly if it prevents you from reflecting deeply on solutions and listening carefully to input from others.

• Bringing others along with your thinking. Your ideas may be clear and well argued, but that doesn’t mean everyone agrees with them. And because of your magnetism and optimism, those around you may be content to follow you emotionally without fully understanding your logic. No one wants lemmings — so be sure everyone understands the whats, whys, and hows of your ideas, not just the emotions behind them.

• Encouraging dissent. You may be missing the opportunity to encourage constructive conflict that would lead to better ideas and protect against risks you haven’t anticipated. Ask people to take turns playing devil’s advocate in your meetings, to put your logic to the test.

• Tempering your unbridled optimism. Your natural enthusiasm may lead you to focus on best-case scenarios at the expense of thoroughly understanding the risks. Remember to ask yourself, “What’s the best — and worst — that could happen?”

• Wearing down your colleagues. You don’t just create energy in your dealings with colleagues — you also solicit it. People might, at times, find their interactions with you exhausting.

• Recognizing differences in others. You might think others would be more successful if only they were more passionate and energetic — more like you. But remember that diversity of thought and style can create a robust, well-balanced team or organization. In particular, make sure your team includes someone who is more methodical than you — this will help you put some process around your passion.

While you can improve in each of these areas, your natural or default style will resonate in certain work environments and fit less well in others. So you may want to seek out settings that play to your strengths, even as you work on areas for development to thrive in a broader range of contexts.

You’re likely to thrive if:

• Your employees need visionary, strategic leadership, as they might in a period of rapid growth or turmoil.

• People in your organization tend to exert influence through relationships.

• You work in a collaborative and purposeful environment, such as an NGO or a cause-driven nonprofit enterprise.

• Colleagues with low morale — for example, in a strategic or financial turnaround — need a dose of your positive perspective.

You may struggle if:

• You work in an environment where process skills matter more than people skills.

• Your organization values intellectual ideas and positional authority — and colleagues get impatient with more relational or intuitive styles.

• Colleagues focus so much on metrics and results that they gloss over how the results were generated, losing sight of the organization’s broader mission and purpose.

Supplemental style:PROVIDER

You are motivated by two different yet equally strong desires: to lead from the front and to take care of people around you. You are confident in your abilities, deeply loyal and committed to your colleagues, and filled with a sense of conviction — all characteristics that may be very appealing to followers. You are also likely to believe that your approach is the right one, and you are highly motivated to share it with those you are close to so that they will succeed. But your conviction can also lead to insular thinking, and others may find you intellectually distant or overly focused on your own perspective. Your team may see you as deeply caring and thoughtful, but also inflexible and convinced that your way is the only path forward.

Potential blind spots:

• Integrating differing viewpoints. Your compassion and listening skills have the effect of making your colleagues feel heard. Yet they may see that your actions don’t change in response to their suggestions. Try implementing a few of their ideas.

• Operating day-to-day. Your focus on higher-level strategy and relationship building probably overshadows your interest in the details of execution. Build processes and support systems (perhaps with the aid of a Harmonizer or a Producer) that keep you accountable.

• Forging personal relationships and remaining accessible. While you care deeply about providing for others, your colleagues may see your relationships as somewhat one-dimensional — that is, more student-to-teacher than peer-to-peer. Find opportunities to share more of yourself (your background and your thinking) so they can get to know you as a person.

While you can improve in each of these areas, your natural or default style will resonate in certain work environments and fit less well in others. So you may want to seek out settings that play to your strengths, even as you work on areas for development to thrive in a broader range of contexts.

You’re likely to thrive if:

• Others in your organization feel a strong need to belong — for instance, a relatively young workforce who would benefit from your mentoring and guidance.

• You work in an environment that expects and values a clearly defined, strongly held point of view.

• Your team needs a leader who can set a clear, deliberate path forward.

• Your organization specializes in a narrow market or field that can benefit from your way of doing things.

You may struggle if:

• Your personal vision and perspective will be regularly challenged — for instance, if you join a group of established veterans who will test you as a rite of passage.

• The situation requires a diverse group of individuals who can build on one another’s ideas to be successful.

• You are asked to adopt a methodology or approach that is unfamiliar or substantially different from your preferred way.

Supplemental style:FORECASTER

You’re a “learning” leader: You love gathering data, expanding your knowledge (often into disparate topics), and deepening your subject-matter expertise. You’re happiest when you have ample time and space to study information and synthesize observations, and chances are you’re adept at harnessing these skills to foresee events and trends that will affect your business. However, you tend to rely on intellectual ideas and arguments at the expense of emotional connections. Colleagues may see you as visionary and knowledgeable but less skilled at exercising personal influence to advance your ideas. People may also perceive you as too cautious in proceeding with an idea when you believe that the supporting data is limited.

Potential blind spots:

• Failing to get buy-in. Because interpersonal influence doesn’t come naturally to you, engaging stakeholders and getting their buy-in might be tough. Try to use both emotional and analytical persuasion techniques. Identify a few key relationships you can strengthen over time. That will help you develop political capital, which you’ll need in a crunch.

• Shifting gears. Your deep understanding of the facts, figures, and data supporting your ideas could lead you to become overly wedded to your own thinking. Should the organization choose other ideas over yours, you may have difficulty shifting gears. Use your intellectual rigor to understand why another approach was selected. Even if you still don’t wholeheartedly agree with the choice, do your best to move forward.

• Tolerating risk in unfamiliar situations. You have a real knack for anticipating trends, but you often hesitate to proceed without first gathering as much data as possible. In the meantime, business opportunities, and possibly the competition, may pass you by. Challenge yourself to act more decisively and stretch your tolerance for risk. Ask yourself: “Would more information really improve the quality of my decision?”

While you can improve in each of these areas, your natural or default style will resonate in certain work environments and fit less well in others. So you may want to seek out settings that play to your strengths, even as you work on areas for development to thrive in a broader range of contexts.

You’re likely to thrive if:

• The people who look to you for direction want a leader who has new ideas and intellectual capital, rather than someone who connects on an emotional level.

• Your organization is trying to be innovative and would benefit from thoughtful, strategic insights into future trends.

• You’re working in a place that needs deep subject-matter expertise in a particular area, perhaps at an engineering firm or in an R&D unit.

• You have the opportunity to create and improve products and processes.

You may struggle if:

• Executing on short-term results trumps generating new ideas and developing intellectual capital in your organization.

• You’re in a static environment that highly values tradition and has a limited appetite for strategic change.

• You’re asked to provide immediate input on new or unfamiliar topics, without access to data or time to reflect.

Click  here  to take this assessment again

Link: https://www.heidrick.com/Knowledge-Center/Article/What-is-your-leadership-signature