“Becoming a leader is synonymous with becoming yourself. It is precisely that simple and it is also that difficult.” – Warren Bennis

Being a leader means adapting a lot to the needs of your team members, but nevertheless everyone has a go-to style that is most inherent to them. My primary leadership style is a balance between composer and provider.

Wait, what is a composer or a provider?

As a composer, I love working independently using my creativity to solve problems. I do not back away from making decisions or changes, but heavily rely on both data and my intuition, as creating changes is a form of art for me. From my provider side, I am very action-oriented and driven to provide for others. By providing I mainly focus on bringing solutions, redesigning process and workflows, rearranging responsibilities inside the team according to the strength and interest of my people, etc. 

I fit well in environments where processes need building, the current way of working is not the most efficient one, and development and shaping need to take place. I enjoy mentoring newcomers and do 1:1 teaching to school professionals by working closely with them prior to their point of independence. 

Authenticity

One of my main strengths as a leader is staying authentic. I do read, learn, and try to implement ways that my mentors have suggested, but rather than mimicking someones else's leadership style I follow my intuition. This has helped me stay sincere and empathetic, which helps to engage with my team in open way and create a high trust environment. Critics say that as going against our natural inclinations can make us feel like impostors, we tend to latch on to authenticity as an excuse for sticking with what’s comfortable. Instead of either staying stuck in your old ways or imitating everything you see from your mentors, try taking in the new learned traits and behavior, but make them your own. Selectively borrowing traits from many is a process of modifying, blending, and improve. 

My leadership blindspots

• I focus a lot on working on the framework, designing the services, tuning the workflows, and then after introducing my team to new methods or materials for them to utilities, I expect my team to be very independent in getting acquainted with them and starting the implementation. Meaning I can overlook the details of their execution, as once I see my team-member being independent I have high expectations for them to keep to their learning mindset of adapting to new instructions. I do not enjoy checking up on people or in their work. 

• Adapting my way of guiding others through my thought process, as I tend to expect others to have as easy to realise and implement my new schemes or approach. Storytelling and tuning my way of delivering the reasoning are parts I need to concisely keep in my mind when introducing my new schemas.

• My relational orientation and desire to support others can make it hard for me to hold a firm line with my team to ensure they meet deadlines and expectations. I tend to be too supportive in situations where I instead should demand accountability. 

LEADING BY EXAMPLE

Looking at my current amazing team of makers I have to admit I have been lucky. Having a team of independent people who show accountability, take initiative, and keep up with the new implementations by never ceasing to utilize their change muscle. They ask difficult questions, they say straight out loud if something is not working for them, they expect me to keep ahead of emergencies but at the same time, they trust me with their professional growth, supporting them to advance in their knowledge and skillset. I enjoy leading my team and taking responsibility for service design and leading workflows. Hacking current ways of working, creating new revenue streams, working on forecasts, analysing data, creating, developing, implementing, and re-designing. Thanks to having space to utilize my primary leadership styles I have also found opportunities to enhance my coaching oriented, inspiring focused and emotional connections forming leadership side. Leading people is a never-ending learning process, yet it is the first time I take learning as seriously. As I could try to say and guide them in whatever way, but they will still at the end of the day be mostly following my example. Therefore I have never before felt as much responsibility to practice what I preach, as I create their normality by creating mine.