If you’re using the Law of Attraction to start your own business or are working hard to climb the career ladder, it’s so important to know how to be a leader.
Of course, your natural passion and enthusiasm are vital starting points. It’s also useful to think about the specific leadership style you want to cultivate.
There are six main ways to manage a team successfully and be a leader at work. They are all effective at different times. Think about which suits you best, and which are likely to be useful to you most often.
If you take the Cheetah approach to manage a team, you place a premium on moving through tasks as quickly as possible.
You are very focused on specific objectives and outcomes, and on creating an atmosphere of intense productivity.
This is an excellent leadership style when you’re working to a tight deadline. It can also create both personal and professional growth at a very fast rate.
That being said, if this strategy is used consistently it can lead you and your team to burn out.
It can also reduce people’s interest in the work tasks themselves over time. This may actually reduce work quality in the longer term.
Therefore, it needs to be combined with styles that keep everyone’s eyes on the prize.
When you adopt the Visionary role whilst managing a team, you have an intense and vivid sense of what you want to create in your business or company and you make an effort to share this with everyone who works for you.
This can create a wonderful sense of cohesion in the group. Plus, keep morale high.
The only cautionary note about the Visionary management style is that it absolutely requires you to be clear about your aims.
Otherwise, you are asking everyone to buy into an implausible goal, which leads to doubt in your leadership skills.
This is an approach best mixed with more practical styles when appropriate.
3. The InstructorBeing an Instructor is all about being honest and direct, never hedging about anything or spending time finessing your words. This approach promotes excellent crisis management, so it’s a good one to switch to when met with an unexpected challenge.
It ensures everyone knows exactly what has to be done.
On the other hand, a default Instructor style comes with the risk of hurting people’s feelings, making them feel under-appreciated or even incompetent.
So, consider keeping it in reserve without making it your main management strategy. It is one to pull out when things get serious and the ends really do justify the means.
For those who care a lot about treating others equally, the Egalitarian is the ideal management style.
You ask for each person’s opinion, think about how your decisions can have the most positive outcome for the largest number of people, and empower your employees by ensuring they are aware of their own importance.
However, if you opt for the Egalitarian way of being, it’s worth being careful about who you hire (and therefore designing a very thorough interviewing process).
If you have employees who aren’t competent experts, they will combine with your generous management style in a way that ends up wasting your valuable time.
If you adopt the Lover style when managing a team, you believe that the interpersonal relationships in your group are of central importance and devote a lot of resources to developing and maintaining them.
This can improve morale and create lasting bonds. People will likely be keen to go above and beyond at work because they truly care about each other.
Just be sure that you don’t take the Lover approach exclusively. It turns the focus so far away from goals that you might end up with a happy team who don’t actually know what they’re doing!
It’s the type of style that’s best combined with something like the Cheetah or the Instructor.
The Lover lays the groundwork so that switching to these more pragmatic styles takes less of a toll on employee well-being.
When you fall into the role of the Teacher whilst managing a team, you promote personal and professional growth by figuring out the strengths and weaknesses of those working under you.
You give them new opportunities to thrive and apply them where they’re most effective, which generally makes them feel good and cared for as well as respectfully challenged.
On the other hand, look out for those who don’t really want to be pushed to develop, or at least don’t want to be pressured into growth right now.
You could create troubled relationships if you take the Teacher role too far.
