Management Style – Do You Know What Yours Is?

There is a saying “good leaders aren’t born, they’re made”. The same holds true for managers. People acquire their management style through learning from their previous managers, a training program or two, or for many of us, just plain old trial and error. Just like other aspects of life, you have probably picked up some good habits and some bad habits along the way.

Your Management Style is the characteristic way you go about managing people – the way you plan, give instructions, make decisions and relate to staff members – the way you influence and impact others.

We all tend to have patterns in the way we do things – some very stable and related to our personality preferences, some very flexible which we vary from situation to situation. Some we’ve just picked up through life experiences.

The important thing is to have an awareness of your management style – your way of relating and managing and what the strengths and weaknesses of this approach are.

It is useful to know your style and the particular behavioural and thinking patterns unique to you. At Great Managers® we believe that there is no one style that is the correct style as a leader or manager.

Whatever your Management Style, we all have leadership potential.

Strengthening your leadership means activating or actualising some pre-existing potential ability that is within you; the bringing out of latent strengths or minimising the impact of a weakness that may be blocking full effectiveness.

Effectiveness relates to individuals’ behaviour, their impact on the tasks over which they have control and other people, for whose fate in some way they have responsibility.

Great management is the result of a well-integrated understanding of one’s own and others’ personality preferences, behaviours, motivations and skills, coupled with the sensitive application of relevant management strategies, techniques and skills in ways appropriate to the needs of the particular situation.

So there is no one style of leadership that is the right style, nor one set of personality characteristics that is the correct set. To become more effective, managers must recognise and understand how their knowledge of leadership & management, knowledge of self, and understanding of others, can be best combined to bring about the desired outcomes and results in everything they do.

Success as a manager or leader, and success in life has been, is now, and will continue to be a function of how well people work and relate to each other.

Success in managing is wholly dependent upon the capacity to build and sustain those human relationships that enable people to get extraordinary things done on a regular basis.

You can learn more about your Management style and develop that capacity in the Great Managers® Academy.