Leadership

Today's blog post is an assigned topic dealing with leadership. The topic in particular is below:

How do you interact with others? What is your leadership style? How does that affect the team around you?

How Do You Interact With Others?
In my professional life I have always striven to embody the traits I most admire in others. Politeness, helpfulness, openness, analysis/thoughtfulness, and confidence are the attributes that I strive to emanate in professional settings. These attributes are applicable to every level of enterprise and would be the foundation for my leadership style.

What is Your Leadership Style?
To answer this question, the optimal approach going to be one that breaks down the aforementioned attributes and applies them to potential future leadership positions.

Politeness:
While this should go without saying, in my somewhat brief career I have already witnessed firsthand rude/boorish behavior from people in positions of leadership. The best leaders do not make subordinates feel like subordinates. A glowing example of this is my current CFO. This guy is basically the 2nd most powerful person in a gigantic corporation and he always says "hello" and makes you feel like a valued employee/contributor/person instead of a peon. If he can be polite there is no reason why anyone up and down the ladder in this company or other companies can not manage it as well.

Helpfulness and Openness:
I combined these two because they kind of go hand in hand as one typically needs to be open in order to be helpful and vice versa. I can see helpfulness being less prominent as one ascends the proverbial corporate ladder as actually helping individual people becomes harder to do as more people end up under your leadership umbrella. Openness however never has to have its role diminished. Being transparent with decisions and thought processes, being approachable, and willing to engage with others are all forms of openness that can permeate all levels of leadership. Again, I must cite my current CFO as a beacon of openness. First he opened himself up to email questions about finance, then he not only answered my specific email question but also invited me into his office for a brief meeting to go over the answer in more detail and give me the proverbial bird's eye view of the financial machinations of my company.

Confidence:
Genuine confidence is the confluence of several factors which give a good leader that intangible "leader" quality, as opposed to simply being an excellent worker/team member. When the confidence is derived from having qualities, experience, knowledge, and skill that surpasses one's peers, then the confidence is justified and the leader belongs in his position of authority. When the confidence is derived from being in a position of authority, then it is a hollow and unfounded arrogance and one of the most poisonous traits a leader can possess. A confident leader will own what he says, confident that his prior work, experience, and knowledge  helps ensure that what he says is correct. An arrogant leader waffles on what he says or outright disowns it in an effort to save face. Confidence begets another "virtue" and that is accountability. If you are confident in your words or your work, you will hold yourself accountable for them, if you lack confidence you will attempt to shield yourself from accountability.

Analyses/Thoughtfulness:
The other attributes are probably universal and applicable to any good leader. Where my personal style originates, or in other words, how I differentiate myself as a potential leader is through my analytical approach to the world. I essentially operate under following assumptions; first, there always is an answer and second, the answer can be known through analysis. Data mining, statistics, big data, predictive modeling, Monte Carlo Simulation, and any other unmentioned analytical and mathematical tool all form the basis for my decision making processes. Analysis (breaking things down) allows for synthesis (building things up) which allows for innovation. My innovative contributions to my current employer have all come from combining disparate analytical tools to create new processes and methods.

How Do These Attributes Affect The Team Around Me?
While it would be tempting to align myself with like-minded individuals who placed emphasis on analysis, I think the best team members would be light on analytical affinity. The best team would bring other talents and disciplines to the table so that we all serve in a complementary role to each other. So my ideal team would have me and perhaps another one or two members handling the heavy lifting on analytical and technical endeavors while the deferring to our counterparts on less analytical tasks. While there is a cliche that analytical and intuitive mentalities tend to clash, I counter that apprehension with the other tenants of leadership. Clashes/conflicts can be very productive when the engaged parties work together to resolve issues and make forward progress. This is best brought about though openness, politeness, helpfulness, and confidence.