What's the best leadership style out there? The one you create for yourself. Welcome back, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. There's so much information on leadership styles out there that it's overwhelming. Today I've got five tips for you on how to create your own leadership style. And stay tuned to the end, I'm gonna give you a link where you can download our guide to leadership styles and give you a worksheet where you can work on some of the things that we talk about in the video to develop your own unique personal leadership style. You can fill an entire library and probably then some with all the books that are written about leadership styles. And every book says their leadership style is the best and will give you a lot of reasons why. I've seen a lot of these leadership styles come and go through my career in the Air Force and beyond. And they all have their pros and cons, they all have their benefits. But the leaders I've respected the most throughout my career are the ones who have developed their own unique leadership style based on their values, their personality and the kind of leader they wanted to be. When we try to adopt someone else's style and we try to take a leadership style, lock, stock and barrel out of a book without putting it through that filter, that's when we start to give that queasy feeling in the pit of our stomach and start to second guess our styles and wonder if our words and our actions are starting to match. Now there's always room for personal growth and development. Remember, there's no finish lines in leadership. Leadership is a study and a discipline and we're always striving and learning to be the best leader we can be. But when we adopt a style straight out of a book, we're really not serving ourselves or the people we're trying to lead. Today, these tips I'm gonna give you will help get you thinking consciously about what kind of leader you wanna be, what kind of leader you are today and where you wanna go in the future. And if you look in the description for the notes for this video, you'll see that there's a link to download a guide that talks about some of the common leadership styles that are out there and a little worksheet piece that'll help you apply some of the lessons in this video. Tip number one for developing your own personal leadership style is to know your values. Our values are our guiding principles for life and this is very important to what kind of leader we are and what kind of leader we want to be. And they come from a lot of different sources. They come from parents, teachers, churches, groups we've been a part of. They've all instilled and impressed upon our values in some way. And values may be stated or unstated and when they're stated, that makes life very easy. But when they're unstated, it makes it a little more complicated to try to communicate what you're getting across. So that's why it's very important for us to be able to know our values and to be able to state our values to others. In addition to our own personal values, we all have to deal with organizational values. Whatever organization you're part of is gonna have its own set of values. And again, these may be stated or unstated. When it's unstated, it's very confusing for members of the organization to know what they should be prioritizing in terms of values. In the extreme case, sometimes the values are stated but they're not practiced by the leadership. And we've seen that a lot in the news lately where companies have had some stated values but their leadership, their senior leadership hasn't really lived up to them and that's kind of gotten them in trouble to the point where some people have lost their jobs or even had some worst consequences that go with that. I had a really good mentor and I'm sure you've heard me say this before, you're probably tired of hearing it but he always said values aren't just a poster you put up on the wall, we have to practice and we have to live to them. So it's very important as leaders, one of our jobs is to be able to understand our own values, to be able to understand our organizational values and to find a way to reconcile any differences between those so that we can make consistent decisions and communicate values clearly to our team and have them go on and do the mission. And if you're looking for some help trying to determine your values, there'll be a link down in the description where you'll be able to go do an exercise, it'll link you to an exercise you can do, quick 20, 30 minute exercise where you can work through what your values are and kind of get them clearly stated so you can state them to others. Tip number two is to determine the key leadership traits you need to live to your values. Now traits are parts of our personality, they're not exactly our values but they're not exactly skills which we'll talk about later. They're key parts of our personality and they may be things that we're born with or they may be things that we've developed over time. And some people will say that traits can't be changed, you're born with your personality traits and you can't change them. I don't think that's true. I think it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of conscious decision to go develop a trait or to change a bad trait. Think of it like developing a habit, developing a new habit or trying to change a bad habit. It might take you somewhere between 60, 90, 120 days to really develop that habit and the same can be for personality traits. We can develop these. These are things that you might hear people say honesty, decisiveness, commitment. Even humor can be considered a trait that could be an important key leadership trait. Humor is certainly one that is part of my leadership style. And so it's important to determine in order to live to our values what traits we need to live to our values and if we're missing some of those traits or maybe we have some traits that don't serve those values take steps to modify those traits, modify that behavior, change those habits. Next we're gonna talk about skills. Skills are the things you need, the tools, the nuts and bolts tools you need to be able to have to go execute on living up to your traits and living up to your values. And these are all kinds of things. Communication, public speaking skills, accounting, finance, computer programming, whatever skills you need to be able to get your mission done and to be able to get your job done effectively as a manager and a leader. And the skills that got you to be a manager and leader being really good at your job being a really good technician being the best at the job in the team may not be the same skills you need to be an effective leader. You may need to work on your work communication style. You may need to think through your organizational and management skills. You may need to have better time management than you had in the past. So certainly the skills that got you there will serve you to some degree and it's always great to have great technical skills that the members of your team have so you can be smart about what they're doing. But these skills that we're talking about here are a little bit softer skills. Those leadership management communication skills, the diplomatic skills, the political skills that everyone hates politics, but it's an important part of leadership and an important part of business sometimes is being able to converse and understand the big picture of politics of what's going on. So tip number three is to go understand those nuts and bolts skills you're gonna need to develop in order to be successful at exhibiting your behavioral traits you need, your key leadership traits and living up to your values. Again, this is all in the service of trying to get our words and our actions to match so we can have a consistent leadership style and really give good guidance and help our team get their mission done. Tip number four for developing your own personal leadership style is to understand your personal communication style. We could do a whole video on this later on its own but it's really important to understand your communication style on how you come across to other people because they're gonna be impacted, they're gonna go do things based on how you communicate. So first question is do you listen more than you talk? This is something all leaders should really do and I'll be the first one to admit that I really struggle with this one. This requires a lot of conscious effort for me to sit and listen and not interrupt and try to throw out ideas while other people are telling me what's going on. One of the other things I really struggle with is I do a lot of thinking out loud and there's nothing wrong with that but I do a lot of thinking out loud to foster discussion, throw out ideas and try to get to the best solution so we can all talk about it and get to the best solution. The challenge with that is it can be really confusing for people as to what you want and what you want them to go do so one of the things I need to do in recognizing that's part of my communication style is to think out loud is to, at the end of every discussion, summarize, okay, this is what we talked about, this is what we decided and this is what we're all gonna go forth and take action on so that people don't start heading off in the wrong direction because there was confusion about what I said earlier in the conversation with what somebody said later in the conversation. I worked with someone back when I was in the Air Force and she had worked on a senior leader's staff and they got really frustrated in the beginning working with him when he came in because he'd tell them to go do something and then they'd go do it, being good Air Force officers, they'd go do it and then they'd come back and say, I didn't really want you to do that so they kind of developed a rule, an unspoken rule among them, they never told the boss about this, I think they maybe told him about it later on but until he said he wanted them to do something three times, they would wait for that third time before they would go and do it because they found that was usually pretty safe and he said he wanted something done for the third time, that was when they could go do it and that indicated he was really committed to it so they could go use their time wisely and go work on what he needed them to work on. The last tip I have for you today for developing your own personal leadership style is to clearly understand your priorities. Now, if you're a leader or a manager, getting your mission done is almost certainly your number one priority but what comes after that? As you've heard me and other people say before, if everything is important then nothing's important, right? So what comes after getting your mission done? Is it developing the future leaders on your team? Is it efficiency? Is it building a sense of camaraderie on your team? Those are all fine answers and there's no right answer to what your priority should be. They need to come from you and what you believe is important but it's important to take some time and some conscious effort and think about what are your priorities, make a list and communicate that effectively and clearly to your team. Once you've communicated that to your team, now they can start to make decisions on, okay, the boss gave me these two things to do so I'm gonna choose A over B because A fits with his priorities more than B does. I'm still gonna get both done, A is just gonna get done first. And it's okay to let your priorities shift over time.  You don't wanna be changing priorities on a daily basis but as events warrant, as time goes on, you may find that what was a priority to you six months ago may not be as much a priority today and that's okay. What's important is to re-rack and stack that list and clearly communicate back to your team what the new priorities are. I hope I've convinced you today that developing your own personal leadership style is going to be more effective for you than just grabbing a leadership style out of a book you've read or mimicking someone else. And that's not to say their leadership styles are bad. We should always be looking to leaders we respect and admire for the best parts of their leadership style that are going to work for us as well as getting practical advice, whether it's from academic research or some of the other leadership books that are out there. That's all advice that we should include into our leadership style. In the download for this video, we're gonna list some of the common leadership styles and some of the pros and cons that go along with them to give you a place to get started on developing your own leadership style. There's also a worksheet in there where you can start to write down what your values are, what leadership traits you think you need and what skills you're going to need as well as assess your communication style and priorities like we talked about in the video. So we've given you a little worksheet to get started on that. Don't worry if you can't figure out your own leadership style in one sitting. It takes years and years to really figure out your leadership style and get comfortable with it. But this video and the worksheet's gonna be a good place to start to figure out your values, your traits, your communication style, all those things we talked about. So it will take some time and self-reflection, but just keep asking yourself the questions we always ask ourselves here, who am I and what kind of leader do I want to be? If you can keep asking yourself those questions and start to get to those answers, I think you'll do just fine. If you found this helpful, please like, comment and share it with a friend or coworker. Click on that link below in the description. That'll let you download the guide and worksheet I talked about in this video. And if you have any business or leadership questions or even a topic you'd like us to do a video on, leave us a comment below. We'd love to hear from you or email us at info at evilgeniusleadership.com. Evilgeniusleadership.com is also where you can find out about our coaching and training program. So if you're looking for some one-on-one coaching or some training for your team, that your company or organization, again, we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us and we'll set you up for the free consultation to see how we can help you. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.