Reflective Essay On Leadership Styles

Over the course of my professional career in different organizations in the past three years, I have worked under many managers. This has been a learning curve for me to understand the different managing styles and leadership characteristics of people. One of the managers whom I worked under, was the lead in a government project which also happened to be my last project before I took a break for continuing my studies, is a person I admire till date. I learned several life lessons in addition to the technical subject associated with the industry. This paper demonstrates the leadership styles exhibited by my manager with suitable examples. There was a huge and a high pressure government project which had to be completed in a short span of time. It had several teams associated with different

The project had two managers of which I directly reported to one of them. The leadership styles exhibited by my manager were authoritative and affiliative. As a leader of a huge project, he was clear with the goals combined with the path to achieve them. One of his distinctive ability was to convert his thinking to workable actions which resulted in the successful completion of tasks before the deadlines. Each and every team member knew what they had to do and when they had to do. This was the most critical element in a project. There was a mutual co-ordination among the team members that culminated to results. “We were always trying to figure out why our sales were down last week. We had the whole company looking backward instead of figuring out what we had to do tomorrow” – Tom (Daniel Goleman, Leadership that gets Results, 2000). At times of failures, he provided the team members with a feedback which was neutral. These feedbacks directly had an impact on our working progress. He was one such person who was ready to forgo the ideal situation that