Leadership Styles for Optimum ResultsWhy is Leadership Style Important?One of the most significant strengths of an effective leader is the ability to create a positive work climate. In an outstanding organizational climate, people are energized to do their best work, free of unnecessary distractions. Climates that energize workers to produce their very best can improve profit by as much as 30 percent. Even more important, however, is the effect of an organization’s leader on its climate. Up to 70 percent of an employee’s perception of organizational climate can be traced directly to the actions of the organization’s leader. More than anyone else, the boss creates the conditions that determine people’s ability to work well.
What is Leadership Style?Leadership style refers to the patterns of behaviors an individual leader uses across a full range of managerial and leadership situations. Although leaders face an unlimited range of leadership situations, studies have shown that there are six basic leadership styles that leaders apply to the situations they encounter. These behaviors have an important impact on people and affect their performance. Research on a global database of over 3,000 executives showed that leaders who used styles with a positive emotional impact on their employees saw better financial results than those who did not. Perhaps more importantly, leaders with the best results didn’t practice just one particular style - they used different styles, depending upon the business situation.
How We Measure Your Leadership Style?Understanding your behavioral style as a leader is key to improving your leadership abilities and the results that you are able to achieve through others. It is useful for you to identify the pattern of behaviors that you intend to use, however it is even more important to gather feedback about how your style affects others. To gather these data we use a 360-degree online instrument, The Inventory of Leadership Styles (ILS). It was pioneered in the 1960's at Harvard Business School as a diagnostic tool to assess leaders' effectiveness in creating positive climates. The ILS has been refined over 35 years, based upon research by the Hay Group, and includes a sample of over 10,000 worldwide leaders. The output of the ILS includes a comparison report of the difference between the leadership styles you report that you use and the leadership styles your raters experience. Your scores are compared with norms established by the worldwide database and enable you to compare your leadership style scores with those of leaders from other organizations. The report indicates your primary and back-up styles, as well as suggestions for improving each style. How We Use the ILS for Client Results The Inventory of Leadership Styles provides useful assessment data as a foundation for building flexibility into a leader’s way of leading and achieving optimal results, Daniel Goleman has reported that emotional intelligence competencies form the basis for an effective leadership style ("Leadership that Gets Results," Harvard Business Review, 2001.). Truly effective leaders are emotionally intelligent.
This leadership model links the underlying emotional intelligence capabilities that each style requires, and identifies the causal link of each style with outcomes - allowing us to see how each style actually affects climate, and therefore performance.
When working with leadership teams, we combine the results of the Organizational Climate Survey (OCS) with the Inventory of Leadership Styles (ILS) to more clearly identify the impact of the team’s leadership style upon the work environment as perceived by the employees. The leadership team can then identify gaps in both their behaviors and the characteristics of the work environment, which are impacting organizational performance. | 
