This part of the Leadership pathway begins with you considering your own leadership style and preferences, before moving on to consider how these impact on a team. The Learning is broken into three key areas – Click through the green bars to access them below
Leading yourself
Leading others
Leading within an organisation.
Leading Yourself
Self leadership Is all about finding out how you personally lead and your own values. Values are an important part of leadership as they guide your decision making.
You will find out more about self-leadership and consider your own leadership style as you progress through this section.
In addition you will also consider the importance of resilience.
A key piece of learning in this section is the opportunity to find out what drives you and what your values are.
Before progressing through this section:
Have a think about what motivates you at work.
Write down what is important to you. This could look like honesty, courage, fun, trust – or anything else. Chat with colleagues about their values too if you need inspiration.
Make a list of your values and revist these over time. How do your values change? How do your actions align to your values?
Leadership Styles:
Finding out about your leadership style is really important.
Below is a list of different leadership styles
1. As you read through them, can you see yourself in any of the descriptions?
2. Does one description strongly match you or do you think you are a mix?
Don’t worry there are no right or wrong answers – rather points to consider as you start your leadership journey.
Six Leadership Styles
Democratic
This style’s impact on organizational climate is not as high as you might imagine. By giving workers a voice in decisions, democratic leaders build organizational flexibility and responsibility and help generate fresh ideas.
However sometimes the price is endless meetings and confused employees who feel leaderless.
Affiliative
The hallmark of the affiliative leader is a “People come first” attitude. This style is particularly useful for building team harmony or increasing morale.
But its exclusive focus on praise can allow poor performance to go uncorrected. Also, affiliative leaders rarely offer advice, which often leaves employees in a quandary.
Authoritative
An authoritative leader takes a “Come with me” approach: they state the overall goal but gives people the freedom to choose their own means of achieving it. This style works especially well when a business is adrift.
It is less effective when the leader is working with a team of experts who are more experienced than he is.
Pacesetting
A leader who sets high performance standards and exemplifies them himself has a very positive impact on employees who are self-motivated and highly competent.
But other employees tend to feel overwhelmed by such a leader’s demands for excellence—and to resent their tendency to take over a situation
Coaching
This style focuses more on personal development than on immediate work-related tasks. It works well when employees are already aware of their weaknesses and want to improve….
…..but not when they are resistant to changing their ways.
Coercive
This “Do what I say” approach can be very effective in a turnaround a situation, a natural disaster, or when working with problem employees.
But in most situations, coercive leadership inhibits the organization’s flexibility and dampens employees’ motivation.
Adapted from the Development Toolkit for Health and Social Care, NHS Lothian
As you can see there are strengths and potential weakness in all styles – therefore a leader who has mastered a variety of styles will be better placed to lead a team.
You can explore your leadership style further so far link directly to some SSSC Open Badges which you could undertake and be credited for:
Resilience
Resilience is something we need to be good leaders.
Sometimes this looks like taking care of ourselves, or this could look like having a thick skin when recieving feedback or hearing tough news.
Resilience is something we grow and develop over time – just like leadership!
Have a think about a time when your resilience was strong at work – not a ‘stress-free’ time, but a time in which business as usual was something you felt able to cope with while remaining positive, without work leaking into your non-work time (losing sleep, affecting their mood when you were at home, etc.).
Reflect on this time,
- What was happening in the team that was supporting your
resilience? - What behaviours, habits, systems or ways of working were in use?
Make a list and reflect on this. Is there anything you can make sure you do to ensure others feel positive at work?
Note down your thoughts in the reflective book.
Leading Others
Everyday Leadership:
We have split this section into two themes for you to work through.
- The first is on everyday leadership in practice.
- The second looks at motivating others.
While your building your leadership skills , its important to understand that leaders show up everyday and the most impactful thing you can do is be consistent in your leadership journey.
Trust in leaders is build through consistency, openness, and vulnerability.
Everyday Leadership in Practice:
LOLLIPOP MOMENTS
Watch this TED video on Everyday Leadership
After watching it consider your own ‘lollipop moments’ , this will then help you provide you evidence for an SSSC Open Badge
Motivating Others:
Motivating others:
Motivating others is a key skill for leaders.
As you will have seen through all the activities so far , leaders are inspiring to others and lead the way. This is a key skill to grow and develop throughout your leadership journey.
Manager or Leader?
What is the difference?
Sometimes we get confused with a leader and a manager, of course both these roles support and motivate others but as a leader – your role is to inspire others!
Have a look at this video to get more inspiration about being a leader and motivating others in your role:
Empowering and motivating others is key element to leadership. Let’s put this into practice!
- Is there a small improvement you can make to your setting?
- What can work better?
Have a think about this and bring a group of colleagues together to discuss.
Work together in how you might solve this problem and have a go at practicing your leadership skills in action. Record the improvement you made and the effect it had.
You will be asked later to return to this piece of reflection.
Everyday Leadership and Motivation in Practice:
Additional Learning and Development Opportunities:
As you reflect on explore your own skills, and how you motivated and collaborated with the team you may find it useful to explore these additional resources:
TURAS
TURAS is a digital learning platform developed by National Education Scotland (NES) to provide a wide range of online educational resources for staff working in health and social care.
To register for an account visit the TURAS home page
SSSC Open Badges
Now you have worked through these resources and undertaken the improvement activity above , reflect on the following (remembering to capture your thoughts in the reflective log )
- How would you describe the example you set for the team?
- What are the ‘norms’ for the team that you have influenced through your behaviour and priorities?
- Do you wish to change any of them?
- If so, what is it that you need to do differently?
- What behaviour do you wish to use more regularly, to provide a fresh influence on the team?
- What difference do you believe it will make?
(Adapted from NHS Lothian)
What about Conflict?
As you reflect back on the improvement activity, perhaps you identified that it wasn’t always straight forward and that there were points when there were different points of view offered?
This is very common when working in teams with diverse people
You may find the following webinars helpful as you continue to develop these skills:
Leading Within an Organisation
We have split up this section into two themes.
- vision and innovation as a leader,
2. empowering and challenging others within organisations
Vision and innovation:
Vision is a fancy word for a goal or aim. It’s about how teams work together and what we’re all aiming for.
This is really important as it helps teams work together better, as we’re all aiming for the same thing!
Deciding together on the “why” can help us figure out “how” we’re going to get there.
There is lots of interesting information about the WHY we do things, which is cruical for this section. These modules may help inspire you:
Empowering and challenging others:
We’d like to think that leadership is about inspiring others and all things good, but sometimes being a leader can be challenging as you need to address challenges or issues within the workplace.
This can often be difficult and takes practice.
You may find these modules helpful as you consider these challenges:
Activities and Next Steps
Well done for working through all the resources above, now it is time to make sense of your learning and collate all your work and reflections together:
As you will have seen, finding out about your style of leadership is important.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to self reflect and notice the good parts and the parts for improvement., to help you:
- Ask 3-5 colleagues at work for feedback on your leadership style.
- Try and get a mix of people you work with. This could be a close colleague, a colleague you only work with sometimes, a manager, and another member of staff.
- Ask them what you do particularly well, and what you could improve on. It’s best if this is done so you can’t tell who the feedback is from, so you may want them to type a note for you.
- Collect the feedback and review it. Maybe you could make an action plan!
This is called 360 degree feedback and is an important tool is finding out about our personal leadership style.
Why do you do what you do? – end of section reflection
Use these prompts to reflect:
- What are you passionate about, in relation to your work?
- What is the difference you wanted to make, when you applied to be part of this
- team?
- What gets you out of bed in the morning…and why does it matter?
- How are you going to make the difference you are aiming for?
- How does your ‘why’ align with ‘how’ you do things? (your values inform your
- practice)
- How are you going to communicate your cause, vision, sense of purpose?
- How do you hold yourself, your team, your organisation to account?
- What do you hope to accomplish – what will the ‘why’ look like, if realised?
- What can we accomplish that demonstrates success?
- What are our areas of focus?
(Adapted from NHS Lothian)
Well done you have reached the end of the BUILDING stage of the Leadership Pathway!
We hope that you have managed to complete some of the SSSC Open Badges along the way.
Remember also that you can use any of your reflective work towards supervision, continuous professional learning (CPL) requirements.
Remember there are another 3 steps for you to explore, but the natural next step is the DEVELOPING stage
