How to Find Your Leadership Style

Your leadership style is your default under pressure, not your ideal

The quickest way to see your style is to notice what you do when there is no time to choose. Calm moments let you act like the leader you admire. Pressure shows the leader you are by habit.

That default is not a flaw. It usually formed for good reasons: it worked in an earlier role, it was rewarded by a manager you respected, or it protected you when you were new. The real question is whether it still serves the people you lead now.

Five steps to identify how you really lead

1. 01

   Write down three recent moments that tested you

   Choose a deadline crisis, a performance problem and a decision you made with incomplete information. For each, note what you did in the first hour, who you involved and who you left out.

2. 02

   Look for the move you keep repeating

   Did you take the work back yourself, gather everyone round, set a direction and step away, or ask questions first? The repeated move is your default. Most leaders have one dominant move and one backup.

3. 03

   Ask three people what it is like to work for you

   Pick a direct report, a peer and someone more senior. Ask: 'When things get busy, what do you notice I do more of, and what do I do less of?' Thank them and resist explaining yourself.

4. 04

   Compare intention with impact

   Put your own description beside theirs. Where they match, your style is visible and predictable. Where they differ, you have found something worth exploring, often a blind spot.

5. 05

   Check it against what your team needs now

   A team of experienced specialists needs something different from a newly formed team or one going through a restructure. Name the gap between your default and their need in one sentence.

Common styles, where they help and where they cost you

Use these labels as a mirror, not a verdict. Most leaders recognise themselves in two rows. The leadership style self-assessment gives you a structured way to score yourself before you ask others.

Culture changes how your style is read in Gulf workplaces

The same behaviour can land very differently in a multinational team in Manama than it did in your previous organisation. Where respect for seniority is strong, a participative leader who asks junior colleagues for input in a large meeting may get silence. That is rarely because people have no views; speaking before senior colleagues can feel inappropriate. Asking in smaller groups, or one to one, often surfaces the same ideas.

Family-owned businesses add another layer. Your style has to work alongside owners and family members whose authority does not come from the organisation chart. In my coaching work, leaders moving between multinational and family-owned settings are often surprised that the style which got them hired needs adjusting in the first months.

If you want the theory behind adapting your approach to each person's readiness, the situational leadership entry explains it in plain terms.

Traps that keep you stuck in a label

• ✦Choosing the style you admire instead of the one you use. Aspiration is useful, but it is a development goal, not a description.
• ✦Trusting one questionnaire result. A self-assessment reflects how you saw yourself on the day you completed it. Treat it as a hypothesis to test.
• ✦Copying a leader you admire wholesale. Borrow specific behaviours. Their whole style grew from their strengths, not yours.
• ✦Assuming flexibility means having no style. Teams need to predict you. Flex on purpose, and say why you are doing it.
• ✦Ignoring your strengths. Your style usually grows out of what you are naturally good at. The guide to discovering your strengths at work helps you name them.

A hypothetical case: the sales director who thought she was a coach

Imagine a sales director in a regional FMCG business who describes herself as a coaching leader. She runs development conversations, asks good questions and genuinely cares about growth. When she asks three colleagues what she does under pressure, each says the same thing: at month end she takes over the biggest accounts herself and messages the team late at night.

Her real default under pressure is pacesetting. Nothing about her coaching was false; it simply disappears when targets are at risk. Her development goal becomes specific: keep one coaching conversation in the diary during the last week of each month, and agree in advance which accounts she will and will not step into.

This is an illustrative scenario, not a client story. The useful finding was never her label. It was the gap between her calm self and her pressured self.

Why a coach sees your style more clearly than you can

Working out your style alone is possible, but most leaders struggle to see their pressured self clearly, because they are inside it. A coach helps you collect honest evidence, look at it without defending yourself, and practise new responses between sessions.

I do not hand you a style to adopt. I ask questions until your own pattern is visible, and then we work on the specific moments where you want to respond differently. That is the core of one-to-one executive coaching, usually in weekly or fortnightly sessions, in person in Manama or online, in Arabic or English.