Describe Your Leadership Style [With Examples]

Interviews

Sep 29

So, What’s Your Leadership Style? If you’ve applied for any management-level job, I can almost guarantee you’ve received this question. Sometimes it even comes up in interviews for individual contributor roles when the team is looking for someone they can promote sooner rather than later. It’s a question that involves a lot of forethought to answer. And because it’s so common, it’s important that you take the time to think about it.

In this article, we’ll cover:

Why Employers Ask This Question
How to Figure Out What Your Leadership Style Is
10 Common Leadership Styles [You’re Probably a Combination of These]
Some Tips When Answering This Question
Examples of How to Answer When Asked “Describe Your Leadership Style”

Why Do Employers Ask, “Please Describe Your Leadership Style”

While I do think there are better ways to ask and uncover someone’s leadership style in an interview than asking them an open-ended “How to describe your leadership style” question, many employers will ask this question.

Other variations may look like these:

How do you monitor the performance of individual team members and the team as a whole?
How do you motivate your team?
Tell us about a project you led. What challenges did you face and how did you overcome those?
How do you handle conflicts within your team?
How do you decide what to delegate and to whom?
How do you keep your team on pace to meet objectives?

All of these questions are designed to understand how you lead others and what type of leader you are.

But back to the original question. Why do employers ask these? Well, you’re a big investment for them. Not only are they investing in your salary, but you will be a key player in their other investments playing out well for them too. The bigger the team, the higher the stakes.

And don’t make the mistake of thinking these questions are only asked during management interviews. Many employers will ask them for individual contributor roles as well. Whenever I was interviewing for a position that we wanted to promote from later, I’d ask these sorts of questions.

How Would You Describe Your Leadership Style Basics

Before we dive into a formula to answer this question and some sample talk tracks, let’s establish some ground rules first.

Identify Your Leadership Style

Walking into an interview and answering this question off the cuff will make you look like you have no system or method for leadership. That is not the impression you want to give. Chances are you do have a system, even if you’ve never thought about it or defined it.

Now is the time to define it. Think about how you typically lead the teams you work with. Are you a delegator? Do you lead with transparency? Are you the leader in the trenches with their staff late at night?

Chances are you employ a combination of these and other leadership styles. Most good leaders do. But you also probably tend to lean on one more than the others. You can’t talk about them all in your interview. It will sound like you have no strategy. Instead, figure out what your north star is and hone in on that particular style.

If you’re still having trouble, ask the people who know you best. Ask your friends, family, classmates, coworkers, and even the people on your softball league. Ask them how they would describe your leadership and see if you pick up on some themes.

Use the Five-Step Interview Formula

Most people go into an interview and do one of two things. They’ll rant on and on about their leadership with example after example. Or, they’ll be vague and say something like, “I lead by example.” Great, so what does that mean?

Interviewing is hard. That’s why over the years, I’ve come up with a 5 step-method to answering this question.

First, state your philosophy. This is simply your leadership style and why you practice this way.

Second, give an example of your philosophy in action. How have you used this style of leadership?

Third, share the result or outcome of the example you gave.

Fourth, confirm to the interviewer that this is the best way you’ve found to lead teams and why you believe it will help them.

Lastly, ask a question to confirm buy-in and learn more about whether your answer fits their needs.

I’ll illustrate these five steps later in the examples section so you can see them in action. Come back to this section when you read them and you’ll see each element play out.

Avoid Negative Words

Words have meaning. Choose them carefully. As you think about your answer to this question, think about your word choice. Stick to words with positive connotations and avoid negative ones.

Make It About Others

Many people fall into the “I” trap when answering this question. “I enjoy delegating tasks.” or “I’m a hands-on person.” Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about others. Using language like this will tell the hiring team that you expect everyone to conform to you. Your leadership style should be about leading your team and that means it’s about using a style that brings out the most in others. It doesn’t matter what you like. It matters what your team needs from you.

There is No Right Answer

Everyone leads differently. Every team responds differently to different styles of leaders. And every company has a different culture of leaders within it. Don’t go into the interview thinking that you’re going to game the system and score 100%. This isn’t a test. While you can ask intelligent questions and pivot during the interview based on the employer’s answers, to a large degree you can’t force something you’re not. Be yourself. Be confident in the leadership you bring to the table and show the hiring team why it could work for them.

I remember one company I worked with where, I honest to God, thought the entire leadership team was jerks. While I couldn’t work in that environment, others thrived somehow. They liked to hire direct, strong-personality managers who ruled with an iron fist. Surprisingly they had relatively low turnover too. It takes all kinds I guess.

The point of the story is that there are employers out there looking for your style of leadership (regardless of whether I or mainstream social media think it’s a bad leadership style). Find your people. And hopefully, don’t be a jerk in the process.

10 Common Leadership Styles

A lot of people like to put labels on leadership styles. What you label it doesn’t really matter. How you describe it is what’s important. But for the sake of discussion, I’m going to list some of the more common titles you can find out there to help facilitate a discussion around finding your leadership style. So here are the 10 most common leadership styles people use and discuss.

Keep in mind that no one leadership style is the best and none of these are good or bad. Too much of any one style could be detrimental in the wrong environment. There are pros and cons to each.

Democratic

Some people also call this participative leadership. As you can imagine, it involves everyone working together to make decisons. These leaders value input from others and often make collaborative decisions. It’s also why you may have to interview with 9 different people. It’s because the team makes decisons together.

Autocratic

To put it simply, this is a “my way or the highway” kind of approach to leadership. These leaders dictate what should be done and oftentimes how it should be done.

Bureaucratic

Environments with this type of leadership often have many rules and systems. There is a roadmap for everything and you’re expected to follow it.

Transformational

This style gives people a lot of autonomy to innovate. These leaders are usually focused on continuious improvement and empowering thier teams to experiement and come up with new ideas.

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Transactional

This is a leadership style that gives instructions to team members and then uses rewards or penalities based on the performance on those instructions.

Coaching

With this leadership style, there will probably be a handful of those 1:1 meetings designed for mentorship. There are few directions given and few punishments dolled out. Rather these leaders focus their energy on sharing knowledge and helping others improve thier skills.

Servant

This style of leadership focuses on how to develop and elevate others rather than holding on to your own status. Unlike transformational, it’s not about how to insipre others to follow your lead, but rather it’s about finding ways to help others. Servant leaders often prioritize the needs of other people above their own.

Hands-Off

The exact opposite of micromanagement, this leadership style focuses on providing the tools and resources a team needs and then getting out of the way. Team members make their own decisions, solve their own problems, and work the way they want to work.

Charismatic

As the name suggests, these leaders are skilled in persuassion and charisma. These leaders typically tend to be big picture thinkers and get people excited about a vision. They also tend to not give a lot of specific instructions.

In the Trenches

These leaders often find themselves doing the work with their teams and leading by example. They hold themselves to the same standards as the rest of the team as if they were a team member with the same duties and responsiblities.

How to Describe Your Leadership Style in an Interview

I’ve interviewed thousands of people over the years as a recruiter and hiring manager. In this section, I’m going to give you some example word tracks based on how other’s have answered this question. Most people give lame answers to this question, but a few have really impressed me. Here’s what those who impressed me have said.

What Is Your Leadership Style Interview Answer 1

I believe in delegation and empowerment. Tell people what needs to be done, give them the tools, and give them autonomy to execute. At XYZ I had a team of 4 and we had at least 20 different projects going on each month. By setting clear expectations and understanding my team’s unique skills, I was able to empower them to make decision within a paraemter of guidance. Because of this we were able to complete every project on time, doing 4 times the project volume of larger teams.

This freed up a lot of time for myself and other leaders, promoted new ideas, and allowed the managers to get out of the weeds and focus on how we could complete more projects on smaller budgets. While it may take team members time to adjust to this leadership style, I’m confident that bringing this style of leadership to the team in the long-run will produce more high-performers.

What styles of leadership does the team repond well to currently?

What Is Your Leadership Style Interview Answer 2

Transparency is the cornerstone of great leadership. Everyone communicates differently and transparency helps them feel comfortable doing it. I have a military background. Communication and transparency averts disasters. It’s no different in the corporate world. At ABC we had a big team, 40+ individuals. This leaves no room for guessing.

It was vital that I communicated clear expectations and did it in the most transparent ways possible. When people understand the why, they can do better work. We covered these things via email, in team meetings, and I brought them up in 1:1 meetings. This helped people open up and share concerns and feedback. Some are more comfortable respoinding via email, some in person.

There is no one size fits all if you want a high-performing, diverse, idea generating team. The result, we had so much feedback about our customer’s needs, about internal bottlenecks, and how to retain our people. And it didn’t cost us thousands of dollars in technology or consulting fees to get it. It was nearly free. It just required transparency and inclusive communication channels.

How satisfied are you today with feedback from the team? Is it useful?

What Is Your Leadership Style Interview Answer 3

I’m a hands-on, lead from the trenches type manager. Actions speak louder than words and if you can’t back up what you’re saying, you’ll lose respect and when you lose respect, you lose productivity and morale. There was a time last year we had a project delay on one of our customer accounts. I stayed in the office and worked with the team until midnight to resolve the issues and move this thing forward.

We ended up not only getting the project unstuck, but that experience showed my team that they were not alone and that they were valued. I could ask anything of them and they would go to bat for me and the company because of moments like this one. Plus, I got to see first hand their struggles and how they were working through the problem. I also was able to share my insights from my 20 years of experience doing this.

I’m confident that if we can light fires within people rather than under them, I can create a high-performing team here as well.

What leadership opportunities do you see that exist with the current team?

Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms, oversees Optim’s Resume Revision Service, and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.