What Type of Manager Should You Be?

Key Takeaways

If you are a new leader and don’t know what leadership style to adopt, try to be authentic to yourself. There are three components of becoming an authentic leader:

• Self-awareness
• Situation awareness
• Character strength

You’ve worked at this company for a few years and have been one of the top performers in a decent-sized team. Your direct supervisor was recently promoted to a senior management position at the corporate level, and he has recommended you to be his successor.

Congratulations! You are a manager! Now it is the time to think about the very fundamental question: What type of manager should you be?

Should you be a serious and strict boss just like your predecessor? Or should you be a social and funny boss like Jim from marketing? Or, since you just read an autobiography of Steve Jobs, should you be like him?

Choosing your leadership style can lay the foundation of your position in the company — even in the future. You sought answers but found different answers from each source. So what type of manager should you be?

Research has shown that the best type of leader you can become is to be yourself; be a genuine and authentic leader. They found that authentic leaders are those who:[1]

• are self-aware
  • This means that the leaders have deep awareness of how they themselves think and behave, as well as how they are perceived by others as being aware of their own and others’ values, knowledge and strengths.
• have high awareness of the situation
  • This means having a high level of awareness of the context of the units and the organization.
• have character strength
  • This means they are confident, hopeful, optimistic, resilient and of high moral character.

Research also suggests that being an authentic leader has positive effects on both the leader’s and subordinates’ individual levels of success.

For example, authentic leaders tend to have higher levels of self-acceptance, intrinsic motivation and engagement at work. Meanwhile, their followers tend to have stronger identification with the leader and the organization, experience more positive emotions and have higher levels of intrinsic motivation, self-esteem and creativity. [2]^,[3],[4],[5]

Be yourself. Simple as it seems, a lot of times we find it hard to be ourselves because we feel the pressure to be compliant with stereotypes and demands that are related to being a leader.

Meanwhile, it is easy for employees to detect inauthenticity, and once they deem you as inauthentic, their trust in you can be severely endangered.

In the next couple of articles, I will dissect each component of authentic leadership and discuss in detail the strategies for becoming an authentic leader.

Stay tuned.

References: 

[1] Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., & Walumba, F. O. (2004). Authentic leadership: Theory building for veritable sustained

performance. Working paper: Gallup Leadership Institute, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

[2] Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., May, D. R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005). “Can you see the real me?” A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 343-372.

[3] Guerrero, S., Lapalme, M. È., & Séguin, M. (2015). Board chair authentic leadership and nonexecutives’ motivation and commitment. Journal of Leadership & Organizational Studies, 22, 88-101.

[4] Rego, A., Sousa, F., Marques, C., & e Cunha, M. P. (2012). Authentic leadership promoting employees' psychological capital and creativity. Journal of Business Research, 65, 429-437.

[5] Zubair, A. (2015). Authentic leadership and creativity: Mediating role of work-related flow and psychological capital. Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 25, 150.