Introduction

In today’s competitive business world, companies prefer to build high performance teams for the development of strong leadership potential with appropriate leadership skills and style (DuBois, et al., 2015). The aim of this report is to analyse the importance of different leadership skills and styles and appraising my own leadership style and skills.

Importance of leadership skills and styles

In companies, leadership shows a position of power that benefits the entire workplace involving employees and an organisation through leadership skills of potential leaders. It is essential to cultivate and acquire important leadership skills that help in creating productive and encouraging work environment (Sheen, 2020). It involves respect, love, and devotion among team members and raises the success through working proactively and innovatively for meeting ROIs (return on investments) in business and fostering a healthy workplace environment. These leadership skills are effective communication, creativity, motivation, delegation, problem-solving, relationship building, positivity, trustworthiness, striving for feedback and empathy for team (Doyle, 2019).

Leadership skills are adopted by leaders based on their leadership styles considering personality, unique needs and experience. These factors of leaders depend on companies and their organisational culture during development of their leadership style (Warner, 2012). In the workplace, this helps in using different methods and processes for the achievement of objectives set by employer and meeting the employees’ needs altogether. The different leadership styles are coaching, visionary, servant, autocratic, laissez-faire, democratic, pacesetter, transformational, transactional, and bureaucratic (Kloefkorn, 2017). It is essential for a leader to analyse their own leadership style based on their potential leadership skills to appraise.

Leadership Style

As per the recent proposal impressed my manager was my skills of building high performance teams where I applied for the leadership programme in a company to support the development of people having strong leadership potential. Based on supporting the position I applied for, my leadership style presented is “Autocratic Leadership Style”. Autocratic leadership focuses on leader itself as a center where the decisions are made without consulting employees. Autocratic leader directly communicate with their team about the decision made and expect to execute it without asking any questions further. This describes authority in the hands of leader only, for example, Margaret Thatcher (Chris, 2015). She was described as an autocratic leader based on her authoritarian personality traits. This leadership style tends a leader to be controlling with their nature to strive for authority and power. Autocratic leader takes the charge of everything along with full control over decision making. Margaret Thatcher was a conviction politician presented herself as a strong leader; however, resolute failure as British people were never convinced with her in sense of being morally or politically right (Skidelsky, 2013). I applied for autocratic leadership by matching my skills as a leader with Margaret Thatcher. Authoritarian approach involves responsibilities of decision-making where leaders dictate their methods and processes of work. Autocratic leadership include skills with the ability of making decisions efficiently and quickly without the laborious democratic process which helped me in building high performance teams.

According to me, autocratic leader shows determination at the time of setting goals and accomplish them among reducing negative impact. Thatcher showed this determination while taking decision of reducing the impact of trade unions through legislature that helped the country in closing down various unprofitable mines (Informa, 2013). She also builds strong relationship that influenced me in a positive way to adopt autocratic leadership style along with the confidence of achieving the set goals. This defines my values with strict compliance or guidelines to deliver the outcome among employees to work in a confine and creative way. However, there are many weaknesses of this leadership style along with its strengths such as employees getting frustrated due to lack of communication (Timming & Johnstone, 2015). Other than this, employees have some resentment and fear as they do not want someone to boss around and criticising rather than praising them. This makes employees dependent on the leader without whom they cannot work further and also start missing new opportunities if the leader is not keeping pace with new trends, this sum up as lack of flexibility in companies which leads to no self-planning for long-term initiatives (De Hoogh, et al., 2015). Lastly, communication breakdown where the direction flows from upside-down where leader decide and employees work that can lead towards confusion and misunderstandings due to lack of feedback from employees.

However, my reason of choosing autocratic leadership style by matching it with leadership skills of Margaret Thatcher also named as Iron Lady, Maggie or Milk Snatcher, is to make quick decisions, to supervise closely while activities performed by the management and employees, and when there is a need of workflows to be streamlined quickly. Also, I got the power as an autocratic leader to build high performance teams with my quick decision-making and ultra-strong leadership skills. As a politician, Thatcher made mistakes as well but her characteristic of authoritarian and taking responsibility to make decisions was her power and appraised me to choose autocratic leadership style. This made me powerful, confident and stable by making decisions without any debate or delays which also presents democratic process hand-in-hand. Thatcher was good at making communications and had the great power while showing actions. However, she faced challenges as well by making decisions and known as convicted leader, her strengths got turned into weakness, her country was known as ‘sick man of Europe’ until she transformed its economic reality, and lastly, there was both ways love and hate of looking at her as an autocratic leader (Thiran, 2018). The reason of matching my autocratic leadership style with her was her robust and resolving skills which measured her critics and admirers equally.

Conclusion

To conclude, after analysing the importance of leadership skills and styles along with appraising the autocratic leadership style of Margaret Thatcher, I applied as an autocratic leader. The reason of choosing this for applying in Leadership Programme is for taking responsibility of making quick decisions and building high performance teams. This leadership style is paradoxical as it is resolute but flexible as well where leaders have the courage to believe in their convictions while making decisions. Therefore, to avoid the consequences and pitfalls of this leadership style only requires a leader to be agile and consider perspectives of other people as well.

References

Chris, J., 2015. 4 Margaret Thatcher Leadership Style Axioms. [Online]
Available at: http://www.josephchris.com/4-margaret-thatcher-leadership-style-axioms
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

De Hoogh, A. H., Greer, L. L. & Den Hartog, D. N., 2015. Diabolical dictators or capable commanders? An investigation of the differential effects of autocratic leadership on team performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 26(5), pp. 687-701.

Doyle, A., 2019. Important Leadership Skills for Workplace Success. [Online]
Available at: https://www.thebalancecareers.com/top-leadership-skills-2063782
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

DuBois, M. et al., 2015. Leadership styles of effective project managers: Techniques and traits to lead high performance teams. Journal of Economic Development, Management, IT, Finance, and Marketing, 7(1), p. 30.

Informa, 2013. Margaret Thatcher: Leadership skills of the Iron Lady. [Online]
Available at: https://www.informa.com.au/insight/margaret-thatcher-leadership-skills-of-the-iron-lady/
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

Kloefkorn, S., 2017. Advantages of switching among leadership styles. [Online]
Available at: https://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/news/2017/04/20/advantages-of-switching-among-leadership-styles.html
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

Sheen, 2020. The Most Important Leadership Skills Everyone Should Have. [Online]
Available at: https://inside.6q.io/important-leadership-skills/
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

Skidelsky, R., 2013. Margaret Thatcher – a strong leader, but a resolute failure by any other measure. [Online]
Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2013/apr/18/margaret-thatcher-leader-failure-strong
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

Thiran, R., 2018. 4 Leadership Lessons From Margaret Thatcher. [Online]
Available at: https://leaderonomics.com/leadership/4-leadership-lessons-margaret-thatcher
[Accessed 5 May 2020].

Timming, A. R. & Johnstone, S., 2015. Employee silence and the authoritarian personality: A political psychology of workplace democracy. International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 23(1), pp. 154-171.

Warner, J., 2012. Why Leadership Style is Important. [Online]
Available at: http://blog.readytomanage.com/why-leadership-style-is-important/
[Accessed 5 May 2020].