How to find your organizational style as a leader

Mai Yung Sen — Leaders bear the greatest responsibility for the success of their organization or mission. Some leaders manage companies while other leaders manage causes. No two leaders will ever have the exact same style when it comes to managing their time, their responsibilities, their people, or their communication methods. What they will share in common, however, is a deliberate approach to how they tackle these issues.

SWOT:  Your Organizational Style

There are several different types of organizational styles. It’s important to distinguish that developing your personal organizational style as a leader is not the same as choosing your preferred type of organizational leadership. The former reflects how you approach your individual responsibilities in your role and the latter reflects how you manage your team. However, you can use the same type of SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis to find your personal organizational style as you do to manage your team or organization.

Strengths: Identify areas where you are naturally strong or what your aptitudes are. Think of the things that come easiest to you in your role. These represent your strengths and you will likely do them well with minimal time investment.

Weaknesses: After you know your strengths, recognize your weaknesses. For instance, you might have communications as a strength, but financial planning as a weakness. When you know your weaknesses, you can budget more time for those responsibilities or outsource them.

Opportunities: Opportunities extend past your daily responsibilities into your future goals. With opportunities, you recognize that you are leading not just for the sake of leadership, but because you have a mission or a vision that drives you. Identifying your opportunities will motivate you to streamline your personal work responsibilities to free up time to achieve these goals.

Threats: Threats are things that can drain your time, energy, enthusiasm, or effectiveness. From engaging in office gossip to spending extra time on tasks better outsourced to your staff, threats are the barriers that stand between you and your opportunities.

Apply Your SWOT to Find Your Organizational Style

Once your personal SWOT analysis is complete, you should have a list of things you do well (strengths), a list of things you struggle to do (weaknesses), a list of goals (opportunities), and a list of things that could impact your personal effectiveness (threats). From here, it is easy to develop your organizational style as a leader. You can also look at when and where you have the most energy. Some people work best in the morning while other people optimally perform later in the day. Some people work best in teams while others prefer to work alone. Having a daily agenda that includes greater portions of time allocated to strengths and opportunities in a conducive environment will maximize your effectiveness as a leader.

About the Author

Mai Yung Sen started an interior design company after graduation. The influence of leaders such as John Studzinski has led her to be successful in her own endeavors.