Describe your leadership style and give an example of a situation when you successfully led a group.
The nation will find it very hard to look up to the leaders who are keeping their ears to the ground.
Sir Winston Churchill
My leadership style in my current workplace is about 70% “Laissez-Faire” and 30% “Coach-Style”. The reason why is because the team consists of highly knowledgeable engineers that they are very well versed to our codebase and hence would require very limited guidance to achieve and/or come up with solutions.
In one of my previous roles I created a team from the ground up and my leadership style was 100% “Coach-Style”, the reason why is because the team members where entry level and a lot of mentoring was required to tap upon their individual strengths and traits.
Back in the day and while we were implementing all the different requirements related to the GDPR regulation, we were in the middle of tasks that had extremely tight deadlines which were also borderline unachievable. At that moment I realized that the team I’ve built was meant for success. While I was planning and prioritizing the different requirements and how shall we tackle them in the most efficient and optimal way, my team suggested to me to work overtime to achieve this as a team.
We indeed worked almost 15 hours straight and we managed to deliver. The morale was higher than I could ever imagined and not a single complaint or salty comments. After few months I took upon a new role and my direct manager asked me whether they should replace me or not. I nod “no”. I have explained that the team can work autonomously with minimal supervision as they all links of an unbreakable chain.