Rookie CEO Leadership Styles Drive Company Culture
By: Bill Miller
Tags: Leadership, Planning, Motivation, Strategy, Business

Rookie CEO Leadership Styles Drive Company Culture

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

When you schedule a last-minute meeting with your team today, do they shake in their boots or are they enthusiastic? Consider asking your team 3 words that would describe you. Do it anonymously if they do not want to be identified. Think about what the answers to these would mean.

What type of CEO will you be, Visionary, Authoritative or Collaborative? What leadership superpowers will you bring to the CEO table? Will you be a combination of styles?

My main purpose for writing The Rookie CEO book, writing these blog posts, and developing the “PPLC” framework is to help aspiring CEOs and leaders learn how they will lead and creating an action plan to become the best and most successful CEO and leader one can be! Now that your mind is wandering and thinking about what your team would honestly say about you, let’s dive into the next level.

In a previous post, I described more specifics on the PPLC framework, which I introduced in the Rookie CEO book. The acronym represents:

P=Path to CEO

P=Philosophies the new CEO brings to the position and the company

L=Leadership Styles of the new CEO

C= Culture that the new CEO will create or emerge, and is built on the foundation of their “PPL”

This post will focus on the “L”, Leadership Styles and how they impact the culture of the company!

Leadership Styles — Make or Break the Culture!

Many of us have led teams, managed people and have a track record of proven results. This means we already have leadership styles cemented in our brains and because we know ourselves better than anyone, we have chosen our methods to lead. As a new rookie CEO, you will now move from leading a smaller business function or team to leading a complete company consisting of all business functions. Many of the most successful CEOs in history accumulated many failures on the way to success. All CEOs are rookie CEOs once! As we kick off the discussions, let’s look at a few of the basic leadership styles then we will evaluate how to determine your style and what action steps to take to grow and enhance your personal style to become more agile for today’s world!

Basic Types of Leadership Styles

There is an abundance of books and articles about leadership styles and many experts out there today. Readers of business books and web sites will have a snapshot of this complex topic in their minds and perhaps may have even mapped their existing styles into their personal leadership style elevator pitch in preparation for interviewing and networking. In “The Rookie CEO, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!”, each of the 9 features rookie CEOs that I worked directly for have had to develop their personal styles to take on their 1st CEO role. By way of real-life stories, I share the results and impact of their styles and offer advice and takeaways for future CEOs to learn from in order to fuel their new CEO career.

Elements of Leadership Styles:

Humanity — is the rookie a visionary wanting to change the world as fast as possible influencing the world today?

Inspiration and motivation — is the rookie dynamic and energetic?

Initiative and aggressiveness– what is the rookie’s career and experience foundation for taking on the new role? Will there be a new mission to change or disrupt the market? Will there be a new team built or an inheritance of an existing team needing to be vetted by the rookie?

Is the rookie a manager or leader? This will determine if they are good listeners, do they gather input from all team players and stakeholders and make decisions based on these discovery platforms or will they just make decisions and drive forward in an autocratic way?

Will the rookie micromanage or delegate assignments and let the team execute?

Will there be goals and objectives set, measured and reported?

Does the rookie bring their own strategy, or does he/she meet with the team, ask questions to get team input, then set the strategy?

Will each team member be held accountable?

How much fun does the rookie like to build into day-to-day operation and execution?

Once the roadmap is set, will there be what look like daily changes as new articles appear, the rookie has chats with his or her friends, or they read a new book?

What type of tenacity and “get it done” type of attitude does the rookie bring?

The above will help the rookie understand the types of disruptions they will tolerate and the structure of the operation vs. seat of the pants methods they will employ, and from there, how the company will operate. Can you see how these have a huge impact on the company culture? Remember, the rookie has philosophies that they bring and coupled with their leadership styles will define the culture.

The experts and books I mentioned earlier define leadership styles as coach, visionary, servant, autocratic, authoritative, laissez-fire, democratic, pacesetter, and bureaucratic. Sometimes the classifications are less in number, but the bullets all fall into these categories. One of the largest challenges for the aspiring CEO and leader, is to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, create a learning and growth plan and roadmap and go! One of my favorite things to do as well as a major personal strength is to coach and educate aspiring CEO and leadership talent and guide them along their path to success! There is only one thing I can think of that I can’t coach: true grit!

Summary

If you are on your way to becoming a CEO or senior leader, now that you have insight into how your philosophies and leadership styles can drive the company north or south, you can take inventory of your personal views and arsenal of skills. How do you want your company to be led? How do you want to build out your team?

Learn, understand, and journal everything you can. As in sports, a good foundation of basics and knowledge of rules pays off with success!

Now that you have a basic understanding of my PPLC framework and how you can utilize it for your career enhancement, you can begin your action plan to achieve greatness! Coming in the next post will be the final PPLC chapter: Culture!

If you would like to read more about Rookie CEOs and their sometimes bazaar stories with many key take-aways, grab a copy of my book “The Rookie CEO, You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!” in eBook, paperback or hardcover formats from Amazon.

Connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Stop by my web site to learn more.