Leadership Style

What is your Leadership Style?

In addition to knowing what your strengths and weaknesses in management and leadership skills are, it is important for a Film Commissioner to also understand their preferences as a leader. Leadership styles and preferences are different than management and leadership skills and knowledge and manifest differently in the workplace. Knowing how you relate to people and to the environments that you manage, can allow you to better manage the relationships with the government entities, the production companies, labor and community.

Leadership Preferences

What is a preference? In this context, it is what we find most comfortable to do. It feels easy. It feels natural. Each of us has a way of interacting that feels most natural. Why do we cross our arms one way and not another? Why do we write with our right hand instead of our left? We have a preference for one versus another. Preferences are also at the core of our interactions with each other. This module will serve to acknowledge the preferences we have in our leadership as well as the ones that we do not. It will provide insight into the preferences of others as well as tools that can assist any person in working more effectively with others by knowing their preferences and those of others.

There are a few premises about leadership styles that must be mentioned first.

• There are no bad styles. They are simply different.
• No single style is a predictor of success in business or any other field.
• These styles are based upon outer patterns of behaviors that you identify and others can see.

This is not a psychological profile or other psychometric measure.  The premise of these styles were researched, identified and documented first by David Merrill and Roger Reid in their book, “Personal Styles and Effective Performance.” They have since been explored and many parallels have been drawn with other profile tools such as the Myers-Briggs Psychological Type Indicator, the DISC Inventory by John Geier, and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.

This training does not use an instrument or test but rather exposes participants to the fundamental questions of Merrill and Reid’s research so as to provide an experiential activity regarding leadership in the context of being a film commissioner.