What Kind of Leader Are You? A Fixer, Fighter or Friend?
Sometimes simply being in the room is a disempowering act. That's one of the hidden challenges of being in a leadership role. Whatever your background, there's a likelihood that the strength that got you this far has now become a liability.
You can use the three archetypes explained below — Fixer, Fighter and Friend — to find your dominant leadership style.
The Friend
The Friend is the leader with the open door and a smile on their face. Friends are always available to answer questions, to offer encouragement to someone who's down, and try to treat each person on their team as if they're a member of the family. When it comes to the care side of the equation, Friends have plenty in reserve.
The shadow side of Friend leadership: Friends struggle to hold a consistent standard of excellence. When push comes to shove and Friends have to choose between being tough and being nice, they'll tend to choose the nice option.
The Fighter
The Fighter is the leader with an overflowing cup of new ideas. Fighters see opportunities for improvement in every corner. Working for a Fighter can be enlivening. Fighters are the most naturally inspiring of the three archetypes.
The shadow side of the Fighter is that they're hard to keep up with. They don't appreciate how much work they are creating in their wake. New ideas take a lot of work to implement, and Fighters don't appreciate how that extra work affects people.
The Fixer
The Fixer is the archetype that will sound most familiar. They're the leaders and managers who tend to the micromanagement side of life, who live in the world of tasks, crossing things off the list, catching others' mistakes and their own.
The flipside is that Fixers often lose the forest for the trees. They're so busy fixing typos and double-checking everything that they have trouble zooming out and putting themselves in the shoes of someone else.
Whichever of the leadership archetypes best fits you, remember that leadership is not a destination; It's a process. It's each of us learning a little bit more each day about who we are.