It was really interesting reading about the different styles of leadership throughout this module. I found myself reflecting on different school environments and thinking about what worked, what didn’t work and why or why not. I hope I can take this knowledge, observations and reflections with me when I go back into schools.

Behavioural theories of effective leaders was an interesting place to begin my reading. The core leadership theories article outlined leaders’ behaviours and three ways they tended to make decisions. These included autocratic (making decisions independent of a team), democratic (involving the team for their opinions and input before decision making) and laissez-faire (allows a highly motivated team to make their decisions without input from the leader) (MindTools, 2016). I found myself reflecting on the type of leadership style I have enjoyed working under and that is definitely democratic.  However, the time I was working for a leader who had this style, I wasn’t working in a huge school but it definitely was not small and the problem with this style was that meetings would go round and round in circles at times. I believe that if this approach is to be used, needs to ensure they don’t let discussions lose track of where they should be going and ensure that there is a time frame as some people could discuss certain issues for a very long time.

There are many titles for the different styles of leadership being: Situational, transactional, transformational, servant, distributed and instructional. These can work effectively in different environments and for different people depending on their personalities and behaviours as mentioned above. I personally love the idea of working for a transformational leader as I like the idea of collaboration, ‘looking forward’ and inspiring employees.

MindTools. (2016). Core leadership theories. https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/leadership-theories.htm