Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

Business Communications & Professional Practice – RMIT University 2021

 Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

Visionary leaders provide people with inspiration to see a new vision of the future and
significantly and drive them towards the common dream.
This style can be used effectively when the company needs a new vision or a noticeable new
direction. However, it does not work when visionary leaders work with a group of experts or
counterparts that have more experience than them.
Appendix A will provide an example of this leadership style.
The coaching style happens in a one-on-one interaction where leaders connect what people aim
for with the company’s goals.
By utilising the EI competence of personal development, self-awareness and empathy, coaches
not only facilitate people to discover their goals and values but also help them broaden their
repertoire of abilities. This style concentrates on having an in-depth conversation with people
that are currently having little skills to do current work with the goal to help them go beyond
short-run concerns instead of focusing on exploring personal long-term goals like dreams, life
goals, and career aspirations.
Coaches act as counselors have a highly positive emotional impact on employees because they
deliver great care, empathy, and rapport in people’s potentials and give an expectation that they
can do their best.
This can be used most effectively when working with those who express initiative and seek
professional development. However, it does not work when employees have lack motivation or
require substantial personal direction and feedback. It also fails when leaders have lack
expertise or emotional intelligence to facilitate people along.
Appendix B will provide an example of this leadership style.
The pacesetting style concentrates on performance and meeting goals, thereby expecting
excellence and thrive when there are highly competent and motivated employees with clear
objectives on their side.
This style will leave those who have poor performance behind or even make those who have the
high performance feel under too much pressure by leaders’ relentless demands. This in turn can
have a negative repercussion on the team, leading to burnout, exhaustion, and high staff

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 Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

turnover. As pacesetters are high goal-oriented, they seem to not care about employees they
depend on to accomplish their goals. This is dissonance.
On a positive spectrum, pacesetting works best when you need to achieve the stellar result with
flying colour from a high-performed and motivated team quickly.
Appendix C will provide an example of this leadership style.
My chosen leadership style is pacesetting because by utilising inspiration accompanied by the
emotional intelligence (EI) triad of self-confidence, self-awareness, and empathy, authoritative
leaders articulate a big picture of where the organisation or the team is moving forward.
However, they still set people free to speak up their new ideas, innovate, experiment, work
forward, and achieve the shared goals. Thus, they can retain the most valued talents and
standardise task framework and performance feedback that captures the vision. Leaders with
visionary styles can significantly boost the emotional climate, transform and attune the
organisation’s spirit and value to various extents shared by people that are led by them. This is
considered the most effective leadership style that can have the most strongly positive impact
on group dynamics.
In my context, I founded RMIT Vietnam FinTech Club at RMIT since 2020 with the vision to
increase the exposure of the Vietnamese students to financial technology and digital disruption.
This is also the first student-led fintech club in Vietnam. As my club is new and fresh, I, as a
leader, have to help members visualise

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 Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

REFERENCE:
MindTools n.d., Six Emotional Leadership Styles: Choosing the Right Style for the Situation,
Leadership Styles: Choosing the Right Approach for the Situation, Mind Tools Content Team,
viewed on 14th March 2021, <https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_84.htm>.
Goleman, D. Boyatzis, R. & McKee, A. 2004, Primal Leadership : Learning To Lead With
Emotional Intelligence, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Goleman D. 2000, “Leadership That Gets Results”, Harvard Business Review, vol. 78, issue 2.
Reisel, W. D. 2016, Book Review: Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional
Intelligence 2002, vol. 4, issue 2, 14th November, viewed on 14th March 2021, <
https://jbam.scholasticahq.com/article/1072-primal-leadership-realizing-the-power-of-emotional-
intelligence>.
Goleman, D. Boyatzis, R. & McKee, A. 2002, Primal Leadership : Realizing the Power of
Emotional Intelligence, Harvard Business School Press, Boston.
Kryder, L. 2002, Primal Leadership: The Hidden Driver of Great Performance, Management &
Technical Communication, Washington, vol. 49(2), p. 257.

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 Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

APPENDIX:
APPENDIX A: A SUCCESSFUL VISIONARY LEADER – HENRY FORD
Henry Ford grew his popularity for being a pioneer in the automobile assembly line and having
to successfully mass produce automobiles. Amazingly, he founded Ford Motor Co. with virtually
none of his own money, proceeding to wisely negotiate deals with suppliers that enabled him to
buy parts on credit. After years of diligently reinvesting his profits back into his business, the
company in turn became an industrial giant and Ford becomes immortalized as a business
legend.

APPENDIX B: A SUCCESSFUL COACHING LEADER – HENRY FORD

Mahatma Gandhi was a transformational leader meaning that he was a leader who leads by
example and empower his followers to make them feel better. A leader can do many things in
order to be a transformational leader. Doing things such as motivating your followers, making
your followers want to do things with their own choice and feeling confident all relate and fall
into the things that make a transformational style. Gandhi was a transformational leader because
many times in throughout his life he had to unite people to do the things they stood for. Doing
that itself shows two of the things that make a leader be a transformational leader. Making
people stand up for what they believe is what empowering means, you are making someone feel
confident and courageous about what they will do or about themselves and that is what Mahatma
did to get people to unite. Gandhi himself was confident all the time. The spiritual leader had to
have enough confidence and trust in himself to be able to use satyagraha ( a way of confronting
the law in a non violent and polite way) because if he did was not confident and if he did not
trust himself then he would've never been able to do the things he did.It is true that Gandhi was
actually not a leader by paper on many things but in whichever activity he did, he was always
trying to leader and unite people so that led to him getting a leadership style like being
a transformational leader which is a style that suits him perfectly.

APPENDIX C: A SUCCESSFUL PACESETTING LEADER – JACK WELCH

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The former CEO of General Electric, is an example of a successful pacesetter. As a leader,

Welch despised micro-managing and needed thought leaders to focus more on setting examples
and deadlines. That is the essence of a pacesetting leader. Such a leader is obsessive about doing
things faster and better. They are prone to ask other team members to perform the task likewise.
These are leaders who demand more from poor performers as well. They instruct the members
by assigning responsibilities or tasks if the members are not performing well. They show slight
empathy towards poor performers. Leaders who possess such a leadership style seek
coordination with the members when they believe there is an impact on an immediate task. To
seek development in the assigned task, leaders with a pacesetting leadership style show the
members how to perform the assigned project. In order to grow as a leader, the pacesetters
should often seek feedback from the team members, and provide them with the appropriate
workspace. Instead of focusing on deadlines, they should focus on the process of attaining high
quality output. The main drawback of such a leadership style is that the leadership becomes too
predictable.

APPENDIX D: SUMMARY OF 6 LEADERSHIP STYLES

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 Learning Portfolio 1 – Leadership Styles

Business Communications & Professional Practice – RMIT University 2021