Office Captain Team“What is leadership to you” or “What does leadership mean to you” are some of the most frequently asked questions by the interviewers across the globe. Whether you are applying for a leadership position as an experienced or even as a new hire, interviewers like to ask this question a lot.
There are two reasons behind this. One to know how good you are at understanding the concept of leadership and the second is to decide whether you were fit for that job or not, basing up your answer.
To be frank, there is no clear answer to the question What does leadership mean to you? as its completely based on the individual’s perspective.
For us, leadership is the person’s ability to take care of their team, maintain harmony with positive values, accomplish the targets, and further achieving success with their right skills and support of the team they gained.
However, in order to make your own idea on the leadership, let us go through a few things about this question, based upon which you can prepare your answer yourself.
The Concept behind the Question – What is Leadership to you
Imagine you have applied for a project manager or a team leader role in a company, where you will be interviewed by top-level executives as well as HR professionals.
Obviously, they will ask you this question about what is leadership to you because the main role of your job is to manage a team and get the work done. That means, you were acting as a leader to the team and they need to know how well you are fit to be as a leader.
Depending upon the answer that you give, the interviewers will get an idea about your sense of understanding the concept of leadership and your abilities to fulfill the role of a leader. By which they can assess whether you were a perfect fit for that company or not.
Why New hires should be aware of this Question
Although this question is basically asked as part of an interview for the positions that involve managing a team. However several interviewers even ask this question to the new hires, to understand their idea on leadership as well as to understand their willingness to work as a team under a leader.
Along with that, they can also estimate the leadership styles that you can feel comfortable to work with and often to estimate whether you are ok for the selected role or not.
There can also be several other reasons for asking this question to you. Think about a job role, that is just a position down to the leadership role in the organizational chart. Sure, in the upcoming years, the employee might need to get promoted to the leadership role. So, the interviewing team also needs to estimate from that point of view.
Like that they can be several underlying reasons on posing that question to you.
So, How to Answer the Question- What does Leadership mean to you?
To answer best, just go through these five points discussed below to get clear understanding and related to the position you applied and the experience or the situations you faced in your previous organization.
#1. Understand the Traits and Values of a Successful Leader
First of all, there a certain values and traits that are commonly seen in a successful leader. Be known that, anyone can naturally have some of those traits but not all of them.
So, if you were able to develop or improve the leadership values within you, sure you will make up yourself as an effective leader.
In the situation, if you were asked this question in detail, try to elevate the values and the traits that a good leader possesses.
At the same time, prepare yourself and try to give your voice based upon the requirements of the job roles and also explain to them any situation you have exhibited your leadership traits and values in case they ask for any further explanation based on your experience.
Also be clear about the Leadership values.
#2. Now, make a note of Bad Traits
Once you have now learned about good leadership traits, now consider what traits make oneself a poor or ineffective leader. Relate them yourself, identify any traits that can damage you. Try to avoid them.
This helps you to build the leadership from yourself rather than just knowing the answer from the perspective of the interview.
#3. Understanding the Colleagues and Team Members
Once you are in a leader, you need to deal with people with different mindsets. So, you need to understand the employees or your team members. you need to develop skills to deal with different people in a positive way. You need to respect, cooperate, and main a rapport with your teams to build harmony.
At the same time, you need to mingle with colleagues and fellow leadership members. All of you should cooperate with each other.
So, one should know about the collaboration and cooperation in leadership with respect to your colleagues and team members.
#4. Leadership Skills and Leadership Styles.
Apart from maintaining the harmony of the team, as a leader, you should also make sure that your team is highly productive, as profit and productivity matter in any business.
To achieve that, you should also develop all the required leadership skills as well as managerial skills to keep your team productive and an efficient one at the same time keeping your team happy without any distress.
Also if you wish to be a leader, you should understand situations won’t be the same all the time, they change. So as a leader you should also adopt the leadership style according to the situation.
So, a thorough knowledge of leadership style and the ability to managing and flex between those leadership styles is a must.
#5. Conduct and Conflict Management
Conflict management is one of the important concepts related to the leadership role.
Conflicts are inevitable in teams. At some or other time conflicts can arise. As an effective leader, one should know the steps you need to take and you should be capable of resolving the conflict or at least reducing the damage.
In order to resolve the conflict, first of all, the leader should be aware of the conflict process, its management, and its resolution.
So, you should be prepared even about conflict and its concepts in relation to leadership. At the same time, one should understand that conduct plays a curtail role in building trust and respect from your employees.
You can even create your own Answer
Now that you have an idea of what a leader does with his traits, values, skills, and abilities.
Think yourself in the leadership position managing employees and running the business successfully, fulfilling all your roles.
Try to relate yourself to the previous experiences you faced. write down what you feel on a piece of paper and refine it to get clarity on What does leadership mean to you and express it wholeheartedly to the interviewer.
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