Finding Your Leadership Style: A Guide for Educators

Jeffrey Glanz

1 Helpful
I found it's 7 chategories of leader helped me to understand why I tackle things one way and others around me, who are different types of leaders, tackle them differently. That was a valuable insight that was totally consistent with my experience.

2 Finding your leadership style
Here's a book that all educators should read. The questionnaires and self-help activities make it easy for educators to analyze their leadership potential and match their leadership style. The full descriptions of the seven types of leaders are easy to follow and provide insight into your own behaviors and the strengths of those around you. The vivid scenarios provide clear steps and a multitude of strategies that would encourage educators to stretch their leadership capacities. As a school administrator, I see this book as an excellent tool in the crucial process of matching leadership qualities with specific jobs in the educational system.

3 A Horoscope Guide for Educators

If the morning newspaper's horoscope section is your guide for making decisions throughout the day, then you might find this book delightful and 'insightful.' Reading with a critical mind, however, you will find nothing but ambiguity and contradiction throughout Finding Your Leadership Style.

For example, while explaining leadership in its introduction, the author said, "the following statement... wrong to some extent, 'Leadership is reserved for te few gifted individuals who have the capacity to lead.'" Yet in the following paragraph the author made a contradictory and equally astonishing statement, "We should attract individuals into leadership programs who exhibit and possess specific dispositions, or virtues."

By labelling leadership styles, the author further advanced toward analyzing each of seven leadership labels categorized in the book. Wherever convenient, a famous/infamous person was attached a label -- such as Adolf Hitler for the Dynamic Aggressive and Mahatma Gandhi for the Dynamic Assertive -- to (stereotypically) illustrate a leadership style. When lacking appropriate examples, the author would classify a leadership style as anonymously supportive or a behind-the-scene doer.

The marked lacking of scientifically sound theories and verifiably measurable data makes Finding Your Leadership Style, at its best, a chicken soup for educational leader-wannabes.

4 Describing seven types of leadership styles
Finding Your Leadership Style: A Guide For Educators by Jeffrey Glanz (Dean of Graduate Programs and Head of the Department of Education, Wagner College, Staten Island, New York) is an informed and informative instructional manual written especially for educational leaders and administrators. Describing seven types of leadership styles (dynamic aggressive, dynamic assertive, dynamic supportive, adaptive aggressive, adaptive assertive, adaptive supportive, and creative assertive), Finding Your Leadership Style offers practical scenarios and solid advice for embracing and making the best of one's own leadership strengths and talents. An excellent resource for teachers, supervisors, district leaders, and more, Finding Your Leadership Style is a welcome and recommended addition to Educational Administration and Management Studies reference collections and reading lists.

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