A great leader is ......

How you finish that statement says a lot about you. Each of us wants to be the writer of their great success story. To play a senior role in a business or build one from the ground up and alter the course of an industry. To launch a brand that captures consumers' hearts, transforming them into devoted fans. We want to be the executive or entrepreneur that creates jobs, abundance and a flourishing organization that bursts with energy and innovation.

When we move into leadership positions, we adopt a leadership style that we either witnessed, read about, or saw in others.If it's considered successful, we're likely to follow it until it becomes part of our conduct, becoming our "style." Every leadership style has merits and drawbacks. That’s why it is important to practice being “malleable”, rather than dogmatic and caught in an airtight cycle of “your way of doing things”. A successful leader is able to shapeshift, adapting their disposition to circumstance in order to produce the desired output. But sometimes we aren’t aware of our strengths and weaknesses, and our composure becomes less malleable. That hinders our ability to act in line with our higher-level goals. 

What kind of leader are you? Take This Quiz to Find Out.

Below are 16 questions to help you begin to dig into what your style says about you, and how to leverage to be more effective as a leader. Of course, there are no right answers to these questions. But finding out which leadership style you've adopted will help understand how to play to your strengths and avoid the drawbacks of each given archetype.

Which are the four leadership styles?

The Classic Entrepreneur.

As John Doerr put it "the entrepreneur is the man that does "more than anyone thinks possible with less than anyone thinks possible." Leadership is about competitiveness thrill and the search for achievement. No-nonsense factors, such as prices, efficiency, profit margins, and smart offers, are critical metrics. Sure, these leaders care about the ideals that their organization stands for, but the dollars-and-cents value proposition are what make or break you.

We enjoy producing killer and butt-kicking businesses. We are "opportunistic" in Doerr's terms, and he doesn't mean that critically — we revel in "the pitch" and "the deal." If confronted with decisions about introducing a new product, or negotiating with a unhappy client, or selling the business to an interested suitor, they concentrate on tough-minded estimates and no-nonsense financial returns.

Modern Missionary

Such leaders seek more than pure business success; they seek significance. Winning is less about fighting than creating something original and meaningful.

Success is less about money and more about making a difference and having an effect.

Economic value is important, but human values push their desire to succeed. In a way the Modern Missionary is the FOIL archetype to the Classic Entrepreneur and the two have a great deal to learn from one another. And these leaders may take risks that classic entrepreneurs won't, even if the short-term returns aren't clear, or they may turn down offers that others might embrace, because the financial payoffs aren't as important as the broader impact they're hoping to make.

These leaders don't just want to run businesses; they want to make their businesses a cause.

The Problem Solver

They think less about drastic effects than tangible outcomes. They believe in knowledge and experience's worth. Disruptive technologies and blank-sheet business models that reshape markets and industries, but past performance is a strong predictor of future effects.

When they rise through the ranks or lead companies they have created, problem solvers are the first to address challenges and find new opportunities. Sure, they rely on colleagues' guidance, but ultimately they rely on what they've learned to lead the company into the future. Such top-down, take-off, the-buck-stops-here executives may be the most identifiable kind of leaders in terms of the picture we bear of what it takes to get things done.

The Solution Finder

Such leaders agree that the most important ideas always come from the most unlikely places — the secret genius of their colleagues, the collective intelligence surrounding their organization. They're committed to making sure they don't limit what they can imagine. Ultimately, they are responsible for business outcomes, but they feel that producing such outcomes is everybody's business. These polite, quiet, self-effacing leaders don't make headlines, but that's because they have a different ambition.

They assume that modesty serving ambition is the best mentality to do great things in a world of massive unknowns.

The first step to growth is understanding. Understanding your strengths, your shortfalls, what we really care for, how we make choices, why we do what we do. The more we do that, the more able we are to marshal others' support for what we want to accomplish. During a time of crippling challenges and thrilling progress, unrelenting uncertainty and endless opportunity, there have never been more pathways to success—or opportunities to fail.