Before we look at the secrets of being an effective tax day leader, I want to clear up something that, for me, was puzzling at the start of my career, because I started to investigate different ways that I could improve my leadership. And I encountered a number of different sorts of models. And I found it hard to reconcile the ideas I was getting over here from the ideas I was getting over there. And how did they relate to the ideas over there any ideas over there? gradually, I came to realize that these different models weren't conflicting. They were complimentary, but they were approaching leadership in three different ways.

There are three completely different types of model of leadership, all of which adds real value to our understanding of how to lead teams How to lead individuals. The first of these models are often known as traits, models or traits there is because they look at the traits that good leaders have. What sort of person do you need to be? Now please don't confuse this with an assumption that if you're not born in a certain way with a certain set of characteristics you can't lead I think that's absolute errant nonsense that comes down to us from the 19th century. The fact is, we can all change our personal characteristics and our traits, we can acquire and display the traits that we value and that the people around us value and the kind of traits that people value in leaders are honesty, integrity, capability, competence, being supportive, being fair, looking after people, all these different sorts of traits being clear minded and decisive, but also being influential, and taking time to think things through.

Those traits make a good leader. There are other traits that frankly, do not. If you give up easily rather than have determination, if you tell one story to one part of your team and another story to another, if you easily change your mind, just because someone has come to you with a new idea, or if you stick to an idea, without any good evidence, those will not make you a good leader. The traits of good leadership are traits that you can develop in yourself. And so we have traits models of leadership. And another type of model of leadership we have encore roles, models and roles based models of leadership say a good leader has to fulfill a number of roles.

For example, they have to be a mentor and again And a supporter and a developer to the individual team members. But at the same time, they have to be someone who looks after getting the tasks done. And at the same time, they have to encourage and facilitate good communication. And again, they have to focus on the team as a whole, and be a guide and an inspiration to the team. So we have a number of different roles based models, a number of different traits based models. And thirdly, we have what are called styles based models.

And styles based models say that good leadership comes with the right style of leadership, the right way of going about it. And a number of styles based models, talk about different approaches to leadership that you might adopt as your prevailing style. But our effective day to day leadership is going to borrow From another type of styles based model, situational leadership or contingency leadership, which says that the right style of leadership is contingent upon the situation, if you know the situation, you know the people and the context and the organization you're working with and what you need to get done, you can choose a style that fits. And that's going to be the basis of our effective day to day leadership. And I'll take you further into that in the next section.