36 statements, about 5 minutes, no email. Your main and second style, with a full written report, the moment you finish.
I explain how each person’s work connects to where the team is heading
When a task matters, I tell people exactly what I need and when I need it by
When someone brings me a problem, I ask what they think before I give my view
When someone on my team is having a hard week, I ask about it
I hold myself to a higher standard than I ask of anyone else
What you get
A full written report in six parts, free, with no email. Save it as a PDF or send the link to your team. See a sample report.
All six styles scored and drawn as one profile, with what your second style adds and when it tends to appear.
Two lists to hand to your team, the situations where your default gets the best from people, and the ones where it strains them.
Six leadership moments with the one thing to check in each, three practices to try this week, and a playbook for working with each of the six styles.
The framework
Daniel Goleman described these six in Harvard Business Review in 2000, from a study of 3,871 executives. His original label sits above each plain name. The leaders with the healthiest teams used four or more.
Coercive
Says what, who and by when, and checks that it happened.
Works when: A crisis, a safety issue, or someone who has ignored every softer approach.
Strains when: Skilled people doing complex work, who stop bringing ideas.
Authoritative
Sets the destination, explains why it matters, and leaves people free to find the route.
Works when: A team that has lost direction, or a change that needs explaining.
Strains when: Experts who know the field better than you do.
Affiliative
Builds trust and protects the mood of the team, so people feel safe to speak up.
Works when: Healing a rift, or building trust in a new team.
Strains when: Someone needs to hear plainly that their work is slipping.
Democratic
Collects views and looks for a decision the group can stand behind.
Works when: You need buy-in, or the team knows things you do not.
Strains when: An emergency, or a team too new to the problem to advise.
Pacesetting
Sets a high bar, meets it personally, and expects others to follow the example.
Works when: A capable, motivated team that needs quick results.
Strains when: Anyone still learning, who needs teaching and gets a rescue.
Coaching
Asks more than tells, hands over stretching work, and treats mistakes as material.
Works when: People who want to grow, and a timeline that allows it.
Strains when: A crisis, or someone with no interest in changing.
Read this before you trust it
Thirty-six statements about what you do when you lead, each rated from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Every style has six statements, one of them worded in reverse, so agreeing with everything does not produce a profile. Your highest total is your main style and the next is your second.
Where we stand
The quiz is a reflective tool, not a validated psychometric instrument: the statements are our own and unpiloted, and nobody has tested whether the scores stay stable or predict how anyone leads. The validated part of this page is step two, a 60-item Big Five inventory scored against real norms.
What it cannot do
Same quiz, closer in
Management style is leadership style seen from closer in: how you hand out work, check progress and give feedback. The 36 statements describe exactly that, so the result covers both.
How that style lands depends on who you manage. See our guide to managing different personalities, or put everyone on a map of your whole team's personalities.
For workshops and classes
A paper version for groups: twelve workplace scenarios and a hand-scoring key on two pages, free to print and photocopy for a team session or a class. People tally their own letters, so nobody hands in answers. It scores the same six styles in a different format from the online quiz, so treat the two results as separate readings.
Step two, optional
The quiz asks how you lead. This asks who you are: sixty statements, about 5 minutes, scored against real norms.
01
Extraversion and conscientiousness are the traits most consistently linked to leadership (Judge and colleagues, 2002).
02
Your report draws six leadership dimensions as tent poles, so you can see where the canopy sags.
03
Trait scores as percentiles, your signature strengths, and how you work day to day.
Common questions
Your leadership style is the approach you reach for most often when you direct, motivate and develop other people. The quickest way to name it is the 36-statement quiz at the top of this page: each statement counts towards one of six styles (directive, visionary, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting, coaching), and your highest score is your main style. Most people also have a clear second style, and the report covers both.
Directive, visionary, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. They come from Daniel Goleman's article "Leadership That Gets Results" (Harvard Business Review, 2000), where he called them coercive, authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. The older three-way split into autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire leadership comes from Lewin, Lippitt and White (1939); Goleman's directive style is close to their autocratic one.
There is no single one. In Goleman's data the visionary style had the most positive effect on a team's working climate, and the directive and pacesetting styles had a negative effect when they were a leader's default. His main finding was about range: leaders who could use four or more styles, and switch between them as the situation changed, had the best climate and results.
Not in any way that matters for the result. Management style is leadership style seen from closer in: how you hand out work, check progress and give feedback. The 36 statements in this quiz describe everyday management behaviour, so your result describes your management style as well.
No. It is a self-reflection quiz, and it has not been validated for selection. An employer who wants a leadership assessment for hiring or promotion should use a validated personality inventory alongside a structured interview, and keep the score as one input among several. The 60-question Big Five further down this page is the validated instrument we offer, and SMP Assess runs it across a team or a shortlist.
Accurate enough to start a useful conversation, and no more. Thirty-six self-ratings can show which approach you believe you use. They cannot show how you behave on a bad day, or how your team experiences you, and these statements have not yet been piloted or validated. Treat the result as a hypothesis, check it with someone who works for you, and use the longer Big Five profile if you want a measurement with norms behind it.
Yes. A paper version is free to download and print from this page: twelve workplace scenarios with a hand-scoring key, scored to the same six styles. It is designed for workshops, classes and coaching sessions: people tally their own letters, so nobody has to share individual answers. It is a different format from the online quiz, so treat the two as separate readings.
Name the style in plain words, give one specific example of it working, then name a situation where you deliberately switch. "I mostly lead by coaching: I ask more than I tell. When we had four days to fix a failed release I became much more directive, and said so to the team" is stronger than any label on its own, because it shows range and self-awareness.
Keep going
About this page
Michael Hodge, founder of SeeMyPersonality, has built online personality measurement since 2003 and wrote the statements and the scoring on this page. More about the author.
Leadership style is one input into how you lead: it informs, it does not define. The short quiz is for reflection, and neither it nor the Big Five profile measures ability.
For managers
You know your style. Do you know your team's?
SMP Assess runs the 60-question profile as an employee personality test across a group: send one link, read each person's leadership and work-style report, and see the whole team on one map.