EI Leadership Styles Self-Assessment
About This Assessment
The following tool provides an assessment of your current ‘emotional intelligence’ leadership style preferences. It suggests the styles you use most frequently when leading and managing people, and identifies opportunities for your development as a more fully rounded, emotionally healthy leader.
Before you start the assessment, it is important to have some context.
The Global Leadership Foundation's purpose is to raise the emotional health levels of people across the globe. Emotional Health is a state of enhanced wellbeing created through highly conscious choices and mindful practices. It is characterised by the ability to make constructive and respectful decisions in every situation, taking personal responsibility for how we relate to and engage with others.
Emotionally healthy people are conscious of themselves – their thoughts, emotions and behaviours – and of the impact they have on those around them. As leaders and as individuals, high levels of emotional health are the foundation of authentic, effective and sustainable leadership.
When people first hear about ‘emotional health’, they often misunderstood it to be another expression for ‘emotional intelligence’ (sometimes referred to as ‘EI’ or ‘EQ’). The two are not the same thing, though they are interrelated.
Emotional intelligence is all about recognising and managing emotions in ourselves and others. It is a critical and interrelated ‘subset’ of emotional health along with mental intelligence and other lesser known ‘intelligences’: body intelligence, social intelligence and spiritual intelligence.
As our emotional health develops, our emotional intelligence develops with it, while developing our emotional intelligence supports the raising of our emotional health level.
Here we are focused on emotional intelligence, and specifically the six leadership styles introduced by Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee in their landmark 2002 book Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Those styles are: visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and commanding.
Each of the six leadership styles creates either resonance or dissonance in different ways and contexts. The most effective leaders do not rely on a single style – they develop a repertoire, moving fluidly between the six styles as the situation demands. They argue that the visionary style is the most broadly effective, but all six styles have their place when used with awareness and intention.
Each style is underpinned by specific emotional intelligence competencies, some of which you may already have and some of which likely need developing. This assessment is designed to help you differentiate these and target areas for future development.
The following statements relate to how you perform various leadership and management functions within your work environment. Rate each statement according to how often you demonstrate this behaviour.
To get an accurate picture, it is important that you are honest with yourself and choose the rating that best fits your actual behaviour — not how you aspire to behave.
Note: You may notice that some statements seem similar, but are actually different — please read each one carefully.
Rating Scale:
- Constantly — I constantly do this
- Often — I often do this
- Sometimes — I sometimes do this
- Never or Rarely — I never or rarely do this
| Style | How it Builds Resonance | Impact on Climate | When Appropriate | EI Competency Requirements |
|---|
Your Details
EI Leadership Styles Self-Assessment
0 of 50 completed
Rate how frequently you demonstrate each behaviour. Choose the rating that most accurately reflects your actual behaviour.
- Constantly — I constantly do this
- Often — I often do this
- Sometimes — I sometimes do this
- Never or Rarely — I never or rarely do this
EI Leadership Styles Report
This report shows your personal leadership style preferences across the six EI Leadership Styles. Your scores are expressed as percentages — a higher percentage indicates a stronger preference for that style. The report is divided into two parts: Part 1 is a summary profile, Part 2 is a detailed view of each style including element-level scores.
Leadership Style Scores
| Leadership Style | Score (%) | Rating |
|---|
Rating Scale
| Range | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 80 – 100% | High Preference — almost always used |
| 60 – 79% | High/Medium Preference — often used |
| 40 – 59% | Medium Preference — used about half the time |
| 20 – 39% | Low/Medium Preference — sometimes used |
| Under 20% | Low Preference — rarely used |
The development guidance below covers all six leadership styles — not just your primary and secondary. Each style is assessed against benchmarks derived from research into effective resonant leadership, and your guidance is tailored to your specific score in each style.
Visionary and Coaching are the anchor styles of resonant leadership — the most important to develop as your primary modes. Affiliative and Democratic are situational resonant styles — valuable when accessible and well-calibrated, but potentially problematic if they become dominant. Pacesetting and Commanding are dissonant styles — they have a specific and limited role, and should be used sparingly and intentionally. If either scores above 20%, that is your most urgent development priority.