In my perception, the free-rein leadership style is the most suitable for me as it includes a high level of freedom and individual decision-making among employees and the opportunity to look at problems from different perspectives. It suits me due to my creative skills and powerful leadership attitude. Moreover, it is effective in the long term and allows workers to increase their professional qualifications by working independently and finding new innovative ways of achieving set goals. Hence, under such a leadership style, the working environment tends to be more motivating, less competitive, encouraging to do the given tasks, perform the needed functions, and improve creative thinking.
In my understanding, leaders who exercise this leadership style generally possess certain characteristic traits. They might include intelligence, extroversion, openness to experience, effective communication skills, charisma, creativity, achievement motivation, and general problem-solving skills. Such qualities are needed for establishing a motivated working environment, implementing creativity in problem-solving, introducing new techniques of effective decision-making, and reaching excellent working results. Additionally, despite this freedom in decision-making and choosing the ways of goal achievement, the leader needs to have a strong charisma, persuasive skills, and a strong personality to be able to lead and direct individuals. According to Fahlevi et al. (2019), a free rein leader should support employees with resources and advice but do not get too much involved in their operations. That is why I believe that the free-rein leadership style is suitable for me as I am a strong extravert with great interpersonal skills and I like being creative and innovative by doing my tasks.
Diverse historic personalities utilized this leadership style, for example, Elon Mask. He is well known as the CEO of Tesla and is famous because of his innovative ideas in space travelling. For instance, although the idea of travelling to Mars exists more than 50 years and was described in many science-fiction books and scholarly articles, Elon Mask made it a global goal in that society is interested. According to Fahlevi et al. (2019), when employees are not motivated enough, it will disharmonize the working environment and can lead to unwanted levels of employee turnover. Hence, free rein leaders generally do not control employees; their main function is motivating individuals in achieving common goals that matter for the organization.
Reference
Fahlevi, M., Zuhri, S., Parashakti, R. D., & Ekhsan, M. (2019). Leadership styles of food truck business. Journal of Research in Business, Economics and Management, 13(2), 2437-2442.