Leadership Self-Assessment: Consideration Style in Accounting
This paper presents a leadership self-assessment by a partner at a small accounting firm, drawing on Peter G. Northouse's Leadership: Theory and Practice and Bolman and Deal's Reframing Organizations. The author critiques classical, hierarchical leadership as ill-suited to modern professional environments and advocates for a consideration-style approach that emphasizes team building, employee development, open communication, and delegated decision-making. Through self-inventory exercises, the author identifies personal strengths aligned with the human resources frame and illustrates how team-based organizational structures outperform rigid top-down hierarchies in responding to the dynamic demands of today's business landscape.
- Introduction: Context, thesis, and paper overview
- Leadership Styles in Modern Organizations: Classical, charismatic, and consideration leadership compared
- Self-Inventory Process: Author's personal leadership strengths and team practices
- Leadership Style and Organizational Types: Top-down hierarchies vs. team-based organizational structures
- References: Cited texts by Northouse and Bolman and Deal
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper grounds abstract leadership theory in a concrete professional context — a small accounting firm — making the argument tangible and credible throughout.
- It moves logically from critique (classical leadership's limitations) to proposal (consideration-style leadership) to personal evidence (self-inventory results), giving the argument a clear internal structure.
- The author avoids purely theoretical description by consistently connecting each leadership concept to specific workplace scenarios, such as assembling audit teams or assigning tasks based on individual expertise.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates applied theoretical analysis: the author does not merely summarize Northouse or Bolman and Deal but actively tests their frameworks against personal professional experience. This use of self-assessment data as primary evidence, interpreted through established scholarly frameworks, is a hallmark of reflective leadership writing at the graduate level.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a contextual introduction situating leadership challenges in a post-Enron corporate environment. It then surveys classical, charismatic, transactional, and transformational leadership models before narrowing to the consideration style. The self-inventory section applies Bolman and Deal's frames to the author's own traits, illustrated with workplace examples. The final section contrasts traditional top-down organizational structures with team-based models, closing with a forward-looking statement about exporting consideration-style leadership internationally.
Introduction
In the wake of the corporate scandals involving Enron and the Arthur Andersen Company, there have been increased calls for strong ethical leadership. Leadership has always been regarded as a key factor in ensuring the effectiveness of any organization. However, new models are also being developed to challenge the limitations of the prevailing classical theories of leadership.
This paper argues for a tempered approach — one that combines effective leadership with good management. Both factors are important, since over-managed and under-led organizations tend to lose sight of their goals. By the same token, while charismatic leaders can guide their organizations to high levels of success, a lack of management skills means that such victories often do not last in the long run.
The growing awareness of corporate and white-collar crime has likewise presented new challenges to the classical leadership model. Organizational leaders must now be wary of lawsuits the way physicians fear malpractice cases. Furthermore, advances in technology, the collapse of the dot-com industry, and an increasingly diverse and sophisticated clientele have created a new need for leaders who combine old-fashioned management skills with the vision to identify emerging needs and innovations before they become trends.
In this paper, I apply the leadership theories discussed in Peter G. Northouse's Leadership: Theory and Practice and Lee G. Bolman and Terrence E. Deal's Reframing Organizations to my own profession as a partner in a local accounting firm. The first part of the paper discusses various leadership styles and notes how the classical leadership style necessarily limits a leader's ability to both lead and manage in the modern era. Instead, I propose that, like most organizations, my accounting firm would benefit most from a leader who embodies the consideration style of leadership.
In the next section, I discuss the results of my self-inventory process, which surfaced several leadership qualities that characterize my approach. The results reveal a leadership style focused on fulfilling a company's goals by fostering communication and cooperation among employees.
In the final section, I discuss the effectiveness and advantages of this leadership style, both within my accounting firm and in other organizations more broadly. These examples show how traditional, top-down hierarchies are increasingly giving way to team-based organizational structures.
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