Leaders who use this style primarily tend to be very adventurous, entrepreneurial, charismatic, and enthusiastic in approaching goals. Their optimistic and persuasive style makes others feel inspired to join efforts towards a common goal. Unlike a Directive Leader who is interested in knowing what needs to be done to achieve the goal, the Pioneer Leader tries to involve people to reach the goal; they are very good at connecting talent, discovering new opportunities, and motivating action. The flip side is that sometimes their excess of enthusiasm and optimism makes them unable to weigh the impact their decisions have on the environment and how they affect others.

Best qualities: bold, infuse passion into what they do, inspire others to seize new opportunities, daring, and good at seeking innovation.

Barriers: impulsive, overly confident, and they use this to sometimes persuade others to support unorthodox ideas or unrealistic projects and goals.

Main Characteristics of Pioneer Leaders:

• Goals: Quick, bold actions, significant breakthroughs, and groundbreaking ideas.
• Under stress: they can act aggressively and impulsively, abuse power.
• Fears: losing power, restrictive environments, and loss of status.
• Need: Recognition.
• Judges others: by their ability to influence and their creativity.
• Pace: fast.
• Communication: direct, verbose, inspiring, confident, and convincing.
• Response to rules: little or no interest in them.

Leaders with this style are excellent resource researchers, explorers, they advance rapidly towards goals with determination and a desire to overcome major obstacles. On the other hand, they lose sight of details and are only attentive to the macro level of the end result. Since they have creative approaches towards goals, they are able to launch many projects and ideas but easily lose focus on follow-up and the process of things.

Disadvantages:

• Excessive use of this Pioneer style can overload other styles.
• It can overcommit teams and force them to make decisions without considering the consequences.
• Process tracking is difficult.
• Their overconfidence can increase the insecurity of others.

Where they may also need reinforcement:

• Work on patience.
• Show more humility.
• Consideration for others and their contributions.

Strengths:

• They tend to be good change agents.
• They trust their intuition.
• They are able to gather people and get them to work together to achieve their goal.
• They are often inspirational figures.
• They are not afraid to try new things or ways of doing things.
• They are comfortable being the spokesperson.
• They are not afraid to face risks and challenges.

After many years of working on leadership development, I have encountered this type of style many times, just like the Directive Leader, because these qualities in VUCA environments for project launches are indispensable; they are engines of action and drive continuous improvement. But in modern leadership, there is no “one size fits all,” and as we will see, this style is not always the most suitable depending on who is being led, in which phase of a project one is, and what leadership needs the environment requires.

Imagine having glasses that allow you to see the world as others see it. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? At People Performance International, we offer you those glasses. And with our training program, you can become a true DISC Expert or Certified Behavioral Analyst, but it’s better to hear about it from others HERE

Don’t forget that we have more profiles to see, and in the end, we will see the strategies for training, and we will also see what the variant of this model is.

In the next chapter, you can see the

Energetic Leaders