Reply to this classmate on the discussion thread with 100 words

If I were to pick just one leadership style to describe my current boss, I would say that he uses the Participative style. He was a peer when I first started, and was promoted to management about six months ago. As such, he's very familiar with our workflow and still handles a lot of the "grunt work" himself, so he still feels like a bit of a peer in that regard. He also gets everyone on involved when we have to make technical decisions about how to do things, and has no problems correcting people, or being corrected himself, when it comes to how we code things. He has excellent technical skills and frequently uses them to help us get things done.

A boss I had maybe 8 years ago was definitely a Supportive type of leader. He was the manager over my team in IT, but had basically no technical skills himself. This wasn't a problem though, as he did a good job soliciting help from those on the team who did. Most importantly though, he was a very personable leader who would chat casually with us all the time about whatever. He made sure that we had all the resources we needed, always approved time off and made sure that all the work was covered, went to bat for us in leadership meetings, etc., - he made us all feel like he cared about us was on "our side", because he was. I was a bit skeptical about him at first since he had no technical background, but overall he ended up being a great boss because he did an excellent job supporting us as individuals and as a team.

Three positive behaviors I would pull out of what I just listed are having good technical skills, making sure the team has what they need, and meeting frequently with team members one on one to discuss things. Fortunately, most of my bosses over the years have been very good. However, one boss I had back during my senior year in high school wasn't very good. There were a lot of not-great things he did, but I think the one that sticks out to me the most is him (married) constantly hitting on his secretary (also married) in a very obvious and uncomfortable way. It was a small business and he was the owner, so there wasn't much to be done about it. That's a bit specific, so as a general negative characteristic I will say doing unethical or immoral things and using leadership status to get away with it.