What3Words?

Describe your leadership style in three words.

It’s like being asked for the ‘What3Words’ of your identity.

As someone who loves words and believes they matter, I find this harder than any interview competency question.

Not because I don’t know how I lead.

But because I know what words carry. And I want to choose them well. Off the top of my head I think to:

Authentic. Collaborative. Transparent.

All good words I believe in. All a bit overused. Hijacked in the corporate wall-art Olympics.

Authentic has become hollow branding.

Collaborative is sometimes mistaken for slow or non-decisive.

Transparent can be twisted into sharing ‘too much’.

When asked this, it’s a struggle to quiet the live internal chatter. The part of me that wants to etymologically deconstruct every word and check it hasn’t been weaponised in AI LinkedIn posts. Pondering if my previous teams would even agree with my words.

I find it helpful to remind myself that the interviewer probably isn’t asking for adjective poetry.

They’re asking for pattern recognition.

- How do you make decisions?

- What happens in the room when you’re leading?

- Do people feel steadier or smaller? Clearer or confused? Braver or controlled and managed?

- When you leave a role, what has shifted?

That’s leadership style. Not the label. The lived experience.

If you’re faced with this question, perhaps the better move is to try and choose words that describe behaviour, not branding.

Like: Clear. Courageous. Human.

Words that show how you operate under pressure. What you protect and what you prioritise when it comes to crunchy times.

It’s fascinating how often in life we’re asked to compress identity into slogans or soundbites.

Maybe we don’t struggle to pick words because we lack clarity.

Maybe we struggle because we resist reducing ourselves to something tidy and palatable.

Leadership isn’t a slogan.

It’s often unseen patterns. Something teams feel even if they can’t pin a perfect trio of adjectives on it.

And the best leaders I’ve worked with, for, or coach don’t fit into tidy boxes.

What3Words /// are three tidy squares to describe a specific location in a whole landscape. Useful for navigation. Not nearly enough to capture the nuances of the terrain, the hills, or the neighbourhood.

And if someone is asking for your three words, feel permitted to ask what theirs are.

Not the ones on the website or the wall.

The ones you can feel in the room.

- How do they handle disagreement?

- What behaviour gets rewarded?

- Is there space for your style to contribute?

Three words are easy to rehearse.

Patterns are harder to hide .

❔What words would your teams honestly use about you and the terrain you create?

Photo is a flashback to a couple of years ago. Despite its overuse, authentic to me isn’t a word on a poster.

It’s forgetting to pack trousers and choosing to own the blazer and yoga pants look in the Monday meeting.

And choosing to tell everyone, so they can laugh with you.