What Does Your Approach to the Season say about your Leadership Style?

What Does Your Approach to the Season say about your Leadership Style?

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A Seasonal Leadership Reflection for 2026

Hands up who’s exhausted and ready for a pause. For many leaders, this year has demanded sustained resilience. The supercharged evolution of AI has been enough to test even the most technologically confident among us, while regulatory pressure and a persistently slow hiring market have made this something of an annus difficilis for those carrying organisational responsibility, to misquote our late Queen.

As we look ahead to 2026, leadership is increasingly defined not just by decision-making, but by how leaders hold uncertainty, distribute accountability and sustain performance through ongoing disruption.

With that in mind, we invite you to ease into the festive wind-down with our Christmas-themed leadership quiz. It is intentionally light-hearted!

Answer instinctively and tally which letter you choose most often. You may gain a useful insight into how you lead, only with less trauma than the spectral visitations and personal upheaval that accompanied Scrooge’s famous leadership transformation.

Take the Christmas Leadership Quiz

1. Which Christmas film best reflects how you lead?
   A) It’s a Wonderful Life – (focused on purpose, values, legacy)
   B) Home Alone – (like its lead character, quick-witted, decisive, self-reliant)
   C) The Holiday – (It’s all about managing other people’s needs and expectations)
   D) Die Hard – (Dealing with multiple threats and taking charge to avoid disaster)
2. You’re hosting Christmas dinner. What’s your style?
   A) Planned, tested, calm
   B) You take charge and improvise
   C) Everyone brings something
   D) Big vision, lots happening
3. Which Christmas retailer do you most admire?
   A) John Lewis – trust and emotional connection
   B) Amazon – speed and execution
   C) M&S – consistency, quality and care
   D) A small independent – creativity and agility
4. A key decision you made this year didn’t land. You:
   A) Reflected openly and adjusted course
   B) Fixed it quietly and move on
   C) Talked it through with the team
   D) Reframed it as “part of the plan”
5. Your reaction to Last Christmas on the radio:
   A) Traditions matter
   B) Enough already
   C) It connects people
   D) Incredible durability but could do with remastering for the current age
6. It’s 20 December and a problem appears. You:
   A) Check it aligns with core principles
   B) Solve it yourself
   C) Pull the right people together
   D) Absorb it along with everything else
7. Your team’s energy in mid-December is best described as:
   A) Tired but committed
   B) Running on adrenaline
   C) Supporting one another
   D) Stretched thin
8. Someone offers to help with a complex task. You:
   A) Welcome the support
   B) Decline – it’s quicker if you do it
   C) Accept and share ownership
   D) Thank them, but keep control
9. Which festive phrase sounds most like you?
   A) “Let’s do this properly”
   B) “I’ll just sort it”
   C) “Let’s work it out together”
   D) “We’ll make it work somehow”
10. If your leadership were a Christmas item, it would be:
    A) A star – guiding and consistent
    B) A lone reindeer – strong but overworked
    C) A bustling table groaning with food collaboratively prepared
    D) Fairy lights – bright, but easily tangled

Your Leadership Style Explained

Mostly As – The Purpose-Led Anchor

You provide stability, direction and a clear sense of what matters. In uncertain conditions, people look to you for reassurance and moral clarity. The risk is that consistency hardens into rigidity. As 2026 brings further volatility, regulation and AI-driven change, your opportunity is to hold purpose steady while allowing strategy, structure and ways of working to evolve around it.

Mostly Bs – The Lone Solver

You are decisive, capable and reliable under pressure. When things are urgent or ambiguous, you step in and get things moving. The risk is isolation. Struggling to ask for help or admit when something hasn’t worked quietly limits learning, increases personal strain and teaches teams to defer rather than contribute. In 2026, your leadership impact will grow fastest if you practise sharing uncertainty earlier and modelling that asking for help is a strength, not a failure.

Mostly Cs – The People-First Leader

You lead through trust, collaboration and shared ownership. Teams feel safe, engaged and supported, which builds resilience over time. The risk is drift. In fast-moving environments, a strong desire for inclusion can slow decisions or blur accountability. As the pace of change accelerates in 2026, your challenge will be to pair empathy with clarity, making timely calls while keeping people with you.

Mostly Ds – The Complexity Carrier

You are comfortable holding ambiguity, competing priorities and constant change. You keep things moving when others feel overwhelmed. The risk is overload. Absorbing too much can normalise pressure, mask structural problems and quietly erode performance. In 2026, the step-change will come from simplifying boldly, naming trade-offs clearly and designing systems that reduce dependence on your personal capacity.

Leading Forward: Reflection, Renewal and Readiness for 2026

Christmas has a habit of revealing truths. The leaders who will progress fastest into the New Year will be those who notice their patterns and habits, take time to reflect honestly and consider what might need to change, whether within themselves or the organisational culture and systems they lead.

This moment of pause matters. Rest and reflect are not indulgences; they are strategic enablers.  Also, eat drink and be merry. Fun, connection and recovery act as biological and psychological reset mechanisms for the bran and body, restoring the capacity for focus, learning and resilience.  Warmth and belonging provide emotional renewal, something no strategy deck can replace.

Or, as Dr Seuss phrased it so beautifully in How the Grinch Stole Christmas:

“Maybe Christmas”, he thought, “doesn’t come from a store”.

“Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more.”

With very best wishes for the season from all at Rialto.