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The role of the relevant leadership styles use is crucial for the efficiency of any leaders activity for two general reasons. The first of them concerns the social demands that make some leadership styles more preferable than others while the second one is related to the personal abilities of the supposed person in a leading position. In my opinion, the best leadership style for me is the democratic one because of the following considerations. Firstly, it looks like one of the most relevant approaches to management in todays democratic society. Secondly, it fully corresponds to my personal inclination to dialogue and respect to the opinions of other people. To become an efficient democratic leader, I have to develop my communication skills, systems thinking, and general flexibility because those are the key characteristics of the chosen leadership style.

The democratic leadership style is one of the variety of approaches to leadership and has acquired both strengths and weaknesses in the course of its development. Abdulaziz Al-Sawai in his in-depth analysis of the history of leadership theories development underlines that the theoretical realization of leadership was the process which took place when leadership had already existed and people just needed to improve it by some reconsideration. Thus, the needed qualities of any leader are based on the actual social requirements and the success of a person in his or her self-realization as an authority depends on their ability to fit into them. In the present-day social reality, the democratic relations between people demonstrate the best results Therefore, it is reasonable to require from any leader, including a healthcare professional, the democratic style of leadership, at least in a mix with other style. Dorgham and Al.Mahmoud point out that the democratic leadership style is one of the most popular in the world of nursing management along with the authoritative one. The main feature of this style, as stated by Giltinane, is the leaders belief that all workers are naturally inclined to good behavior, and thus freedom and autonomy at work only increase the efficiency of their professional activity. Frandsen in her resume of the democratic leadership claims that such a leader makes workers participate in the decision-making process and helps them to communicate as a team. Through the in-depth analysis of the democratic leadership style, the author points out such attributes as the abilities to share responsibility with the team, encourage open communication, provide the team members with accountability and feedback, and underline the potential weaknesses of the team instead of accentuating on the personal mistakes of individuals belonging to the team . In this way, a healthcare professional who uses the abovementioned style should have good social skills and the advanced creative thinking in order to perform his or her team-building functions well, being a guiding member of the team rather than an authority contraposed to other members.

In my opinion, I have some of the discussed qualities, but I need to improve them in order to perform my functions of a democratic leader effectively. For example, while my abilities to communicate with people and organize their work are sufficient, it is difficult in some situations to remain completely democratic when the situation actually needs a voluntary decision. Giltinane underlines this problem and claims that the participation of staff in the decision-making process may lead to frustrating results though requires a lot of time. Particular circumstances need rapid personal decisions of a leader himself or herself. It seems to me that the main problem here is the inability of some democratic leaders, who face this weakness of their leadership style, to be completely flexible. When a leader always communicates with the team, it is easy to get the team members opinions in a short time. For this, specific advanced communication skills are necessary. It seems to me that being a democratic leader is very difficult primarily because of the need in very developed systems thinking, which allows a democratic leader to understand and evaluate the situation through the prism of the full context of it and thus see the system problems in the mistakes committed by individual team members. Actually, such a high level of systems thinking connected with social responsibility seems to be a problem for me because I have no experience in this field. At the same time, I suppose that it is difficult to combine the guiding responsibilities with the personal professional responsibilities. It is clear that leadership requires the combination of both professional healthcare skills and the social management abilities, and in this way appears the dilemma concerning the balance between these two fields of a healthcare professionals activity. Such flexibility, especially required by the democratic leadership style because a democratic leader should be in a close contact with his team, may imply to some extent the decrease of a healthcare providers attention to the sphere of his or her direct activity for the sake of the management. In fact, the possibility of peculiar compromise between these two fields of activity looks difficult for me because I felt my lack of flexibility for such a task and thus I have to develop it in order to become an effective democratic leader.

Through the provided analysis of the selected leadership style, it is possible to assume that it is very difficult to become an effective democratic leader because of the high requirements to such manager. At the same time, it is clear that this leadership style corresponds to my own qualities in the best way, and the challenge concerns only my self-development. Thus, I completely agree with Giltinane who claimed that although democratic leadership can be less effective than other forms of leadership, it can be more flexible, and usually increases motivation and creativity.