Leadership styles

What leaders have in common

All leaders look to the future to judge the world around their organisation or team and imagine what success will look like.  All leaders set long range goals, decide on strategy and communicate their vision and objectives.

And all leaders take an important role in making the future happen, especially by creating the context in which change and growth can occur.  This applies equally to leaders operating in business, politics, activism, sport and many other spheres.

How leaders differ in style

But how leaders achieve this can vary radically according to leadership style and different styles will be appropriate in different contexts and for different teams.  The model of leadership styles developed by Kurt Lewin in the 1930s is still useful today.  This breaks leadership styles into three broad types:

Authoritarian or autocratic leadership style

We recoil from the words ‘authoritarian’ and especially ‘autocratic’, but in many circumstances these can be appropriate.  Armed forces leadership, for instance, will in many circumstances be necessarily authoritarian, based upon a rigorous division of role and responsibility and clear chain of command to yeild results. 

But this approach to leadership may equally be suited to other circumstances.  For example, an emergency like a natural disaster or terrorist attack will be best met by an authoritarian style of leadership, with the clear aim of leading people involved out of danger.

Even an environment like a newsroom during a big breaking story will probably work best under an authoritarian leadership style.  Out go collaborative editorial meetings, and in comes clear direction from an editor, with urgent deadlines.

Participative or democratic leadership style

A democratic leadership style invites the participation and contribution of team members towards the final decision-making process.  That process is run by the leader and they have a key role in shaping the final decision and resolving any differences. 

The key advantages of this leadership style is it draws in skills and expertise not held by the leader and also builds the commitment of team members to their own strategic objectives through their involvement in their development. 

There is an obvious time cost to this approach (which is one reason it does not suit emergency situations).  The advantages will however be seen not only in better strategies or plans, but also in the way the team works towards those.

Hands-off leadership style

This approach, sometimes called laissez-faire, places a great deal of trust in team members to both understand and deliver what the whole team is driving towards.  The risks of this leadership style are self-evident: team members may mistake or misunderstand what they are working towards; and it allows a large degree of leeway to underperformance.

A leader who successfully employs this style will normally allow team members to get on with their work, with possible gains in productivity, but will also ensure the leader’s own door is ‘always open’ for consultation and discussion.

With the emergence of coaching in the workplace it should be possible to combine a hands-off leadership style with one that employs a coaching approach, in which the leader acts as the catalyst to drive team members to bigger and better things.