We all have our own unique way of getting things done. When it comes to leadership styles, we may not even realize what sort of tendencies we have in dealing with the big picture or the big decisions. Still, many of the most common leadership styles fit into a handful of buckets. Knowing your style can help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and how they might affect your team.
It is important to understand that your leadership style isn’t set in stone. We tend to have certain reactions and plans for different elements of business, at different times in the growth of our company, and depending on the people we’re leading. Be that as it may, we do tend to lean on certain styles more often than others. By understanding what you do and what those tendencies do to your work environment can be very useful in predicting how it might affect your company and your team.
Democratic Leadership – This one seems relatively straightforward. Decisions still come from the top, but they’re formulated based on the structured, organized, and intentional input from other contributors. In short, the decision rises to the top alongside valuable insight, information, and informed opinions from people in trusted positions.
In the short term, democratic leadership can make for better decisions overall. There’s a longer-term benefit, too. Being a part of the decision-making process can help lower-level employees feel confident and empowered as they take on more influential roles, as well as develop the critical thinking skills unique to your business or industry.
Laissez-Faire Leadership – Let them do. Basic French skills excepted, this leadership style is focused on a laid-back, hands-off leadership style that puts the onus on workers to make smart decisions across the board. From working hours to dress code to day-to-day operations, this style is most common at small companies or very young start-ups, where teams are typically more empowered to take care of their own tasks. However, this style is less and less effective as more people, more projects, and more variables begin to intersect. Laissez-faire leadership often leads to poor communications, uncertain expectations, and other challenges that are made exponentially more difficult as the size of the firm increases.
Strategic Leadership – Ever feel like a bridge? This leadership style puts the executive in a position to manage both executive level, big-vision thinking as well as the operational elements of running the business. This style can be very effective because it allows leaders to constantly connect the granular and the aggregate, or how all those smaller pieces fit together. The challenge is that this style requires plenty of interaction with multiple departments, lots of meetings, and a lot of time spent on issues that might be better handled by your team managers.
Coaching-Style Leadership – One of the core tenets of being a leader is your responsibility to put people in a position to succeed. In a sense, that’s what the coaching-style leadership is all about. The first key is to identify what each employee does best, balancing strengths and weaknesses, and also evaluating who that employee might do their best work alongside. Like democratic or strategic leadership, this style focuses on growth and goal-setting. The difference is often in just how personalized those goals might be and what growth looks like to each individual. Additionally, this style of leadership also borrows heavily from team sports by prioritizing team building, motivation, and a sense of camaraderie. The real key is in being able to connect with a wide variety of people and understand many different personalities, learning, and working styles; in a sense, leaders need to understand what makes people tick.
What leadership style do you identify with? What shortfalls have you found in the way you lead? Let us know!