As an authority figure, leadership is the key to success. To improve your success, it is vital to understand your leadership style. Why? Because when you know what your leadership style is, you can have a clear idea of your strengths, as well as your weaknesses. Only when you have a firm understanding of your strengths and weaknesses can you, or your team of leaders, become a more effective leader.
His leadership style guides him in his role as a leader. Understanding your leadership style will help you communicate better with the people you lead. Being familiar with the type of approach you take to leadership can help you advance your career, increase your success, and increase the success of those you lead. While there are many different leadership styles, they all have a default leadership style that comes more naturally to them.
Leadership styles determine how someone uses their power and authority to lead others. So your default leadership style is how you feel most comfortable guiding others to achieve your vision. Let us now examine the different styles of leadership. Autocratic Leadership is Leader-Centric and Leader-Centric.
With this leadership style, all decision making lies with the leader, and decisions are made by the leader without consulting subordinates. Democratic leadership (often called participatory leadership) focuses on the leader's team and is characterized by the fact that decision-making is shared across the team. In stark contrast to the autocratic leadership style, ideas are freely shared and open discussion is encouraged. At the very core of transformative leadership is the constant promotion of a compelling vision, along with a set of values to live and work for.
Transformational leaders create a culture of not blame in which the focus is on the problem at hand and how to solve it, not on who is responsible for creating the problem. Laissez-faire leadership is when the leader does not lead the team, but allows the team to fully self-manage. This leadership style is also known as the “hands-free” style and unlike the other leadership styles we've seen, all authority is given to subordinates, including goal setting, problem solving, and decision making. From the leader's perspective, the key to success is to build a really strong team and then stay out of their way.
A common question people ask when learning about laissez-faire leadership is “what does a laissez-faire leader do?. Well, this will differ from leader to leader, but they are usually more concerned with the creation and articulation of their compelling vision. They also usually care about the steps to take to help achieve the vision. So, obviously, the team is left to decide how to achieve a particular step.
A laissez-faire leadership style usually works best near the top of the organizational tree, where senior leaders appoint other senior leaders to lead their respective departments and allow them to move forward. To make things more complex, no two leaders are exactly alike and, in fact, they may have characteristics borrowed from other leadership styles to suit their needs. The following diagram can be very useful to think about what main areas of focus the different leadership styles have. There is a reason why the boxes in the diagram are labeled 1 through 4 and it has to do with subordinates.
The higher the skill level of our subordinates, the greater the number of squares and the more appropriate that leadership style will be for those subordinates, so autocratic leadership is good for people with a very low skill level, while laissez-faire leadership works for people with a degree very high of skill. Essentially, the behavior of the leader must change depending on which quadrant the capabilities of the followers fall into. Leadership training from a good business school can help you understand and strengthen your own leadership style. The best leaders can adjust their style based on the situation they are in, for example, turning around a failing organization may require a more direct approach than being asked to grow an already successful organization.
This may require different styles of leadership, even returning to autocracy, as difficult decisions are needed. Being familiar with the type of approach you take to leadership can help you advance your career, increase your success, and increase the success of those you guide. Throughout history, great leaders with particular leadership styles have emerged to provide direction, implement plans and motivate people. Transactional leadership styles use transactions between a leader and his followers (rewards, punishments, and other exchanges) to get the job done.
With that in mind, another way to accurately find out what type of leader you are is through the use of leadership-style survey software. The basic understanding of different leadership styles is that they range from autocratic to democratic; from strict control to a more laissez-faire approach. The investigation found that a manager's leadership style was responsible for 30% of the company's final profitability. Bad leadership can be hidden in good times, but when a company faces difficulties, poor leadership is exposed.
The objective was to discover specific leadership behaviors and determine their effect on the corporate climate and the profitability of the final results. In addition to the main leadership styles, there are lesser-known styles, including charismatic, laissez-faire, autocratic and bureaucratic leaders. . .
Leave Message