Leadership

Whether you are managing a team at work, leading your sports team or leading a major corporation, your leadership style is crucial to your success. Consciously, or subconsciously, you will use some of the leadership styles featured, at least some of the time. Understanding leadership styles can help you develop and adapt your own style to help you become a more effective leader. The ten leadership styles I believe in are as follows, Autocratic leadership, Bureaucratic leadership, Charismatic leadership, Democratic leadership or Participative leadership, Laissez-faire leadership, Servant leadership, People-oriented leadership or Relations-Oriented leadership, Task-oriented leadership, Transactional leadership, and Transformational leadership.

Autocratic leadership is an extreme form of transactional leadership, where a leader has absolute power over his or her employees or team. Employees and team members have little opportunity for making suggestions, even if these would be in the team or organization’s interest. Most people tend to resent being treated like this. Because of this, autocratic leadership usually leads to high levels of absenteeism and staff turnover. For some routine and unskilled jobs, the style can remain effective where the advantages of control outweigh the disadvantages.

Bureaucratic leaders work “by the book”(Linam, K.), ensuring that their staff follow procedures exactly. This is a very appropriate style for work involving serious safety risks such as working with machinery, with toxic substances or at heights or where large sums of money are involved.

A charismatic leadership style can appear to be similar to a transformational leadership style, in which the leader injects huge doses of enthusiasm into his or her team, and is very energetic in driving others forward. However, a charismatic leader tends to believe more in himself or herself than in his/her team. (Butcher, J.) This can create a risk that a project, or even an entire organization, might collapse if the leader were to leave: In the eyes of their followers, success is tied up with the presence of the charismatic leader. As such, charismatic leadership carries great responsibility, and needs long-term commitment from the leader.

Although a democratic leader will make the final decision, he or she invites other members of the team to contribute to the decision-making process. This not only increases job satisfaction by involving employees or team members in what is going on, but it also helps to develop people’s skills. Employees and team members feel in control of their own destiny, such as the promotion they desire, and so are motivated to work hard by more than just a financial reward. As participation takes time, this approach can lead to things happening more slowly, but often the end result is better. The approach can be most suitable where team working is essential, and quality is more important than speed to market or productivity.

Laissez-faire, this French phrase means “leave it be”, is used to describe a leader who leaves his or her colleagues to get on with their work. (Linam, K.) It can be effective if the leader monitors what is being achieved and communicates this back to his or her team regularly. Most often, laissez-faire leadership works for teams in which the individuals are very experienced and skilled self-starters. Unfortunately, it can also refer to situations where managers are not exerting sufficient control.

The style of people-oriented leadership or relations-oriented leadership is the opposite of task-oriented leadership: the leader is totally focused on organizing, supporting and developing the individual on the leader’s team. A participative style tends to lead to good teamwork and creative collaboration. (Linam, K.) In practice, most leaders use both task-oriented and people-oriented styles of leadership.

The term Servant Leadership, coined by Robert Greenleaf in the 1970s, describes a leader who is often not formally recognized as such. (Borken, M.) When someone, at any level within an organization leads simply by virtue of meeting the needs of his or her team, he or she is described as a servant leader. In many ways, servant leadership is a form of democratic leadership, as the whole team tends to be involved in decision-making. Supporters of the servant leadership model suggest it is an important way ahead in a world where values are increasingly important, in which servant leaders achieve power on the basis of their values and ideals. Others believe that in competitive leadership situations, people practicing servant leadership will often find themselves left behind by leaders using other leadership styles.

A highly task-oriented leader focuses only on getting the job done, and can be quite autocratic. He or she will actively define the work and the roles required, put structures in place, plan, organize and monitor. However, as task-oriented leaders spare little thought for the well being of their teams, this approach can suffer many of the flaws of autocratic leadership, with difficulties in motivating and retaining staff.

The style of Transactional leadership starts with the idea that team members agree to obey their leader totally when they take on a job: the transaction is usually what the organization pays the team members in return for their effort and compliance. (Borken, M.) You have a right to punish the team members if their work does not meet the pre-determined standard. Team members can do little to improve their job satisfaction under transactional leadership. The leader could give team members some control of their income/reward by using incentives that encourage even higher standards or greater productivity. Alternatively a transactional leader could practice management by exception, whereby, rather than rewarding better work, he or she would take corrective