A Look at Different Leadership Styles

Leadership can take many forms. As a leader in your own company, it can pay to understand what form of leadership you tend to express when working with your team. Listed below are some leadership styles to see if anything resonates.

What Leadership Style Seems Most Familiar to You?

Autocratic Leadership

If you tend to make business decisions with complete independence and minimal delegation, you meet the criteria to make you an autocratic leader. This leadership style can be immensely helpful when control and decisiveness are necessary, as decisions can be made and acted upon more quickly.

However, autocratic leadership has some drawbacks: it can lead to micromanagement and stifle creativity. These drawbacks can be mitigated somewhat by adding different leadership styles to your team.

Bureaucratic Leadership

If you defer to the rules and traditions, maintain a clear chain of command, and generally adhere to proven and traditional methods of doing things, you most likely exhibit a more bureaucratic style in your leadership methods. This can be extremely effective, especially in well-established businesses, as it helps make operations more predictable and consistent. That said, this level of commitment can also stifle innovation amongst the team and is often not well suited to a company invested in rapid growth.

Coaching Leadership

If you structure your internal teams by considering each employee’s strengths and capabilities, you likely follow a coaching (or conscious) leadership style. By assigning team members new tasks and providing feedback to help them improve—particularly through collaboration amongst their peers—you help grow the skills your business will need to succeed. This form of leadership can also infuse your business with a strong company culture that sometimes lasts longer than some people’s employment.

However, this approach doesn’t necessarily work with every employee and often requires a significant time investment. That being said, succeeding in these efforts can help boost performance to significant levels.  

Democratic Leadership

A team where everyone has a voice and is encouraged to collaborate is one where the leader follows a democratic leadership style. This allows numerous perspectives to play into the equation, which both helps keep employees engaged and ultimately improves outcomes. That said, this approach to leadership can be time-consuming and runs the risk of some decisions being swayed by people without the perspective to make informed choices.

Laissez-Faire Leadership

Laissez-faire leadership (literally translating to “let them do” leadership) is based on trust, empowerment, and autonomy. Instead of guiding every single step of a process, laissez-faire leaders hold their team members accountable for their roles and responsibilities while focusing on the higher-level tasks required to keep the business running. Many employees feel valued while working under this management style, but it can leave new employees without the guidance they’d like and established employees working in silos.

Pacesetting Leadership

If someone spends time “in the trenches” with their team, setting a high example and holding their employees to an equally high standard, they use a pacesetting strategy to guide their leadership. This approach significantly supports morale and helps encourage a team to feel motivated and gratified.

However, it is imperative that the pace isn’t unrealistic, which can demotivate a team and accelerate burnout, and that leadership is still willing to accept input and feedback.

Situational Leadership

With so many different personalities and circumstances present in most businesses, there’s rarely one approach to management that works all the time. A situational leader adjusts their style to reflect the reality they are operating in, enabling them to be flexible and communicate more effectively to better lead their team.

There are some challenges to pulling this approach off as well. These kinds of leaders need to be able to balance short-term and long-term business needs while also maintaining some level of familiarity with effectively every function within the business.

Strategic Leadership

Strategic leadership combines executives' interests with those of the rest of a team. It focuses on seeing everyone succeed in accomplishing the standard business goals—being more productive, collaborating more effectively, and increasing accountability are just some examples. This approach can work great, as it helps raise all ships, but it is also important to balance a focus on the future with attention to the present.

However You Tend to Lead, We Can Equip Your Team for Success!

Regardless of which of these approaches resonated with you the most—or if you’ve decided to try a different one—having the right technology for your business will help you optimize its operations even more and become an even more effective leader.

That’s where we come in. If you’d like to learn more about the IT solutions and services we provide to help make your business more efficient, secure, and productive, call Macro Systems at 703-359-9211 today.