As a corporate business leader, over the course of your career, you will have experienced a wide range of leadership styles. In order to be the best leader possible, it is important that you are able to not only recognise different leadership styles but know when and how to display them yourself. In this blog post, we outline and explain four of the most common leadership styles.
What is a leadership style?
Simply put, a leadership style is the approach you take when providing guidance, making decisions, putting strategies into action and motivating people. Your style will dictate how you behave in a leadership position and it’ll be formed through a combination of your personality and your experiences.
Why is it important to know your leadership style?
If you can tap into your existing strengths, you’ll be a more effective leader, using the attributes that come naturally to you, which you’ve used throughout your career. Of course, identifying your leadership style can also help you to become aware of your weaknesses and work to rectify issues with your approach.
Following your innate leadership style will also help you come across as a more authentic leader. This in itself will make people more likely to respect and follow you.
1. Authoritative leadership
An authoritative leader is a leader with great confidence who asks their subordinates to trust and follow them. This leadership style is ideal for confusing or seemingly troubling times, as an authoritative leader is clear with their employees and offers them straightforward orders and directions. Authoritative leaders are often incredibly engaging and energise their employees through their confidence.
2. Pace-setting leadership
Pace-setting, as the name suggests, is an energised leader that is constantly motivating their employees to do and achieve more. For example, a pace-setting leader will be constantly creating new, more challenging targets for their employees and pushing them to reach their full potential. It is often recommended to adapt a pace-setting leadership style to motivate employees who are under-performing or to lead employees through a period of significant change to give them clear direction and continuous motivation.
3. Laissez-faire leadership
A laissez-faire leadership style is often adopted when a leader has complete trust and confidence in their subordinates. Laissez-faire leaders are on the opposite end of the spectrum to micromanagers and trust their employees to do their work without direct supervision or mentorship. It is essential a laissez-faire leadership style is only adopted when appropriate, or a leader risks managing unmotivated and confused employees.
4. Affiliative leadership
In contrast to a laissez-faire leadership style, an affiliative leader gets to know their subordinates on a personal level and spends a significant amount of time with them. An affiliative leader, for example, will support the emotional needs of their employees and strive to make a personal connection with their subordinates. This leadership style should be adapted when an employee or team is not functioning as they should and need to form close bonds with one another to strengthen the team.
If you are interested in learning about leadership styles in more detail, and how learning how to adapt different leadership styles can help you in your corporate business career, do not hesitate to contact Anthony Gregg today. We offer bespoke leadership coaching to help senior executives discover their own authentic leadership style.