Six common leadership styles and when you should use them

Every leader has their own style of leading but for you to lead with the impact, it is important to understand how and when to apply different leadership styles and what qualities you should have as a leader.

It is equally important to understand your strengths and weaknesses as well as those of your team.

This was one of the key take-ways from the leadership workshop held yesterday. The workshop was facilitated by Joan Kamau, the Lead Facilitator at the African Management Initiative. During the session Joan shared tips on how business leaders can improve on their styles with an emphasis on the Daniel Goleman 6 Leadership Style tool which defines the 6 Leadership styles; Visionary, Coaching, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting and Commanding.

She broke down the leadership styles as follows. Have a look and maybe you can tell where you fall as a leader and which style best suits you.

Visionary leadership Style

Joan explained that this is a style where leaders Inspire, provide direction, believe in their own vision, empathetic, explain how and why people’s efforts contribute to the ‘dream of the company and much more.

It is more of a ‘’Come with me’’ style of leadership. Visionary leaders have a good understanding of the bigger picture and they communicate using their relevant experience confidently.

A real visionary leader will not only explain where people are going, but they will also be able to explain why getting it is important and beneficial to the people they are communicating with.

What is impressive about how visionary leaders achieve this is that they have the skills to do this in a way that people can understand what they are saying and relate it to how it fits into their own life.

This type of leadership is Correctly Used:

• When a new direction is needed
• If a team or group needs a clear direction
• Not so effective when a team is more experienced than you are

Coaching Leadership Style

The coaching leadership style focuses on developing people for the future by joining the development of individuals’ goals with the long-term goals of an organization’s success.

It is more of ‘’Try this’’ type of leadership. This type of style helps people listen, identify their own strengths and weaknesses, let’s people come up with their own answers, encourages, and helps people learn how to delegate.

The coaching leadership style develops people professionally working on identifying weaknesses and improving their skill sets. When used correctly this leadership style is very beneficial to both the organization and individuals being coached as both their success and the organization’s long-term goals are aligned with the organization’s mission.

This type is used correctly to

• Improve skill in an individual or team
• Use with well-motivated people who want to improve
• Generally, a great method for continuous long-term improvement
• To help competent, motivated employees improve performance by building long-term capabilities

Affiliative leadership Style

This is a ‘’ people come first ‘’ type of leadership style.

This type of leadership style promotes harmony, is nice, empathetic, boosts morale, solves conflicts, connects people to each other

However, as a leader, you will inevitably be challenged with situations where people will disagree with what you or others are saying or doing and there will be times of confrontation.

Regardless of your best efforts these confrontations and the emotions that come attached to them cannot be avoided.

Making mistakes or misjudging what to say and when does not make you a bad leader, disagreement and conflict come hand in hand in any environment where people interact with each other.

What can make the difference between someone who may be deemed to be an incompetent leader and a great leader is how quickly and effectively we can resolve these negative and unwanted emotions.

This leadership style is correctly used when:

• Motive people during stressful circumstances
• Heal rifts between people
• To heal rifts in a team, motivate during stressful times, or strengthen connections
• Clear up any misunderstood intention

Democratic Leadership Style

This is more like ‘’What do you think’’ leadership style.

Leaders who use this style value every person’s input and gets commitment through everyone’s participation; superb listener, team worker, collaborator, influencer name them.

The democratic leadership style is used to gain vital facts and information from the experts or those with the relevant knowledge in your team.

It focuses more on listening than it does direct and encourages participation from employees. As a leader this leadership style is vital, you cannot be the best at everything and in a well-motivated and engaged team, you will have specialists whose knowledge and experience will far exceed your own.

Any leader that is skilled enough to park their ego and use their team and the individuals in their teams to their strengths is clearly going to outperform a leader who cannot.

This leadership style is correctly used when:

• To build buy-in or consensus, or to get valuable input from employees
• Any situation that requires a big change from the entire team
• Seek expert opinions when your own knowledge is less than that of your team

Pacesetting leadership style

This is more of a ‘’ do as I do now” type of leadership. Leaders who use this style set Sets high standards of performance, a strong drive to achieve, initiative-taking meets challenges and exciting goals for their employees

The Pacesetting leadership style is very results-focused; it focuses on the result more than the way the results are achieved. Leaders using the pacesetting leadership lifestyle expect excellent performance from their teams when results are below expectations the leader will often jump up to pick up the slack. Due to this “follow my lead” approach everyone is held accountable to the leader’s high standards.

This leadership style is correctly used when:

• This works well with a highly competent team that is well motivated and well trained.
• This style of leadership will not work well with an unconfident team who lack experience or motivation
• To get high-quality results from a motivated and competent team; sales teams
• Use when needing to improve performance to deliver short term goals

Commanding style

This is a “Do what I tell you” style of leadership.

People that use the Commanding Leadership style want to get things done and they want them done quickly.

There can be a time a need for this style of leadership, but it should be used sparingly. Used correctly it is powerful in fixing problems faster than another leadership style would. However, many people overuse this leadership style.

Leaders in this space tell people what to do, demand immediate compliance, monitors regularly, driven to achieve and get things done, give clear direction.

In short-term people may turn a blind eye to what you say and do, but in the long term, the commanding leadership style when excessively used will have negative effects on the people you interact with.

This leadership style is correctly used when:

• In a crisis
• Dealing with problem people
• Under skilled for the task required but highly time-sensitive
• If necessary due to external factors such as if in Danger
• Start a turnaround

Joan noted that sometimes leaders may require to apply all the 6 leadership styles. However, the most important thing for a leader or manager is to understand when they actually should use a particular style

She also added, “Through the AMI Management Programme (MDP) we will work with you as middle managers and managers and learn how to use this tool among many others to both grow our organizations and ourselves as leaders.”

We regularly host thought-provoking and inspiring talks, skill-focused seminars and unique networking evenings designed to provide opportunities for professional development and creative growth.