Leadership is a tricky obstacle course which one must maneuver through ever increasingly difficult circumstances. There is a lot of focus on leadership styles from a social media and PR perspective. The old guard of leaders did not need to consider these issues twenty or even ten years ago. They are still at the helm and are hearing all these new buzzwords, they need to adapt to the new leadership styles to suit a wide array of individual preferences. 

There are a few well known leadership styles; autocratic, authoritative, pace setting, democratic, coaching, affiliative, Laissez-Faire Style to name a few. 

Some detail about leadership styles in real life

I love when I am being interviewed for a new position or have a conversation with other leaders and questions like this come up; ‘how would you describe your leadership style’ or ‘what do you think is the best leadership style?’. I am fascinated by this question for so many reasons but I think the one that stands out the most is that the question insinuates that all employees are the same and have the same needs. 

We know that every person has different needs, develops at different speeds and don’t all respond the same way to training or learning methods. Even conjoined twins have been observed to have different personalities as early as the 16th century So how can a leader have one leadership style? 

Discussing education, Madeline Hunter said, “Expecting all children the same age to learn from the same materials is like expecting all children the same age to wear the same size clothing.” Is leadership not the development of your employees? We can narrowly align leadership to education, growth, learning and development while seeing that it is a mechanism to change behavior in order to produce a certain desired efficiency for the organization. 

So do we think that all employees need the same leadership style to flourish? Looking back at my career I can tell you what leadership styles I enjoyed and thrived under, and what leadership styles I needed, even if at the time I didn’t like it. So let’s look at a few scenarios:

A school leaver 

What we usually see from a school leaver is that they have completed the school curriculum but have no experience whatsoever. They have learnt about mathematics, languages, science etc. and have done the basic groundwork to become a productive citizen but there is a long road to walk. 

It makes sense that the leadership style may be bureaucratic or autocratic. For some tasks these employees need to be seen, not heard right? But can all of them be told what to do and that is it? These employees will obviously also need a level of coaching leadership for them to become the employee the company needs. 

A graduate

I recall studying engineering and hearing so many of my classmates saying ‘I will never work for someone else’. This kid has never set his foot in an office and thinks he is going to take over the world! Not that I am saying it cannot be done but as an engineer that needs a reasonable amount of experience he will certainly need to work somewhere first, right? And so all of them did and as far as I can say to this day they still do. 

So how will you manage this kid? A lot of coaching leadership of course but if you have ever met a graduate engineer, they know everything! At times you will have deadlines and need to move quick and cannot coach or tolerate a long debate. You can catch up on the coaching later. You take on a pace setting style, which I often wonder if that is a style that works on its own. 

In some cases the pace is not tracking to plan and you need to make a judgement call. It all goes out the window and for a very short period you need to be autocratic. When the ship is pointing in the right direction you can return to pace setting and keep one eye on the pace, the other on the target and the two at the back of your head on the team and what they need to succeed. 

A mature department with big targets and strict deadlines

Typically this sounds like a pace setting style. But that will depend on the term of the project. If it is to be a short one to three month project then you may not want to adopt a pace setting style because you cannot be pulling everyone with you. You decide to create a high performance team of specialists that understand the project, can set the pace and they are willing to burn the midnight oil for three months. Note that a high performance team is not a long term structure as they will burn out and the project will fail. 

So now that you have a high performance team it looks more like a transactional style. The transaction is in the form of incentives for milestones and the end goal. There is a bit of micromanaging initially but once the team is in sync the transactional incentive piece stays in place but then you need to get the hell out of their way and just remove obstacles. They are the specialists after all! So you adopt a servant style or a democratic leadership style. 

So what happens when all of these come together at the same time? 

I must stress that the above is indicative, these are not leadership styles that I believe should be applied as a blanket to all employee types or scenarios and I can discuss this at length. My view is certainly not the only one and it may not be possible to have a different leadership style on a per employee level. It is suggested that the style can be set at a group level and I can see merit in that. That is if you have too many direct reports and the leadership up the ladder may be missing something. I appreciate listening to opposing views and having a constructive debate. But for brevity let’s conclude. 

This is not a ‘what if this all comes together’ scenario, this is reality and all our teams are a combination of personalities with individuals with different needs and wants. I believe the leader that has the emotional intelligence to identify the needs of the employee and tailor the leadership style to each of his team is the greatest leader. It will not come with some level of trial and error though. 

This will surely raise questions in performance reviews. ‘Why are you coaching John but you are adopting a laissez-faire approach with me?’ (I wonder if that exact question will ever be asked anywhere in the world but you get my point). At this point the leader needs to have the EQ and relationship with the employee to explain the method, which I believe they will value even more. It may raise more questions which can be a great segway into a coaching or mentorship relationship.

At the end of the day I don’t believe a single leadership style can be pinned to be the correct one and the leader that can be nimble enough to lead at an employee level will truly be remembered as a great leader!

Image credits: Photos by Markus Winkler, ThisisEngineering RAEng, Brooke Lark, Dynamic Wang on Unsplash