Leadership Styles

As Napoleon Bonaparte had once expressed, 'a leader is a dealer of hopes'. The essence of leadership is the ability to have great analytical skills. A leader is necessarily is a great visionary. A good leader has the ability to choose the best people to accomplish difficult tasks and he also has the patience to guide his subordinates.

There are various approaches that can prove to be very helpful to achieve the goals by motivating people and implementing your plans. These various approaches are different styles of leadership. If you blend all these styles as per your needs you can emerge as a good leader.

The authoritarian or autocratic style of leadership is characterized by what is usually called as 'bossing the people around.' Without paying any heed to the advice given by the followers if you are pushing your way through then it is an example of authoritarian or autocratic leadership.

Authoritative style of leadership is quite helpful if you have all the necessary information or if you are running short of time. At such time one needs to delegate the task authoritatively. This style is not to be confused with the idea of yelling and threatening your followers with your power. It is certainly a malpractice to use your power and authority to abuse the team members.

This kind of leadership style should be used on rare occasions and that too with great care. You tend to loose your demeanor while applying this type of leadership.

The second and the most popular style of leadership is participative or democratic. As the name suggests this style of thinking allows the followers in the team to participate in decision making.

This style allows the participant to decide what to do and how it should be done. The decision making of course is done by the leader. Using this style of leadership is not at a sign of weakness but a strength.

This leadership style should be preferred when you do not have all the information needed to decide a plan. Your colleagues having the desired information can help you decide the best possible plan.

This style of leadership has twofold benefits it allows you work closely with your followers and at the same time helps maintain an amicable relationship with them.

This partial freedom is given in delegatory or free reign style of leadership. As a leader is unable to reach everywhere at all times this type of leadership becomes quite essential in some situations.

This style in no way allows you to blame your team for failure of a job. This style is to be used only when you have full confidence in your followers. Use it sparingly and wisely.

A good leader is one who uses all these styles with dexterity as situation demands.

While deciding which style should be applied a good leader takes into consideration points like how much time is on hand, the internal conflicts in group, the stress level, the type of work to be accomplished, how well informed the co-workers are and how much trust can be put into them.

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Situational Leadership as the Key to Effectively Managing People

For over 25 years, major corporations and organizations throughout the world have used the concepts of Situational Leadership to improve the effectiveness of their managers. Dr. Heresy and Dr. Blanshard at Ohio State University to provide managers with a practical and simple approach to achieve the best results from their people developed one of the most outstanding leadership models.

There are many ways you can be an effective leader - there is no single "school solution" to the management process.

Real leadership means managing people fairly for mutually rewarding and productive purposes and has nothing to do with manipulation - taking unfair advantage of or influencing others for self-interest, or making people feel uncomfortable.

Motivating and controlling people toward accomplishment of planned objectives requires 3 important skills:

- understanding past behavior

- predicting future behavior

- directing, changing and controlling behavior.

Research studies indicate that effective leaders can be engaged in different types of behavior: task behavior relationship behavior.
Task behavior provides guidance and direction - the leader clearly spells out duties and responsibilities to an individual or group about everything.

Relationship behavior emphasizes two-way communication with followers and exchanging information with them. This type tends to be more nonverbal than task behavior.Synonyms for relationship behavior are supporting, facilitating, and encouraging.

Some good leaders manage to combine both types of behavior in their work, though all of them have different leadership styles.

Leadership style is defined as the leader's patterns of behavior - including both words and actions as perceived by others.

There are 4 leadership styles:

- High task, low relationship behavior (the leader provides specific instructions and supervises followers closely, sometimes it's called "telling")

- High task, high relationship behavior (the leader explains decisions and provides followers with opportunities for clarification - "selling")

- High relationship, low task behavior (the leader shares ideas with followers and facilitates decision making - "participating")

- Low relationship, high task behavior (the leader turns over responsibility for decisions and implementation to followers - "delegating")

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Transformational Transactional Leadership

At first glance, transformational and transactional leadership are antagonistic with each other. After all, transactional leadership tends to disregard charisma and the feelings of subordinate in favor of keeping deadlines and making sure that quotas are reached! Transformational leadership on the other hand, tends to put a premium on charisma, motivation and the relationship between leaders and subordinates.

What if there was a way to bring the two styles of leadership together?

The strength of transactional leadership is a commitment to tasks. The leader is also a good manager. Subordinates are always reminded about their tasks, the expectations from them and the consequences of achieving of missing the agreed upon goals. This kind of task-oriented leadership tends to be a bit harsh though, depending on the leader at the helm. When targets are missed and supplies are lagging behind, it is very easy for a leader to lash out and forget about the welfare of the people.

Transformational leadership, on the other hand, tends to put a premium on relationships and on the people working within the organization. The leader, usually, is beloved by the subordinates because he is popular, he is admired, and the followers feel that the leader truly cares about their plight-in the workplace and in their personal lives. But taken to the extreme, this kind of leadership can fall apart because of too much understanding and consideration for the followers.

A good balance then is the transformational transactional leadership where the leader cares for the followers and for the targets and outputs that they are supposed to deliver. In this case, there is a balance between task orientation and people orientation.

Another important question, however, is this: how do you work for the right balance between charisma and productivity?

If you go overboard with charisma, the followers will love you. They might even consider you as their buddy and a good friend in the workplace. But if you start becoming too familiar with them, the professional barriers might erode and you will have a difficult time demanding productivity from them.

Too much charisma is not good. That is why balance is very much needed. As a leader, you should know your followers enough to know what will work for them. In the process, you should also be careful lest they manipulate you into relaxing your demands for better productivity from them.

Does your organization favor transactional or transformational leadership? That would certainly impact your organizational culture and your performance.

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Recognizing Leadership Potential

One of the most unavoidable requirements of being a leader is to identify and recognize leadership potential in other people. This process would be simple if the men and women that are destined to become leaders were prepackaged and labeled Leadership Ability Guaranteed. There is no such thing as a born leader. We all arrive on this earth with the same amount of potential. It is what happens to us during life and how we handle it that determines our level of leadership abilities.

Every person carries within them, the ability to lead. The seed of greatness has been carefully planted deep down inside us. So what is it that causes that seed to germinate? What makes it grow? More important, what makes it multiply and reproduce? What is it we, as established leaders, need, in order for us to find and stimulate someone else to pick up the baton of leadership and run?

In order to identify leadership potential in people, we must possess a huge amount of commitment, diligence, patience, desire, and focus. We must be able to look at the individual, identify their gifts, their attitudes, their dreams, their goals, and their past success as well as their past failures. Only by understanding these, can we get deep enough inside the person to locate that leadership seed and expose its potential.

Once we find this seed, it becomes our responsibility to fertilize it with care, understanding, and encouragement. We are required to nurture it and provide it with an opportunity to grow, blossom and reproduce. Much like a garden needs protection from severe weather, insects, and weeds; the potential leader needs protection from discouragement, rejection, and mediocrity. Nothing stunts leadership potential faster than association with mediocrity.

Helping someone become a leader is more than just providing them with information and helping develop their skills. We must instill in people a sense of value; their value as a potential leader. We must encourage them in times of challenge and respond to them in times of need.

No matter what, we must recognize that people will buy into, and believe in us, before they buy into their own ability to lead. We must be the example in not only what we teach, but what we actually do. Mentoring is just as much modeling as it is teaching. We must make sure we model what we teach.

Bill Bergfeld is a professional Network Marketer and owner of multiple businesses. His passion is leadership; his current online project involves aging and methods of reversing its affects. He can be reached using bill@billbergfeld.com