6 Types of Leadership: How to Find Yours
"A great leader is someone who always …."
The way you complete that sentence can divulge a lot about your style of leadership.
A leadership style is basically a leader's characteristic traits when motivating, managing, directing, and guiding groups of people. The types of leadership can be broadly categorized into six different groups:
Autocratic Leadership
Democratic Leadership
Laissez-Faire Leadership
Transformational Leadership
Transactional Leadership
Coaching-Style Leadership
Despite these definitions, some critical questions remain unanswered.
What's the meaning of each leadership style listed above?
What are the benefits and drawbacks of using each of the leadership styles?
In this article, we will look at the six types of leadership along with their definitions, advantages, and disadvantages.
Here is everything you need to know.
The Premise: What Are the Types of Leadership?
Leadership styles are classifications of how an individual behaves while leading a group. The type of leadership a person uses also influences how they make strategies and execute plans while considering the well-being of the team and the expectations of important stakeholders.
A great leader can bring about social reforms and political movements. They can even motivate others to create, innovate, and perform. As you consider some of the people you think of as great leaders, you can instantly see that there are often significant differences in how each individual leads. Thankfully, researchers have developed various frameworks and theories that help us better identify and understand the different types of leadership.
The 6 Types of Leadership You Should Know About
Here are the six types of leadership styles, including their definitions, benefits, and drawbacks.
1. Autocratic Leadership
In the autocratic leadership style, the leader takes the decisions without taking meaningful input from anyone who reports to them. Employees are neither consulted nor considered before a change in direction and are expected to follow the decision at the pace and time established by the leader.
An example of this type of leadership could be when a manager modifies the hours of work shifts for several employees without discussing it with anyone – particularly the ones affected.
What Are the Advantages of Autocratic Leadership?
Autocratic leadership is best used for situations where there's insufficient time to allow the entire group to make decisions or when the leader has the expertise that the members of the group do not. Moreover, it can also benefit situations where consistent results need to be produced.
What Are the Disadvantages of Autocratic Leadership?
Autocratic leadership can lead to employee rebellion and reduce employees' creativity. It can also decrease collaboration and group synergy. But perhaps the most significant disadvantage is that it increases the employee turnover rate.
2. Democratic Leadership
Democratic leaders encourage group members to take part but have the final vote in decision-making. Such leaders usually make employees feel as if they are an indispensable component of the team. This helps foster commitment to the goals of the group.
For instance, such a leader might offer the team a couple of decision-related choices in a meeting. They can then discuss every option. Once the discussion is over, the leader might consider the participant's feedback and thoughts, or they might ask everyone to vote.
What Are the Advantages of Democratic Leadership?
Democratic leadership encourages collaboration and results in higher levels of the group. It can also lead to more innovative and creative solutions to problems.
Research published in Scientific & Academic Publishing in 2015 stated that democratic leadership contributes to higher productivity among group members. In addition, a democratic leadership style helps in the development of a strong team.
What Are the Disadvantages of Democratic Leadership?
Due to the involvement of several people, democratic leadership can result in more confusion and communication gaps. It can also make the decision-making process more time-consuming. Plus, if the employees are untrained or unskilled, they can end up making the wrong decision.
3. Laissez-Faire Leadership
Leaders following the laissez-faire leadership style are pretty hands-off. They provide minimal or no guidance to their group and leave the entire decision-making to the group members.
These types of leaders provide the necessary resources and tools to finish a project and will take responsibility for the members' actions and decisions. Nevertheless, the power is essentially handed over to the group.
For instance, in a new startup, you might find a laissez-faire founder who doesn't make any stringent policies regarding deadlines or work hours. They might put complete trust in their employees as they direct their efforts on the more significant operations of the company.
What Are the Advantages of Laissez-Faire Leadership?
The laissez-faire style of leadership can enable individuals to practice and polish their leadership skills. It can also instill a feeling of independence and can result in increased innovation and creativity.
What Are the Disadvantages of Laissez-Faire Leadership?
In this leadership style, conflict amongst team members is fairly common, which can result in lower productivity. It might even lead to confusion regarding responsibilities and roles and won't be very effective if team members aren't skilled or motivated.
4. Transformational Leadership
Transformational leadership involves continuously transforming and enhancing the company's practices. Team members might have a set of goals and tasks that they work on every month or week, but the leader is constantly pushing them out of their comfort zone.
This kind of leader might give all employees a set of targets to accomplish along with their deadlines. While the objectives might be simple, the leader might move the deadlines close or give you tougher objectives as you continue to grow within the company.
What Are the Advantages of Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leadership is conducive to developing strong relationships and fostering creativity. It gives team members autonomy to do their tasks and can result in higher growth in teams. According to the results of a study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, this style of leadership can even have a positive impact on an employee’s well-being.
What Are the Disadvantages of Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leaders run the risk of losing sight of every member's individual learning curves if directly reporting employees don't get the appropriate coaching to guide them through new roles and responsibilities.
5. Transactional Leadership
The transactional style of leadership considers the relationship of the leader and follower as a regular transaction. By taking the team member's position, the person agrees to obey and follow the leader. This entails the employee and employer relationship, and the transaction concentrates on the follower finishing specific tasks in return for monetary or other benefits.
Transactional leadership is quite common these days. These types of bosses reward their employees for the exact amount of work they do. A common example of transactional leadership is a sales team that gets a bonus for closing a specific number of clients by the year-end.
What Are the Advantages of Transactional Leadership?
The key benefit of transactional leadership is that it leads to clearly defined roles. Individuals are aware of what they need to do along with what they are going to get in exchange. This style of leadership enables leaders to provide a higher degree of guidance and direction if required.
What Are the Disadvantages of Transactional Leadership?
Research published in Applied Psychology in 2017 states that a downside of transactional leadership is that it stifles creativity. Moreover, it might not be suitable for individuals who are not motivated by extrinsic motivation. In fact, it can actually be discouraging for employees seeking personal and professional development opportunities.
6. Coach-Style Leadership
This style of leadership aims to identify and nurture the unique strengths of every team member. A leader practicing coach-style leadership focuses on strategies and plans that will help their teams work better together.
Coach-style leadership is similar to democratic leadership. However, it puts increased value on the success and growth of individual team members.
A manager using this type of leadership might help team members work on their strengths by encouraging them to work on new tasks, providing valuable guidance, or sharing constructive feedback. In addition, they might even encourage a few team members to build on their strengths by acquiring new skills from other team members.
What Are the Advantages of Coach-Style Leadership?
Coach-style leadership can encourage collaboration and two-way communication. It also facilitates individuals' professional and personal development and creates avenues for creative thinking and growth.
What Are the Disadvantages of Coach-Style Leadership?
Coach-style leadership is quite resource-intensive as it requires a lot of energy and time. Moreover, it doesn't always lead to the most efficient or fastest results. Thus, this style of leadership might not be the best choice for a strictly result-oriented or high-pressure company.
How to Find Your Leadership Style
There is no single way to find your leadership style. Some people prefer using traditional, formal assessments, whereas others believe a qualitative examination of yourself is the right way to go.
Here are three ways you can use as you start identifying your unique leadership style.
1. Take a Formal Test or Assessment
If you have spent any time in the corporate world, you have probably taken some kind of leadership-style test or personality assessment. The results classify test-takers as a specific type of leader.
Formal evaluation to identify leadership style is helpful in highlighting your strengths. They also help you identify traits that come naturally to you, so you can work on them to lead more powerfully and efficiently.
What Is the Best Leadership Style Test?
The Leadership Style Self-Assessment by the University of Southern California is one of the best assessments you can take to identify your leadership style. It allows you to identify the right style and offers constructive tips to be on the right track of that specific leadership style.
2. Ask for Feedback from Your Team Members
You can take as many leadership tests as you like, but you'll never gain a complete understanding of the kind of leader you are without getting feedback from the people you lead. Asking for your team members' honest opinion of your style of leadership will provide you with critical insight into behaviors you might never have picked up on otherwise.
How to Get Feedback from Team Members
Performance reviews offer a great opportunity for leaders to learn about how their team perceives their performance and style. Since performance reviews are already part of an organization, leaders might find it easier to solicit constructive and honest from team members at that time.
In addition, the relevant people management platform will simplify the process of receiving and sharing feedback. For instance, the 360 performance review software by Lattice makes it easy for employees to share feedback with the option to anonymize names and comments.
3. Observe Your Existing Leaders
Most individuals' personalities are molded by those who have an influence over them. These people are initially our teachers and parents, but as we get older, they are leaders such as our managers and bosses. We might not realize it, but the characteristics of these influencers impacts how we address problems, make decisions and behave under pressure.
How to Observe Your Existing Leaders
You can observe your leader's behavior in client interactions, team meetings, negotiations, difficult conversations, or presentations. The key to success is devoting the energy and time to focus on the leader and using all the senses during the observation.
It might be helpful to review the leader's developmental goals and plans, assessment data, and other information that helps you understand their style, motivations, and level of self-awareness.
Wrapping Up
Identifying your leadership style is imperative as it allows you to determine how you impact employees who are under your direct influence.
It is important to solicit feedback to understand how you are doing. However, knowing your style of leadership before getting feedback can be a useful starting point. This way, when you get feedback, you can decide which style would be best and incorporate the style traits into your everyday management roles.
