Editor's note: This article was excerpted from Leadership
Made Easy, which identifies 15 essential leadership skills
and teaches you how to develop and use them.
An important point of this introduction to leadership styles is
that effective leaders can be true to their own nature and not have
to assume radically different personae when in a leadership
position. A person's mannerisms and personality typically
don't have to change when assuming a leadership role. This
doesn't mean that great leaders don't make some changes in
their leadership presence and style, especially when changes are
needed. These changes occur primarily after self-study, evaluation
sessions with superiors or subordinates, or on-the-job experience.
Develop your own leadership style, therefore, based upon your own
set of beliefs and personality traits, as well as what you learn
from studying leadership.
Theories of Leadership
There are scores of leadership theories, models and studies
available for you to examine, if you choose. Although developed
primarily in the 20th century by scholars, leadership ideas have
existed at least since A.D. 100. Thanks to these great men and
women, the curious have been able to analyze leaders on the basis
of personality, situations, interaction with others, psychology,
politics, humanism and perception, to name a few factors. In
addition to the theories, there are countless leadership surveys,
tests and aptitude indicators that are available to determine a
leader's style and interests.
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What can you do when faced with this complexity of leadership
information? Most leaders don't study the many theories of
leadership in detail. Some general knowledge is helpful, however,
to know what the relevant major issues are so that you can use that
knowledge in your specific situation. These issues will be
explained in this article. Then you can choose to study in more
detail those areas that are of most interest to you.
Leadership Orientations
To help prepare you for your leadership role, we'll briefly
examine five leadership orientations. Since every leader has a
distinct style made up of combinations of these orientations,
it's impossible to accurately predict your style without a
thorough analysis. As with most leaders, you'll tend to use
different styles when faced with different situations. Each
orientation presents two extremes between which leaders have to
determine the right balance for themselves, based upon their
personality and specific leadership challenges. For example, there
are effective leaders who have high orientation scores in both
relationship and task; others score high in relationship and low in
task. By understanding the following five leadership orientations,
you'll be better able to understand the framework within which
most leaders operate.
- Democracy or autocracy
- Participation or direction
- Relationship or task
- Consideration or initiation
- Action or inaction
Democracy or Autocracy
Orientation
These two orientations are the first classification because they
encompass attributes of the other four orientations. It makes sense
that leaders tend to lean naturally toward one or the other because
followers will do either one of two things. They will do what
they're asked to do, thus requiring the supervision of a
teaching and facilitating type of democratic leader, or they'll
do what they're made to do, which requires a more punishing and
coercing autocrat.
There's no conclusive proof as to which type of orientation
is more effective at getting bottom-line results. One may be more
effective in different organizations or situations than the other.
A person's style of leadership, however, does affect employee
job satisfaction, although the effects vary among employees. A
higher degree of satisfaction in an organization will encourage
loyalty, teamwork and sharing of the leader's goals; each of
these can lead to higher levels of personal and organizational
productivity.
Democratic leaders focus on their followers because they feel
the welfare of their team is of great importance. They tend to be
easily approachable, relationship-oriented and considerate of
others' feelings. They prefer to lead their teammates by
collaboration and empowerment. They're convinced that tasks
will be better accomplished if they consider their
subordinates' needs. These teammates tend to have high job
satisfaction.
Autocrats primarily are concerned with tasks for which
they're responsible. They believe the key is to focus less on
subordinates and their needs and more on the work-related issues.
In doing so, they use their position to prescribe solutions and
direct others to comply. This type of leader usually has more
subordinates with low levels of job satisfaction than does the
democratic leader.
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