Leadership is the capacity of your company’s management to set and achieve challenging objectives, make fast decisions when there is a need and inspire others to perform to their highest levels to outperform the competition.
Strong leaders help organizations maximize productivity and achieve business goals. Leadership is not all there is to business success, but effective leadership can promote teamwork, motivate and inspire trust, and provide a sense of purpose and direction. In many businesses today, these five leadership approaches are practiced.
1. Democratic Leadership Style
This leadership style allows members of a group to participate in decision-making. Also called democratic or shared leadership, democratic leadership applies to all organizations and is considered the best leadership style as democratic leaders keep their lines of communication open. As a democratic leader, you need to spare plenty of time for your team to contribute and actively participate in discussions.
Since the democratic leadership style encourages your team to share their thoughts, it leads to better ideas and more creative approaches to problem-solving. When your team feels more involved and committed to projects, it also leads to higher productivity and increased group morale. However, with democratic leadership freedom comes consequences such as communication failures, poor decisions from unskilled personnel, overriding individual or minority views, and potential security issues.
Communication is crucial in leadership. Effective communication helps build trust, align efforts in pursuit of your business goals, and inspire positive change. Tools such as visual voicemail from RingCentral can help quickly browse through virtual voicemail messages with an inbox-like interface. With virtual voicemail, you can always be within reach, which is typical of a democratic leader.
2. Pacesetting Leadership Style
As a pacesetting leader, you lead from the front. You constantly set high standards for your team and expect them to exceed such standards with minimal management. For pacesetting leadership to succeed, you need to work with a highly skilled team that needs limited management. You need to be a skilled manager and nurture a culture that strives for constant improvement.
With a pacesetting leadership style, you will achieve your business goals quickly, fully utilize your competent team, and address issues swiftly. However, pacesetting leadership could lead to stressed and overwhelmed employees, loss of trust, low employee engagement, repetitive and boring work, and little or no feedback.
3. Laissez-Faire Leadership Style
As a laissez-faire leader, you have trust and reliance on your team. You don’t micromanage or get too involved, and you don’t give too many instructions. As a laissez-faire leader, you allow your employees to use their creativity, resources, and experiences to achieve their goals. Laissez-faire leadership leads to employee retention, accountability, a more relaxed company culture, and a creative environment.
However, not all employees and leaders love this leadership style. This leadership style can be complex for newcomers and could lead to confusion about who’s in charge.
4. Autocratic Leadership Style
Autocratic leadership is the opposite of democratic leadership. An authoritarian leader withholds all authority and consults no one when making decisions. While employees are never consulted, they’re still expected to change and deliver results. While autocratic leadership style could work in the short-term, authoritarian leadership often leads to increased cases of employees quitting their jobs.
5. Strategic Leadership Style
As a strategic leader, you must always have both the interest of the company and everyone else’s interest. You are loyal to the organization’s vision, transparent, effective communicator, have passion for your job, have empathy for others, and are a problem-solver. While it may seem like a perfect leadership style, it can be risky as you cannot please everyone.
Choosing a Leadership Style for your Business
Leading your business to success can be challenging. With a business market prone to changes, one leadership style might not be applicable in every situation. The debate in academia on which leadership style is best never stops. This is why as a leader, you need to be adaptive, adjust to the current environment and encourage your team to seek excellence. Therefore, choosing a style for your organization means knowing the people you work with, understanding the goals of your company, and determining the way you want to attain business success.