Leadership Styles

These are true leaders who inspire their teams constantly with a shared vision of the future. While this leader's enthusiasm is often passed onto the team, he/she may need to be supported by detail-oriented people. A leader with this style sets clear goals, is inspirational, communicates a vision, expects the best from the team, gives encouragement and support, and recognizes people's hard work.

• transformational

• democratic

• task-oriented

• laissez faire

An extreme form of leadership, where leaders have absolute power over their workers or team. Staff and team members have little opportunity to make suggestions. For some routine and unskilled jobs, this style can remain effective because the advantages of control may outweigh the disadvantages.

• autocratic

• charismatic

• bureaucratic

• democratic

These leaders inspire enthusiasm in their teams and are very energetic in driving others forward. There might be a risk that a project, or even an entire organization, might collapse if the leader leaves. As such, this leadership carries great responsibility and must demonstrate a long-term commitment to the company.

• people-oriented

• task-oriented

• charismatic

• laissez faire

These leaders work "by the book." They follow rules rigorously, and ensure that their staff follows procedures precisely. This is a very appropriate style for work involving serious safety risks (such as working with machinery, with toxic substances, or at dangerous heights) or where large sums of money are involved (such as handling cash).

• democratic

• bureaucratic

• laissez faire

• autocratic

These leaders focus only on getting the job done, and they can be quite autocratic. They actively define the work and the roles required, put structures in place, plan, organize, and monitor. However, because these leaders don't tend to think much about the well-being of their teams, this approach can suffer many of the flaws of autocratic leadership, with difficulties in motivating and retaining staff.

• people-oriented

• transformational

• autocratic

• task-oriented

This French phrase means "leave it be," and it's used to describe leaders who leave their team members to work on their own. It can be effective if the leader monitors what's being achieved and communicates this back to the team regularly. This is effective when individual team members are very experienced and skilled self-starters. Unfortunately, this type of leadership can also occur when managers don't apply sufficient control.

• charismatic

• laissez faire

• people-oriented

• transformation

This is the opposite of task-oriented leadership. These leaders are totally focused on organizing, supporting, and developing the people in their teams. It's a participative style, and it tends to encourage good teamwork and creative collaboration.

• autocratic

• bureaucratic

• people-oriented

• transformational

Although these leaders make the final decisions, they invite other members of the team to contribute to the decision-making process. This not only increases job satisfaction by involving team members, but it also helps to develop people's skills. Team members feel in control of their own destiny, so they're motivated to work hard by more than just a financial reward. The approach can be most suitable when working as a team is essential, and when quality is more important than speed to market, or productivity.

• charismatic

• task-orientedd

• bureaucratic

• democratic