Defining Connections within Leadership Styles
Leadership: As humans, we are hard-wired for connections. We enjoy building meaningful relationships with peers, colleagues, competition, customers, friends, and members of the community, etc.
When I think about connections within a professional setting, sometimes I find myself pausing to self-reflect on past and current professional connections I made along the way. With years of professional working experience as an Executive Assistant and officially a coach practitioner, I have gained valuable insights into leadership connections either through observations or firsthand experience. That has inspired me to explore some ideas and views into creating this blog post. Without further delay, let’s dive into this topic a bit more.
I am sure some of you are already aware of the seven primary leadership styles that are most common in business settings. I plan to explore relationship building and connections within a few primary leadership styles. The term leadership has a positive connotation, but that does not mean that every person in a leadership position is an empathic, principle, or with an admirable character.
With that said here are different leadership styles that people will lead others for better or worse:
Transactional Leadership
A leader who values structure and order, they depend on self-motivated employees who work well in a structured, directed environment. They don’t necessarily carve out time to get interested and learn about their employees’ passion or lives outside of work. Transactional leaders work well in organizations that where a structure is crucial; they are not necessarily fit for organizations where initiative is encouraged. Some of the characteristics that describe transactional leaders their tendencies to focus on short-term goals favor structure policies and procedures, inflexible, opposed to change, very left-brain, enjoy efficiency, and thrive on following the rules.
Transformational Leadership
The transformational leader is someone who will empower those who follow them to create a radical, positive change across the organization. They are passionate about initiating change at a massive scale and often position themselves in a place where they can reach large groups of people at a time. They are truly amazing to work with, progressive, and very productive leaders. They don’t rely on themselves as being the sole change agent. Instead, they empower individuals to make advancement, changes in their own lives, and careers that result in better performance and outcome. They connect with their employees by holding positive expectations, knowing that their teams can do their very best. Because of this action, they will inspire and empower their employees to surpass normal levels of performance. They focus and care about their employees and their personal needs and development. These leaders are a great fit in leading and working with complex organizations seeking leaders who inspire others and guide them through uncertainty, where employees are also challenged and feel empowered; this also nurtures employees to become loyal and high performers. Some of the characteristics they display are visionary, balanced risk-takers, collaborative among team members, focus on scale and goals, creative, autonomy, and empathic.
Laissez-faire Leadership
These types of leaders are laid back as they come. Their style of management is to give all the power to subordinates with little to no direction or interference. They believe managing employees is ineffective and that employees are best motivated by their drive, which will often create frustrations and lack of clarity, accountability, direction, and reduces cohesiveness among employees. This type is usually the least active type of leadership style and typically creates the least fulfilled employees. To connect with their employees, it would help them stay involved, observe employee’s performance from a distance, and help address problems if needed. These types of leaders believe to be liked is to provide less invasive management to make them better liked.
Coaching leadership
With coaching leadership style, these leaders focus on improving employee effectiveness and self-motivation rather than managing the interpersonal dynamics of a team. They lean toward results and performance. They connect with their employees by establishing a beneficial relationship that uncovers areas of strengths and weaknesses within the individual, creating goals to enable the individual to focus on their areas of improvement and track their progress. From past observations and insights, not many leaders use this style as leaders see this type of approach to leadership is “slow” and “monotonous” that requires a lot of time and patience. It relies a lot on instructions and feedback, which most leaders find it time-consuming. However, this style does have a couple of issues; if the employee is not open for coaching or the leader lacks the expertise, the coaching style will fail to create the desired impact. There are disadvantages to in house coaching; in a sense, it does has the potential in instilling bad habits and old ways after being on the job for years, they do develop a preference for the old ways of doing things. Apathetic towards the individual if felt threatened being replaced by them or better than they are.
Visionary Leadership
Visionary leaders have a clear vision of where they would like to take the future of the organization or company. They are rare individuals yet most powerful. They begin with a vision for the organization for a form of social change, or a community. They strategize a way to utilize the skills of others to bring their vision to life. This type of leadership is outside the box thinkers. Their purpose is not to improve other people skill set or transform a structure. Their mission is to invent something that never existed before. They can take their vision and implement it effectively; these leaders are highly skilled communicators, intensely focused and enthusiastic, high emotional IQ, Charismatic, and persuasive. They connect with their employees by communicating their vision and strategically aligning themselves with individuals who share in their vision and willing to take on new challenges working outside their comfort zone to be creative and innovate.
Autocratic Leadership
These leaders control all decisions and take very little input from others. They don’t focus on how their followers or teams’ lives can be improved as to how they position themselves to seem at the center of their world and feared by those followers or teams. They tend to manage people with control and fear. They have the entirety of power and responsibility. They are usually unrealistic, inflexible, and on occasion, will be abusive at times. However, it is also common for this type of leaders to be charming and convincing people to trust them. In short, this dynamic can make them challenging to deal with and volatile in their behaviors with one day, the leader will be funny, friendly, and encouraging; yet the next day, they are cunning, demeaning, unrealistic and manipulative. This style can connect with employees if the nature of the work requires a strong centralized control with the leader responsible for giving details, orders, and instructions and taking the responsibility of the decision. Having too many of this style in an organization will drive employees away and create a toxic work environment if left unchecked.
