Your choice of management style can significantly impact employee morale, productivity, engagement, and overall cohesiveness within your team—especially in the modern workforce, where employees expect to have their needs met in order to perform at a consistently high level. In addition, leaders’ personal successes are largely determined by how well they navigate decision-making and communication with their team members.
But management is as much an art as it is a science. Striking a balance between the various demands that are on your plate can be difficult. Effective leaders are adept at ensuring each team member feels valued, business goals are being met, and staff collaboration is seamless and easy to achieve.
With that said, this article will unpack six common management styles, their individual characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, and how to select the most suitable one for your company.
Autocratic
Autocratic management, also known as authoritarian leadership, is characterized as a management style in which leaders have the authority and power to make decisions without input from their subordinates. This centralized approach to decision-making allows for more decisiveness, clear directives and expectations, and quicker crisis resolution.
However, it can also easily lead to low employee morale, limited creativity, innovation, and productivity, as well as high turnover rates. Micromanagement and low individual ownership and accountability are often by-products of this strategy, which can create a culture of distrust and isolation across the workforce.
Autocratic leadership helps managers and bosses ensure error-free outcomes by streamlining important decisions and keeping power within a small group of trusted individuals. However, this approach falls short when it comes to long-term plans and enabling employees’ career progression, making it particularly effective in delivering short-term solutions for urgent situations or crises.
So, what type of personality traits do you need to be a successful autocratic leader? Here’s a list of relevant characteristics that will help you assess your inclination:
Confidence and self-belief
The ability to motivate others and yourself
Clarity and consistency in decision-making
Reliability to follow and enforce company guidelines
Democratic
In essence, democracy refers to a system that is run, controlled, and continually improved upon by the population of people within the system. With a democratic, or participative, leadership style, you open up the floor to more participation, input, and accountability from your team members than an autocratic approach.
This may seem overwhelmingly positive, particularly in an era of work where employees desire to feel empowered, but it also comes with its own challenges. These include slower decision-making processes, the increased potential for interpersonal conflict, and non-negotiable needs for trust and seamless communication.
Considering the focus on employee experience in today’s workplaces, it can be argued that this style’s benefits significantly outweigh its disadvantages. By distributing the decision-making process, investing in staff well-being and career development, and nurturing creativity and innovation through collaboration, democratic leaders push employees to tap into their full potential at work.
Laissez-Faire
As the name suggests, laissez-faire leadership connotes a laid-back approach to management. It’s a hands-off style that gives team members full autonomy to make their own decisions and, typically, these types of managers only reach out to staff if something needs to be urgently addressed or if individuals request a meeting.
With minimal direct supervision, employees have the freedom to govern their own work days, freeing up room for increased creative thinking and out-of-the-box strategies. Despite the relaxed atmosphere this creates, managers should still be accessible enough to offer support and direction when it’s needed.
Naturally, there are a number of considerations to factor in before you adopt this management stance:
Team members must be experienced/skilled enough to work by themselves
There should be inherent alignment between daily tasks and organizational objectives
Employees may feel unsupported or in the dark if leaders are too disconnected
It’s best to thoroughly assess the problem-solving proficiency, motivation, and self-productivity levels of your team before embracing the laissez-faire approach.
Transformational
With the transformational approach, managers and supervisors foster a company ethos that:
Motivates employees to do their best work
Emphasizes vision and meaningful change
Positions leaders as role models within the organization
Transformational leaders are less concerned with day-to-day operations and are more interested in making the workforce aware of larger organizational objectives—encouraging everyone to play their role in achieving those goals by uplifting and inspiring people on an individual level.
While this approach to management is widely perceived as positive, it usually only works for employees who work well independently, and it requires strong communication and emotional intelligence.
Transactional
Transactional leaders are all about results—and are not afraid to use rewards and punishments to drive employee performance. Using extrinsic sources of motivation and capitalizing on the transactional nature of workplace relationships, these types of managers will pursue their desired outcomes by incentivizing their teams.
By adopting this approach, you will create more clarity around your team members’ roles and responsibilities, fast-track your pursuit of short-term goals, and gain easily measurable performance metrics as a result of a straightforward reward/punishment framework
The downside, however, is that relying on transactional interactions with your staff can stifle employees’ creative output and foster a culture of compliance instead of engagement. It’s also less motivational and may influence your employees to look at their current position as a temporary career stepping stone rather than a long-term role.
Servant Leadership
The servant leadership style prioritizes workforce needs over all else. With the goal of encouraging employee development, building a positive company culture, and increasing trust and respect between team members, servant leaders seek to serve first, while their own objectives and tasks come second.
With this type of empathetic management style, leaders win the trust and respect of their team members, encourage employee growth and career development, and foster a positive work atmosphere.
This sort of selfless dedication can also be seen as a lack of authority by some. Additionally, it may slow down the speed at which actions can be taken, as servant leaders will typically gather input from all staff members to inform their final decisions.
Conclusion
In essence, choosing a particular management style is not a one-size-fits-all approach, it requires careful consideration of your organizational culture, team dynamic, industry, and personality traits. In short, it depends largely on the context in which you are working. But by understanding this and adjusting your actions accordingly, you can cultivate a unique style of leadership that’s the right fit for you and your team.
