The classic leadership styles are explained in practical terms so that team leaders can apply them.
The classic leadership styles are autocratic, participative and laissez-faire. You either tell people what to do, you involve them in deciding what to do or you let them do what they want. To apply these leadership styles, however, we need to be more specific.
While it is important to be consistent, it is acceptable to vary your leadership style provided you do so in a predictable manner. Even the autocratic style is a matter of degree. It simply means offering clear direction without consulting your team members. You don’t have to be heavy-handed except in an emergency or when something has to be done and the person you are asking to do it is resisting you. You could be directive about some things but not others. For example, you might provide clear direction on what needs to be done but be participative or laissez-faire about how it gets done.
Similarly, you could adopt a participative leadership style to decide what needs to be done and how but delegate implementation fully, hence moving towards a laissez-faire style to get the work done. Again there are degrees of participation. You could simply consult your team, but make the decision yourself or you could be fully participative, aiming for consensus. A participative team leader involves people in making decisions that have a big impact on the team.
Then there is the type of people and work you are doing. With highly skilled, experienced professionals, your style should be a mixture of participative and laissez-faire. Such employees resent being told what do to unless it is an emergency. If the work is complex and technical as well, you might not have many of the answers yourself about what should be done. To foster innovation and devise new strategies, brainstorming with your team is a key tactic, making participative leadership essential in this context. If developing people is important, you should be more of a participative team leader.
Work itself ranges from physical tasks through mental activity: thinking, problem solving and decision-making. If most of your work is of the mental variety, then the best way to get this sort of work done is to ask people what they think. Of course you can delegate problem solving just as you can physical tasks, but group decisions are known to be better than individual ones. Again, it is a matter of how important the decisions are that your team needs to make.
To decide which leadership styles to adopt, consider the type of decision to be made as well as the needs of the context and people reporting to you.
