Followership improves if you know and understand leadership styles.
Learning about different leadership styles and understanding them can help leaders, team members, and employees improve their working relationships. In this post, I’ll summarize some key points and suggestions around this topic.
Common Leadership Styles and When to Use Them
First, there are various well-known leadership styles that people tend to adopt, whether consciously or unconsciously, such as:
- Commanding – good for crisis situations or dealing with problematic employees
- Visionary – when changes require a new vision or clear direction
- Democratic – for getting buy-in and input from your team
Additionally, there are styles like “affiliative” and “pacesetting” that also have their appropriate applications. The key is first identifying what style you or your leader tend to default to.
And these styles are just a few of the many you can learn about.
There are several which are important to understand as they create an umbrella within which leadership functions like Transactional, Transformational, and Servant leadership.
These three leadership styles are often bolstered by secondary styles that are the descriptive form of how their followers experience the leadership – autocratic, coaching, supportive, and many other styles.
Leadership Styles Provide Followers with Cues
Importantly, a leader’s style gives clues or cues to their followers about what is needed from them. For example, if a leader takes a more commanding approach, that signals that urgent action or compliance is required to address a crisis or pressing problem. As a follower, recognizing these cues allows you to respond appropriately.
Followership Styles Matter Too
Which means that leadership styles provide value not just for leaders themselves, but also for followers – whether they are team as a whole or a specific employees. By understanding what a leader’s style in a certain situation is signaling, followers can tailor their own working style and priorities accordingly.
Leveraging Style Knowledge to Improve Work Relationships
Using your knowledge of leadership styles can actively improve working relationships and outcomes.
As a follower you can use these styles to answer the question, “how are you gonna engage them to make the relationship better?”
For leaders, this means considering when to use a more visionary or democratic style, for example. For team members, it means recognizing a pacesetting style means ramping up execution and delivery in alignment with the leader. Getting better at “speaking the language” of leadership styles strengthens alignment.
Key Takeaways
The main takeaways around leadership styles included:
- Identify the predominant styles you and your leader exhibit
- Understand what cues each style sends to followers about priorities/expectations
- Adjust your own working style to align better with leadership cues when appropriate
- Consider adopting other styles situationally if needed to improve relationships
Hopefully this gives you some new areas to explore in strengthening your own leadership and teamwork capabilities
Want to learn more and work with me to educate your people about leadership, followership, and strategy? Let’s chat
