Monday Morning Leadership | Leadership Styles

Hey, welcome to Monday Morning Leadership, guys—a day late. This is Brad Krantz, and we’re working through The Certain Leadership Roadmap by Kara Bramblett. Today, we're going to cover leadership styles. There’s quite a few of them, so I’m not gonna cover them all in depth. My hope is that this will help you to discover and/or identify your style.

Daniel Goleman said, "The best leaders don’t know just one style of leadership they’re skilled at several and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances might dictate." So, do you know your style? To truly understand the essence of servant leadership (and that’s kind of where we’re headed here), one must understand the different types of leadership. Right? That should make sense.

The leader has to evaluate oneself to recognize what kind of leadership style he or she naturally exhibits, and this will help toward making a clear judgment towards guiding a team. Individuals can sense when a leader is disingenuous to representing oneself, and isn’t that sadly true? Have we all experienced this? Instead, you want to be genuine and consistent in leading your team. And I’d add: Be authentic and practice integrity.

So, each leadership style is unique, and it’s based upon the presenting situation whatever you’re facing and you’ll leverage one style over another. The foundation of leadership will guide you on the best style to use. Hopefully, that’s our intent here.

So, we go back to the ’30s. A guy named Lewin defined three types of psychological-based leadership styles. We had autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire, and those styles are actually still in use today to describe leadership styles.

The autocratic style obviously demands immediate compliance. As the word denotes, this is a "do as you’re told" type leader. And obviously, this type of leadership can be advised in situations that warrant immediate action. I can think of, you know, the military command structure or a significant emergency or national disaster situation.

No surprise, it’s not beneficial when modifying the behavior of a team and perhaps no shock is often met with resistance. We don’t like to be told what to do.


The democratic style is that consensus through participation. The democratic leader is one who builds and achieves goals through voting. Okay? This style tends to ask questions (which is a good thing for a leader) and reach agreements.

The laissez-faire method is based on a mindset of building a strong team and then staying out of their way. Okay? One of the significant benefits of this style is innovation. You kind of let people do what they do best. Again, obviously, people who want clearly defined objectives might find themselves frustrated here in this approach.

And now we jump forward to the mid-’60s. We see task-oriented and people-oriented styles emerge. Task-oriented is focused on result-driven outcomes, and here, leaders ensure clear communication and expectations of the objectives and desired outcomes.

People-oriented focuses on determining which team member is most suited for a task based upon his or her skill set, interests, or their personal development. And this style is really effective for developing an individual through stretch opportunitiesthose that help them stretch and grow.

Now we hit the 21st century, and again, Daniel Goleman detailed six emotional styles of leadership.

We’ve got the ** visionary style** that moves people toward a vision. Surprise—this has been said to be the most impactful style of leadership. This kind of leader gains strength through passion and vision, and it empowers and inspires a team. That’s a big plus. Okay? And it tends to drive innovation and creativity. And that’s—I kind of tend to favor this one.

Now we have the coaching style, where this develops people for the future. And this is kinda like your sports teams we see it a lot there. Obviously, this kind of leader has a focus on achieving progress. In sports, it’s winning games. Every single person on your team needs coaching in some capacity whether it’s a business, other team, church, or whatever.

Then we have the affiliative style, and that creates emotional bonds. With this "people come first" kind of leader in the sense that he or she tries to do as much as possible to build a bond, a relationship and it’s most effective in the face of motivation when there’s a lack thereof among the team. Okay?

Then we have the pacesetter style. This expects excellence and self-direction, and this kind of leader is one who is prone to set high standards without considering others’ ideas. Obviously, this can tend toward damaging morale and making people feel inferior.

So, there’s also four additional styles of leadership defined and more toward today’s focus on leadership. And those are:

Transactional leadership—this focuses on day-to-day operations, and this leader has the challenge of seeing the big picture and conveying a vision. They focus on an individual’s roles and responsibilities, and they aggressively performance-manage team members. And this can lead to, unfortunately, low morale at times.

Then we have transformational leadership—a venue of innovation within an organization through inspiration and motivation of the team. These leaders are focused on transforming their organizations to the next level by leading with high performance and engaged teams. And this is said to be the most common type in business. Apparently, I missed much of this in my years working, but oh well.

So then we have charismatic leadership. This encompasses the components of transformational leadership—with the inspiration and motivation—however, it’s really for the benefit of the leader. So again, no surprise—this style can obviously lead to the demise of organizations. Right?

Next, we land on servant leadership. And again, this was first defined by Robert Greenleaf, who was an executive with AT&T back in 1970. And the desire here was to lead by serving others—meeting the needs of the team members, okay?—and then also helping empower them to make decisions, focus on growth, and ensure their basic needs were met.

And interestingly, many times, a servant leader has no formal recognition. Okay? That’s okay. This leader, at many times, is unknown and focuses the spotlight on individual team members to show success.

And the benefits of servant leadership are many. One is higher engagement, which leads to a high performance of the team. And the team members feel valued and have a greater sense of engagement, and they feel that the leader cares about them and their well-being—which he should, if he’s a good servant leader. And I would say who wouldn’t want this type of leadership?

The team tends to have high morale through guidance by a moral compass. And this is important to not undervalue or overlook in leadership. Moral compass is huge.

And there are fundamental competencies for servant leaders that transcend all styles of leadership. To be effective in leadership, one must know which style to leverage. Okay? An understanding that each style is critical depending on the situation and the environment that you lead. Okay?

So, here’s some questions for reflection:

• Do you see or find your style here?
• Did this help you to better understand the different types of leadership?
• And which do you most identify with and why?

Thanks so much for joining me today—again, Tuesday for a Monday Morning Leadership. I hope that this added value to you or motivated you in some ways. So, join me next week as we look at one of the core competencies of servant leadership: self-awareness.

Have a great Tuesday, guys. Bye-bye!