Nutshell: Making a leader

Understanding leadership theories and styles can help improve our self-awareness, making more adaptable leaders of us all.

Time was that the prevailing view of leadership was that leaders were exceptional people born with the innate qualities they needed to lead. These Great Men (sic) bestrode the world, set apart from others by their heroic and unwavering leadership gifts.

In the words of the Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, the history of the whole world was considered to be “but the biography of great men”. For all its flaws, the idea that leaders are “born, not made” proved to be remarkably resilient, lasting well into the 20th century.

Fast forward to today and – thankfully – we know better. As the science of human behaviour has grown and developed, so has our thinking around what makes a leader and how, as leaders, we no longer have to rely on certain fixed traits or qualities. Instead, we can build the skills and behaviours we need to be successful.

For Canadian academic Henry Mintzberg, leadership is “neither a science nor a profession; it is a practice, learned primarily through experience, and rooted in context”. It turns out, then, that leaders these days really are “made, not born”; we just need to practise.

That’s good news for us ordinary mortals faced with the challenge of leading a team. But if we are to develop that practice, we also need to take on board another important Mintzberg idea, that leadership is “rooted in context”.

It’s both:

• situational: dependent on the situation we find ourselves in and

• dynamic: needing to change as we learn and grow and take on new roles and challenges.

 As London Business School’s Herminia Ibarra reminds us, we need to beware the authenticity paradox. Sticking too rigidly to what we consider to be authentic selves will only take us so far.

The best leaders are adaptable, able to flex their styles as circumstances demand and change. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a central, stable core of values that guide us; rather that we might bear in mind the advice that “in matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock”.

 To do that, we need to improve our self-awareness around what kind of leader we are now – our preferences, biases and motivations – as well as learning when and how we need to adapt.

That’s where leadership styles frameworks and models can help. By improving our awareness of our default behaviours and how they impact on others, they can provide a useful starting point as we develop our approach and practice.

Style matters

As we’ve moved away from those Great Men of Carlyle’s imagination, our thinking about leadership has moved through several different stages and schools of thought.

By the 1940s, researchers were moving away from a focus on personality traits that may or may not be associated with leadership, and instead looking at the patterns of behaviours – or styles – used by leaders when directing, motivating, guiding and managing people.

Kurt Lewin’s three styles

Much thinking about leadership styles today can trace its origins to 1939, when German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin set out to identify different styles of leadership. His identification of three major leadership styles continues to be influential today and has formed the basis of many more distinct and defined styles ever since.

His three identified styles are:

• authoritarian (autocratic)

• participative (democratic)

• delegative (laissez-faire)

  
  

Authoritarian leadership (Autocratic)

The classic command-and-control style, authoritarian (or autocratic) leader provides clear expectations for what needs to be done, when it should be done, and how it should be done.

They tend to make decisions independently, with little or no input from the rest of the team. At its extreme, this style of leadership can be seen as controlling or even dictatorial.

Participative leadership (Democratic)

Participative (or democratic) leaders offer guidance to team members, but they also participate in the group and encourage creative input from other group members.

This helps people to feel engaged and motivated, an important part of the team, and a commitment to group goals. However, it’s no free-for-all: participative leaders still have the final say when making decisions.

Delegative leadership (Laissez-Faire)

Delegative (or laissez-faire) leaders offer little or no guidance to group members and leave the decision-making to group members themselves.

They provide support with resources and advice if needed, but otherwise they don’t get involved. It’s a style that can often lead to poorly defined roles and a lack of motivation.

Which style works best – and when?

In his study, Lewin observed the response of three groups of children led in a craft project by an authoritarian, democratic, or laissez-faire leader.

Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that democratic leadership tended to be the most effective at inspiring followers to perform well. The group might have been less productive than the authoritarian group, but their work was more creative and of better quality. The delegative leadership group was the least productive of all, exhibiting little co-operation and less ability to work independently.

That doesn’t mean that the other styles have no place in our leadership toolkit. Lewin’s three styles show us that we may need to mix and match depending on the situation we’re facing or the context we’re working in. Each has its strengths and its weaknesses.

Delegative leadership, for example, might be motivating for groups of highly qualified people able and willing just to get on with the job. But Lewin also noted that, in other contexts, the lack of direction discouraged personal accountability and productivity.

Likewise, authoritarian leadership can be effective in situations when people need a clear sense of direction, where rules or standards need to be carefully followed or when a situation calls for quick decisions and decisive action. But, used routinely, it can create demoralising and even hostile environments and us-and-them cultures.

There can even be drawbacks to the participative style. It can be too time-consuming in certain situations, and it can falter if group roles are unclear or badly communicated.

Participative leadership may well be the best default, but, as we’ll find out, there are times when a bit of flexing might get the job done better for all concerned.

Beyond Lewin

Very few of us would recognise the world of work of Lewin’s 1930s. Since then, it’s changed beyond recognition, and thinking about leadership behaviours and styles has evolved accordingly.

Lewin’s styles have been criticised for being too simplistic and for lacking a proper appreciation of situation and context. But his focus on patterns of behaviour remains an underpinning for the many, more finessed, frameworks that have evolved to help us make sense of the different styles leaders might deploy and when.

Here are some examples:

Situational leadership: Hershey and Blanchard

In the 1960s, Paul Hershey and Kenneth Blanchard published The Situational Leader in which they reinforced the idea that the most effective leaders are those that are able to adapt their style to the situation they face.

They identified four primary leadership styles, broadly on a similar continuum to Lewin, from more directive to less directive:

• Telling

• Selling

• Participating

• Delegating

Situational leadership requires leaders to adapt their style depending on their situation, taking their lead from the task at hand and the level of “maturity” (knowledge, competence and willingness) of the people involved.

For example, for a relatively simple task tackled by a keen new recruit, leaders might be able to move quickly from telling to delegating. It might take longer if that new recruit is less keen, or the task more complex. 

Situational theories, therefore, recognise the complexity of dynamic social situations at work and how different people in different roles (and doing different things) can affect outcomes. Leaders are most effective when we recognise this and flex accordingly.

Hersey and Blanchard later updated their framework to focus on two key leadership behaviours:

1.  Supporting (more enabling)

2.  Directing (more directive)

They suggest that leaders need to deploy different levels of support or direction depending on people’s competence and commitment (a version of their original maturity), while the task still needs to be taken into account. In the situational leadership II model, the four styles become:

1.  Directing: High on directing; low on supporting

2.  Coaching: High on both directing and supporting

3.  Supporting: Low on directing; high on supporting

4.  Delegating: Low on both directing and supporting

The point, of course, is that not one of these four leadership styles is best; we need to match behaviours to the developmental skill of the people involved in the task at hand.

Contingency Theory: Fiedler

Psychologist Fred Fiedler also added his contribution to the leadership styles debate in the 1960s. Like Hershey and Blanchard, he concluded that there was no one best style of leadership.

Instead, a leader’s effectiveness is based (contingent) on matching two factors:

• Leadership style

• Situational favourableness (later called situational control)

Unlike Hershey and Blanchard, Fiedler’s Contingency Theory suggests that leadership style is fixed.

His framework uses a tool known as the Least-Preferred Co-Worker (LPC) Scale to establish which style we have, based on whether we’re a more relationship-oriented leader or more task-oriented.

For Fiedler, task-oriented leaders usually have lower LPC scores, which makes them very effective at completing tasks. They’re quick to organise a group to get tasks and projects done, but, for them, relationship building is not a priority.

Relationship-oriented leaders usually have higher LPC scores. They focus more on personal connections, and they’re good at managing conflict. They’re also better at making complex decisions.

Once we’ve established which style we are, then we consider how best to match it to a situation that complements that style, based on three factors:

• Are leader-team member relations and levels of trust good or poor (member relations)?

• Are tasks vague or clear-cut and well understood (task structure)?

• Do you have strong or weak power over your team (position power)?

For example, imagine if we were stepping up to lead a team following the retirement of a much-admired and long-standing colleague.

The team is understandably wary about the change (i.e. lead-member relations are poor). But the team’s task is well defined (structured) and our position of power is high because we have positional authority as the boss. In this situation, the most effective leader would be high LPC, someone who can focus on building relationships.

Fiedler’s model has been criticised for its lack of flexibility, and it has certainly aged less well than other leadership styles frameworks, especially as relationship building is now seen as such a fundamental leadership skill, whatever our natural style. The LPC Scale is also viewed as something of a blunt tool.

But it’s an interesting insight into a model that seems to fly in the face of the thinking at the time that leaders can and should adapt as the people and situation around them change. Instead, it suggests that leaders do best when they play to their strengths.

Action-centred leadership: John Adair

As its title suggests, John Adair’s action-centred leadership (ACL) framework focuses on what leaders actually do rather than the characteristics they display.

First published in 1973, instead of looking at leadership styles, it identifies three key areas that leaders need to focus on to lead a team effectively, and offers a framework for keeping them in balance:  

• Task:the actions we take to achieve a goal.

• Team:our actions at the group level that enable effective teamwork and cohesion.

• Individual:actions that support each team member’s unique needs.

The framework is usually represented by three interlocking circles:

The model contains a useful list of 'functions' that the action-centred leader must perform within each of the three circles. For example:

• Under task, we might be planning how to get the job done or how to allocate resources.

• Under team, we might be setting expectations about team behaviours and standards or recruiting a new team member.

• Under individual, we’ll be coaching and mentoring them on a one-to-one basis, helping individual team members to develop their skills and capabilities.

The framework reminds us that it’s easy to focus on one or two areas more than others, but the overlap between the three circles shows that each area relies on the other for success. To be an effective leader, we need to balance the time and energy we expend on all three.

For example, if we are setting objectives, we need to not just have an eye to the tasks that need to be completed but also make sure the team understands the goals being set and each individual knows how their contribution will fit in to the bigger picture.

There may, of course, be times when we won’t be able to balance all three areas equally. We may, for example, have to prioritise getting tasks done if we’re up against a tight deadline, or a more junior team member might need more individual support until they are up to speed.

But the circles can help us to remember that we should strive to rebalance our focus when the situation allows.

Transformational leadership: Burns and Bass

When, in 1978, James MacGregor Burns defined leadership as a process where “leaders and their followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation”, he introduced a new concept that has come to embody much thinking about leadership ever since.

By 1985, Bernard M Bass was building on Burns’ work to round out the theory of transformational leadership. In essence, it’s a leadership theory that focuses on a leader’s ability to inspire loyalty and trust in their followers.

These leaders tend to be emotionally intelligent, energetic and passionate, committed not only to meeting organisational goals, but also to helping their people to fulfil their potential.

This focus, the theory goes, improves the motivation levels and morale of team members, leading in turn to more creativity and better team outcomes.

And it’s not just a theory. Research shows that it’s a style characterised by higher performance and more improved group satisfaction than other styles; it’s also proven to be good for team wellbeing.

Transformational leaders model integrity and fairness, are encouraging and enabling, but that doesn’t mean they’re not concerned with success.

The style is based on clarity around goals and high expectations, creating can-do, accountable cultures where teams work together to look beyond self-interest towards shared goals and excellent performance.

The four Is of transformational leadership

Bass suggests that there are four different components of transformational leadership, known as the four I’s of leadership: 

1. Inspirational motivation

As leaders, people need a good reason to follow our lead. Transformational leaders have a clear vision and are able to communicate it in ways that motivate people to get on board with what we’re trying to achieve and how.

2. Intellectual stimulation

Transformational leaders not only challenge the status quo; they also encourage creativity across the board, inviting people to explore new ways of doing things and to keep learning. This creates psychologically safe cultures where people are prepared to innovate rather than playing it safe.

3. Idealised influence

The foundation of influence is trust and respect. When we serve as role models for followers, modelling ethical behaviours and positivity, this builds our trustworthiness. In turn, this encourages people to emulate us and to commit to team vision and goals.

4. Individualised consideration

Transformational leadership also involves offering support and encouragement to team members as individuals.

That means we have to work constantly to build relationships, develop our trustworthiness and help our people to learn and grow. We need to keep an eye to everyone’s personal development and goals, acting as a coach and mentor to help them build their capabilities and expertise.  

Transformational leadership is a leadership style that also requires us to work on our own self-awareness and skills, making sure that we make time and space for our own learning and development.

We’ve come a long way from Carlyle and his Great Men. But the (much-needed) finesse that behavioural science has given us also means that leadership can never be a precise science.

Fortunately, we have a wealth of frameworks and models to help us understand what it takes to lead effectively. With self-awareness – and a healthy dose of Mintzberg’s practice – we can flex when we need to flex, selecting the right style at the right time for the right outcomes.

Test your understanding

• Identify Kurt Lewin’s three leadership styles.

• Describe John Adair’s action-centred leadership framework.

• Explain what individualised consideration means in transformational leadership terms.

What does it mean for you?

• Think of a recent situation where, in hindsight, it might have been better to be more or less directive when dealing with a colleague. What might you do to improve your style choice next time?