Reviewing Leadership Styles

If you work in the business or IT field, you need to exert leadership qualities. Therefore, you need to be someone who has training to lead – someone who cares about his or her company. When you have this type of emotional connection, you can be of more value to your business.

Reviewing the Four Leadership Styles

By reviewing leadership styles, you can get more from your employees and be a more effective leader. You can understand these styles better by receiving situational leadership training. This type of leadership model addresses four main types of leadership styles. These styles are founded on directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating work. The ideal is to direct managers to the level of delegation.

The Directing Process

The situational leader knows the relationship between effective leading and the level of readiness that followers in an organization display for certain tasks. During the directing process, the leader is showing a basic level of leadership. He or she can help direct new employees in their roles. In this formative phase of leadership, the follower may have a high commitment to the work, but a low level of ability. He or she may also exhibit some insecurity.

In this situation, you would need to pay attention to the tasks that are given rather than receiving a direct report on progress. At this point, that type of relationship does not exist. When a direct report will not suffice, the leader or manager must spend additional time with his or her employee – providing clear directions and routine follow-up. At this juncture, it is your job to encourage and motivate your workers.

The manager that directs celebrates positive results and offers recommendations or remedial actions when the results are less positive. The idea of this phase is to promote the worker to the next level of ability. At this stage, the manager is leader-driven.

Coaching Employees

When coaching is used, the workers have developed a bit more competence and, therefore, commit more to their work. While a worker may not be totally confident about his or her ability, he or she is starting to succeed at arriving at specific goals.

At this point, the managers will still concentrate on certain tasks, which may take a good deal of time to complete. However, he or she and the employee have begun to make a connection – one where the leader can emphasize a coaching style.

The idea is to engage an employee so he or she can advance to the next level. The manger directs less and suggests things to do more often. This triggers more encouragement and leads the worker to progress to the next level more easily. This still represents a leader-driven phase.

Supporting Workers in Your Company – Working Toward Delegation

At the next level, the manager becomes more of a support system for the employee. By this point the employee is no longer totally insecure about his or her ability to do a certain task or take on a new responsibility. With the proper support in place, he or she has renewed confidence. This will help him or her to progress until he or she reaches the delegation stage – a stage where he or she can assume a task and handle it on his or her own.

As you can see, each stage is important to the leader and follower. By learning the situational model of leadership, you will become more effective and valuable to your company.