The driving force of any organization is the leadership. Leadership and management have many definitions. Here I would like to refer the term leadership to management and leader to manager. The reason being, I personally feel that all managers are leaders as they help their team identify their goals, lead change and ultimately bring transformation in their organization. A good leader encourages his team to be creative and allows out-of-the-box thinking to find solutions to problems. He lays great stress on values, beliefs and ethics.
You should be aware that there are various styles of leadership. For an organization to be successful, it is necessary to implement multiple leadership styles ranging from situational to transformational to cross-cultural leadership.
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- Situational Leadership
Consider the scenario where the manager delegates a piece of work to one of his team members who is ill-prepared for it. This will leave an impression that the worker is incompetent and this can even de-motivate the employee. Here, the fault lies with the manager than the employee. If you are an effective leader/manager, you would have realized the inability of the employee and delegated it to someone who is more proficient in it.
A situational leader is a person who would understand the current work related issues and take the best possible measures to solve the problem. In this form of leadership style, a manager should show the ability to switch between strategies and select an appropriate style that suits the given current situation.
- Transformational Leadership
One of the right kinds of leadership style that every business should implement is the transformational leadership. Whether you are the owner of the business or a manager of a team, you should be able set attainable goals and nurture your team by fostering positive behaviors and thereby sharing the vision of the organization. Leaders with this style of leadership recognize that the employees are the strength of the organization and thus encourage innovative and creative thinking among them. A transformational leader shares their vision with the employees, thereby motivating them to leverage the business growth.
- Transactional Leadership
Transactional leadership style inclines towards the management than the employees. This type of leadership is based on rewards and punishments. Here the employees are rewarded for their good work and punished for discrepancies. Transactional leaders are bend towards the policies and procedure to get the work done and they are autocratic in decision making. For a business to succeed, the manager should possess a right combination of transactional and transformational leadership style.
- Servant Leadership
This style opposes the autocratic and transactional leadership styles. In servant leadership style, the manager or the owner of the organization keeps in mind the growth of his employees. His emphasis would be on empathy, collaboration and ethics. He would encourage teamwork and charts ways to achieve long-term goals. Servant leadership is similar to transformational leadership.
- Cross-Cultural Leadership
Today, people from different cultures and value systems are hired by the business organizations across the globe. Western leadership style is more of a participative style where the manager involves his team members to a certain degree in decision making process. However, in Asia the leadership style is a combination of autocratic and transactional leaderships. An effective leader who deals with another culture should understand their work related social and cultural values to achieve business success. He should also have the ability to organize and lead a workforce of diverse cultures.
The current world scenario is seeing a paradigm shift in leadership styles and one such style is empowering leadership. In empowering/super leadership the leader aims at creating effective self-leaders who will eventually be capable of leading their team. The combination of various strategic leadership styles is the secret behind the success stories of various small/medium businesses.
