In the blog post How to lead in multicultural teams" (see also: https://www.erhan-coaching.com/en/post/how-to-lead-multicultural-teams) it was said that Authentic (credible) behavior also depends on how you as a leader deal with different situations. Depending on the topic, importance, context, urgency, etc., a good leader is able to adapt his style to suit the situation.
What leadership styles are there?
If you search for leadership styles in the literature, you will particularly find the distinction between the authoritarian style, the cooperative style and the laissez-faire. In the authoritarian style, the leader decides everything himself and then passes his decision on to his team in the form of instructions, information and orders. In the cooperative style, the manager informs about his planned decision. Employees have the chance to give feedback before the manager makes their final decision (with or without taking the feedback into account). With laissez-faire, the leader stays out of the solution-finding/decision-making process. The team is left completely alone.
How can you recognize a change in leadership style?
The collaboration between leaders and employees is essentially based on communication. Following the meaning of the term communication (from the Latin word communicare = doing something collectively), there is an exchange of information between leaders and employees. These can be: instructions, orders, information, advice, expertise, know-how, etc. Based on Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular in the Harvard Business Review, the crucial point is how much the leader puts into the communication with the employee in the form of answers and how much he extracts in the form of questions.
This interplay between questions and answers shows to what extent a leader “jumps back and forth” between the different leadership styles in an appropriate manner.
The two questions “How much does the leader put into the communication in the form of “answers”?”, and “How much does the leader pull out in the form of “questions”. ?” can be visualized on two axes:
X-axis: “Information pulled out from the leader (questions)?”
Y-axis: “Information put in from the leader (answers)?”
If you add the two options “Less” and “More” to each axis, you get four fields in a matrix. These four fields essentially describe how employees and leaders communicate together and make decisions. Three of the four fields can be meaningfully described with the three leadership styles mentioned above (authoritarian style, cooperative style and laissez-faire). Another leadership style, which is referred to here as the democratic style, best fits the fourth field. As a result the following four combinations exist:
No questions and no answers from the leader = Laissez-Faire
No questions but lots of answers from the leader = authoritarian style
Many questions and many answers from the leader = cooperative style
Many questions but no answers from the leader = democratic style
This shows that the democratic style follows the definition and principles of the classical coaching approach, i.e. the employee decides, while the manager only supports the process by asking questions. At this point I would like to call this a special form of leadership, since an application requires skills and knowledge from the field of coaching.
Examples of leadership styles:
Authoritarian leadership style: An authoritarian leadership style is important for very urgent issues, such as an accident in production. In this case it is about the health of an injured employee and questions about whether the employee needs help are obviously non-appropriate. Instead, quick decisions in the form of instructions are necessary to protect the health of the injured person.
Laissez-Faire: Do the employees want to organize a summer party or christmas party for the workforce, it makes more sense (after setting a budget) to let the team decide freely. Making authoritarian decisions could have a negative impact on employee motivation. This means that the manager neither gives instructions nor proactively asks any questions.
Cooperative style: A product manager wants to expand feasibility in production and requires approval for the investment. He presents his strategy to his supervisor and justifies it with relevant financial figures. The manager asks a lot of questions, but also provides a lot of information based on his experience. Assuming that there is the possibility of purchasing machines from different manufacturers for this expansion, both decide together which manufacturer they prefer.
Democratic style: A sales employee approaches his supervisor with a conflict between his sales partners. Assuming that the manager has no background information about the context and at the same time believes that the employee is capable of solving the situation himself, he can use the democratic style by applying various techniques from Coaching to accompany the process of finding a solution. The question here is, which Coaching techniques exactly? This will be presented in a future blog post using a best practice example.
How can Coaching support this topic about flexibility in leadership style?
If a leader is not sure whether he or she has solved a situation correctly, an external Coach can be an excellent sparring partner with whom the leader can reflect past situations. Unlike asking colleagues or friends, the Coach is absolutely neutral and can therefore give objective feedback after actively listening and asking questions.
If various leadership situations have triggered stress due to emotions, the Coach can help reduce the stress level by using Coaching techniques.
After setting a goal together, the Coach and leader can also do preparatory work by playing through possible future scenarios. During the Coaching process, the leader gains new insights throught the methods used by the Coach. With the newly found clarity he decides to deal with a certain situation in the way he wants and thinks is right.
In this sense, Coaching can support leaders in developing their leadership qualities, communication skills, conflict management, time management and other key skills.
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