Leadership

Leadership and management are two concepts that sometimes are confused between eachother as synonyms. Despite that, there are many differences between managing and leading. A leader is capable o captivating, get the attention of the followers and motivate a team to go on a direction and mutual objectives. On the other hand, a manager demands the existence of an hierarchy on an organization and a rigid structure and behaviour. This way, a team that’s commanded by a leader has more probabilities of achieving the proposed goals when compared to a team run by a director.

The first question to be asked is “what makes a good leader?”. The answer conjugates many hypothesis as an efficient leader must be able to guide his team through a cooperative environment, must have the capacity to create effective and efficient strategies and must build an healthy organizational culture. This subject has gained an incredible meaning and, for that reason, many studies have been made to identify the styles of leadership existent in management, which concluded that there are six different styles of leaders, deriving from six components of emotional inteligence: authoritarian, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coercive.

The autocratic leadership style reflects all the aspects of the organizational culture. This type of leader seeks to be a visionary, giving his enthusiastic and clear vision to the team, always showing how their indivual work and input are conjugated in the global context of the organization. This way, the workers understand the importance of their job and tasks im achieving the company’s goals. It is an effective type of leadership in almost any organization, but mostly when they’re in a difficult period, as the leader has the capacity to seek a direction for the company.

The coaching style distinguishes from the other because there’s a bigger stimulation of the workers to find out their own qualities and weaknesses and continually being better, in other words, improvement and education are fundamental. This style seeks to help in the personal evolution of the works and not the immediate professional tasks, making the employees more attached to the team, as they value the leader as a friend and advisor.

The affiliative style is someone whose special concern is people, valueing most the emotions of the workers, more than any task, always maintaining a the harmony and good communication of the team and between all members. This leader tries to connect everybody in the team, seeking a great loyalty and compromise from the employees. This way, the flexibility in the team is prized as the leader knows how to adapt the rules and promote more autonomy to the teams to work as efficiently as possible and to proportionate confort and recognizement.

A democratic leader seeks to listen to the opinion a will of every worker so that the morality stays high, allowing him to maintain a confident and respectful relationship between the different workers by caring for everyone’s opinions. It is more effective when the leader knows what’s the best way to go and the employees give him suggestions and ideas of improvement, evaluating them as better or not to the current plan.

In the pacesetting style, the leader gives the example, controlling the quality and production, and demanding high levels of efficiency from the workers, who will be substitued if they can’t meet the goals. Through this way, the employees will feel completly controlled, anxious and without motivation to work, doing it just as a need because they don’t have the notion of how their work will affect the overall group production. This style is good when the workers have a high potential, autonomy and capabilities, needing very little coordination.

Lastly, the coercive style is defined as giving less flexibility when compared to the other styes, as this leader doesn’t let the workers to participate in discussing the goals and objectives and give their personal opinion. Everything comes from the ideas of the leader and the workers believe they’ll never be able to expose their thoughts and initiatives, losing their belief of being part of a team, leading to demotivation and worst results. This style is necessary when there’s an abrupt change in the plans and order is need to get back on track, but beyond that just creates a bad environment in the organization.

Now, the question that remains is “What’s the best leadership style?”. As described earlier, there are different scenarios in which a style is better applicable in one circumstance than in other. So, a good leader is the one who adapts between the various styles to promote the best enviroment inside the organization and optimization of the result they seek.