PAPERmaking! FROM THE PUBLISHERS OF PAPER TECHNOLOGY ® Volume 8, Number 1, 2022
In a young startup, for example, you might see a laissez-faire company founder who makes no major office policies around work hours or deadlines. They might put full trust into their employees while they focus on the overall workings of running the company. Although laissez-faire leadership can empower employees by trusting them to work however they'd like, it can limit their development and overlook critical company growth opportunities. Therefore, it's important that this leadership style is kept in check. 4. Strategic Leadership (Commonly Effective) Strategic leaders sit at the intersection between a company's main operations and its growth opportunities. He or she accepts the burden of executive interests while ensuring that current working conditions remain stable for everyone else. This is a desirable leadership style in many companies because strategic thinking supports multiple types of employees at once. However, leaders who operate this way can set a dangerous precedent with respect to how many people they can support at once, and what the best direction for the company really is if everyone is getting their way at all times. 5. Transformational Leadership (Sometimes Effective) Transformational leadership is always "transforming" and improving upon the company's conventions. Employees might have a basic set of tasks and goals that they complete every week or month, but the leader is constantly pushing them outside of their comfort zone. When starting a job with this type of leader, all employees might get a list of goals to reach, as well as deadlines for reaching them. While the goals might seem simple at first, this manager might pick up the pace of deadlines or give you more and more challenging goals as you grow with the company. This is a highly encouraged form of leadership among growth-minded companies because it motivates employees to see what they're capable of. But transformational leaders can risk losing sight of everyone's individual learning curves if direct reports don't receive the right coaching to guide them through new responsibilities. 6. Transactional Leadership (Sometimes Effective) Transactional leaders are fairly common today. These managers reward their employees for precisely the work they do. A marketing team that receives a scheduled bonus for helping generate a certain number of leads by the end of the quarter is a common example of transactional leadership. When starting a job with a transactional boss, you might receive an incentive plan that motivates you to quickly master your regular job duties. For example, if you work in marketing, you might receive a bonus for sending 10 marketing emails. On the other hand, a transformational leader might only offer you a bonus if your work results in a large number of newsletter subscriptions. Transactional leadership helps establish roles and responsibilities for each employee, but it can also encourage bare-minimum work if employees know how much their effort is worth all the time. This leadership style can use incentive programs to motivate employees, but they should be consistent with the company's goals and used in addition to unscheduled gestures of appreciation. 7. Coach-Style Leadership (Commonly Effective) Similarly to a sports team's coach, this leader focuses on identifying and nurturing the individual strengths of each member on his or her team. They also focus on strategies that will enable their team to work better together. This style offers strong similarities to strategic and democratic leadership, but puts more emphasis on the growth and success of individual employees. Rather than forcing all employees to focus on similar skills and goals, this leader might build a team where each employee has an area of expertise or skillset in something different. In the long run, this leader focuses on creating strong teams that can communicate well and embrace each other's unique skillsets in order to get work done. A manager with this leadership style might help employees improve on their strengths by giving them new tasks to try, offering them guidance, or meeting to discuss constructive feedback. They might also encourage one or more team members to expand on their strengths by learning new skills from other teammates.
Article 10 – Leadership
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