What is Leadership Style?

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Leadership style

Leadership style in traditional leadership theory = how you relate to subordinates.
Do you emphasize task structure or relationships, be unilateral or participative?
Do you show consideration to people or do you get the job done through formal structure?
Questions about leadership style assume that the fundamental purpose of leadership is to motivate employees to work harder.
But, thanks to hyper-competition, organizations now have two separate tasks - to get today's business done and to create the future. The former calls for good management; the latter for leadership.
Now, leaders need to focus externally and promote new products or services, something all employees can do. This means that leadership is no longer a formal role; only management is.
We now need to reframe leadership style as management style.
Style questions should refer to how managers motivate subordinates to perform, not leadership.
Leadership generates new directions - it's not about managing people.
See links on this site for more on how our concept of leadership must change.
Test your insight into guerrilla leadership with this quiz.

The Definition of Leadership

In our knowledge driven world, the power to lead is shifting to the power to promote new ideas, a better way, based on innovation. The meaning of leadership now should be simply the successful promotion of new directions. Leaders show the way. The beauty of this definition of leadership is that it is consistent with market leadership or leadership in sports where one individual, team or organization "shows the way" for others. By focusing our attempts to define leadership on what it means to be the head of a group, we have created a very distorted picture of leadership.

From this point of view, there is only management style. There is no such thing as leadership style.

Participative Leadership = Participative Management

In a meeting, if everyone takes turns promoting a better way, a new solution, then everyone has taken turns showing leadership. All such instances of leadership are one-way influence attempts. Particpative management means that the person in charge asks questions to draw solutions out of team members. But this is not leadership if the meaning of leadership is to actively promote a better way. Think of Martin Luther King promoting desegregation or Al Gore promoting environmental action. These acts of leadership are one-way influence attempts. In a meeting, if everyone has an equal say in the decision, then we must say that no leadership was shown or needed no matter how skilled a facilitator was the person in charge. Hence, there is no such thing as participative leadership. This is an unconventional view, however.