Coaching clients often ask, “What is the ideal leadership style?” The answer is: it depends. There is no single best leadership style. Each style has positive and negative traits associated with them. What I find more helpful is drawing the distinction between leadership styles and leadership best practices.
Leadership Styles
Two leadership styles I more commonly see at play in many organizations are leaders with a commanding style or a deliberate style:
• Commanding Leadership Style: These leaders are often driven by a strong sense of responsibility to get results, and they expect others to share their focus on achievement. While they can come across as very confident and their intense focus on results can drive initiatives forward, at times they can also seem demanding or intimidating.
• Deliberate Leadership Style: These leaders prefer to take time to make thoughtful decisions based on facts and logic. They focus on efficiency, providing quality outcomes and tend to communicate calmly and clearly. While that communication style can be helpful under pressure, sometimes they don’t show the enthusiasm or energy the team needs to motivate them to reach a goal.
Those are just two of a rather large number of leadership styles, and they are neither right nor wrong. What is important to note is that each style has natural strengths associated with it and also potential challenges or blind spots that the leader needs to become aware of.
Leadership Best Practices
Instead of comparing the different styles of leadership to determine which is best, it would make more sense to talk instead about the best practices of leadership. While there are many ideas and theories about what good leadership looks like, there is actual data that supports certain leadership behaviors are more effective and desired.
This VAE model, published in The Work of Leaders: How Vision, Alignment, and Execution Will Change the Way You Lead, was drawn from the knowledge base of various experts in over 150 organizations, prominent thought leadership circles and years of research and development. The VAE model provides a simple, three-step process that is at the core of the work leaders do:
• creating a (V)ision
• building (A)lignment around that vision
• championing (E)xecution
Each of these three steps also has best practices attached to them.
Creating Vision: This is an imagined future condition for your organization or team. When engaging in visioning, effective leaders don’t do that alone, but they almost always confer with their teams. They facilitate conversations where the team explores bold new ideas and also the implications of those potential approaches.
Building Alignment: Leaders achieve this by gaining buy-in from the organization and their team. Alignment occurs through providing consistent, clear messaging, sharing the “why” behind the vision, engaging in dialogue and providing inspiration along the way.
Championing Execution: Finally, effective leaders champion and make sure the vision is being executed and becomes reality. This involves driving execution, analyzing what’s working well and what’s not, addressing problems through ongoing feedback, offering praise and celebrating success as a team.
Leadership Personalities
What I also see in my work is that some leaders naturally fall into either being big-picture, visionary thinkers who are unable to make a practical plan or follow through on the details — or they prefer to focus on the data and task-oriented details, rather than being a leader and focusing on strategy and engaging their team. You may already know where you fall on this continuum. Are you a big-picture visionary leader or a leader who prefers to execute on tasks?
Neither preference is inherently bad or good. But what is important is your self-awareness around your natural leadership style and how that plays into how you display the best practices of crafting a vision, building alignment and executing the vision. Understanding where you shine and your own blind spots as a leader is crucial to your own leadership development.
Article was originally published as a Forbes Coaches Council article on June 28, 2021.