Welcome to this episode of the Gain the Lead podcast in the podcast series, fundamental Leadership Tools and Principles. In this podcast, we're going to look at the topic of leadership styles. What do we mean with the topic of leadership styles? Well, maybe if you can relate back to the times where you were an employee and you had a manager and sometimes maybe you felt that they were micromanaging you, giving you too much, telling you what to do in an area that was your expertise. Or maybe the opposite, maybe you felt left alone, not getting enough support from your manager where you would've required or liked some. Finding the perfect leadership style for each employee in each situation is a very skillful way to ensure that people get the right amount of support that they need , yield to feel motivated and the right amount of freedom that their skill deserves so that they also feel motivated. And in this podcast, we're going to look at a model that in practice, you can decide in five seconds or less, which leadership style has the highest probability to be optimally motivating for your employee and get the results that you desire. My name is James Miller and I'm a leadership trainer and coach and also one of the managing directors of Gain the Lead . It's my role and it has been over the past 18 years to train and coach leaders all around the globe and support them in improving their leadership. And in this podcast about leadership styles, we're going to cover the following things. First, the definition, what are leadership styles? Then we'll look at a simple model that helps decide which leadership style is optimal in which situation. And after that, we'll look at what kind of different leadership situations we would typically utilize this principle of leadership styles. Now, if you Google leadership styles and you will find things like situational leadership, you'll find a man named Kurt Lavin . You'll find all kinds of different definitions. You'll find things about cooperative and aire and autocratic, and you can read 10 different articles and you're going to find 10 different definitions. What we have done is made this as simple as possible, so it's very quick and very practical to apply. So what we're going to talk about in its foundation is situational leadership styles modernized for an agile word reflected on with agile principles, and it has its, let's say, scientific foundation from Paul Sey who first researched this together with Ken Blanchard in 1977. And we've just brought it into an up-to-date, modern era. So if we want to look at leadership styles and find the right ones, then there are two criteria that we will always be looking at, and that's the what and the how. What do we mean with that? Well, the whats means, what needs to be achieved, you know , what needs to be achieved and a task, a user story. Um , what needs to be achieved in a project or maybe in an entire year, whatever is relevant for you. The whats, whats can be goals, targets, OKRs , um, clear user story descriptions, definitions of done, like the end result that you want to achieve. The how is the way to get to that end result. And basically based on the qualification of an employee, we can differentiate leadership styles that show who does how much of the what and who does, how much of the, how well with how much of the how. I mean who plans how to get from A to B, is it the leader, the employee, or both together? And we can put this together in five different leadership styles that can very commonly be used to develop people. So let's start at the beginning. Maybe you have a new employee fresh to the business and of course they're going to need some support. So at the beginning we starting with the leadership style that is called directive or sometimes autocratic, but the name isn't that important. It's the definition of who does how much of the what and the how. So in this case, we've got a fresh employee, rather low experience, probably doesn't know any of the systems or processes and anything in your organization. Of course they bring some experience from other organizations. So with this employee, they're going to need you to of course tell them what you want them to achieve. Give them a clear KR goal, a use the story, a definition of done. And then they're also gonna need you to explain how it is done around here. So you can explain step by step to them, the processes, the steps that you take around here , um, explain it in detail, maybe even do it together with them once so that they can then follow those steps exactly and gain experience. That's the most typical usage of this leadership style. However, there are also other situations where the leader defining the what and the leader explaining exactly how is additionally relevant even with more senior employees. 'cause some things just have a process if , uh, things have a clear step-by-step process of how they are done in the organization. Like for example, typical in bookkeeping or documentation processes , um, or maybe even down to things like how to order your laptop or your company car will have a clear definition of processes and that needs explaining to the employee how to do it so that they can do it simply easily, quickly, and then move on to bigger tasks. The second level of leadership style means basically if we take the story further, the employee has gained some experience, you know , they've done some of the tasks in your team or in your department a few times, and of course we don't need to explain how to do those again. So then we can look at a different , um, split of who does how much of the what and how much of the how. Now at this level, an employee typically is still fresher in the organization. There may be in their first two to 12 months. So we still need to tell them what to achieve at the end of the day, where they need to go with the OKRs, user stories and so on. And then let them work out as much of the past as they possibly can at their level of experience. And we add in anything that they don't know yet and explain it to them, share them , um, help them and support them. Now of course you can do that yourself as a leader, maybe however, you also have a senior member in the team. Um, you can also delegate , uh, this step to them explaining how to do things. This leadership style is called a coaching approach to leadership. Coaching means helping, supporting, giving instruction, but also giving as much freedom as the employee needs to be able to utilize their skills, grow and of course learn at the same time. This leadership style is typically executed for many, many, many months until the employee has enough knowledge, enough skill and enough experience to be able to take over the task all by themselves. So naturally at the beginning when you start with this leadership style , um, you will be giving more of the path as a leader, and as experience grows, you'll be able to give less, less, less, less, less, less, less of the path until you get to the following situation that one day you hand over a use the story, you hand over a project or a task to an employee, and uh, you say, okay, you've got plenty of experience now over the past six months, how would you do this? And when they then give you a good explanation that can work and they succeed, then you know, okay, they have enough experience, they have the knowledge, they have the motivation, and then you can move on to the next leadership style. Before we move on to that next leadership style though, there are also situations where you might use this leadership style even with the most senior of employees because maybe you have a programmer, a very senior programmer in your team, they know how to code, they know how to do their job and they know the tech stack they're working on, but maybe you would be switching them to a different tech stack or there's a new way of doing documentation. Uh , then you might need to explain the additional things to them that they don't know or send them to training and so on. This could also apply to a senior sales manager that knows how to sell. Um, however, if you provide them with a new product that they need to sell, of course they're going to need some support, some instruction to understand the customer's needs, understand the best arguments, understand where this product is a good fit and how to sell it successfully. And once your employee has got to the stage where when you're using the coaching leadership style, it starts working well, they start being very autonomous, they can do more and more and more by themselves, they're generating successes, then it's time to move on to the next leadership style, which is called fully delegating. This means the leader is still responsible for providing the what. So the targets, the goals, the end results you would like the employee to achieve. And because they have the experience, they are then responsible for planning exactly how to get from wherever they are now to that end result , taking ownership for every step in between and it basically becoming their baby, yeah , their area of responsibility that they can drive, they can develop, they can do in their way, they can improve and generate great results. In this leadership style is the most common leadership style and basically the aim of developing employees to get them to this level. Um, because then you as a leader can do little , uh, the employee has their own responsibility areas they can be proud of. They can make their successes in, they can take ownership for and they can well shine basically in the team. However, some employees get even more experienced than that. Um , their experience is potentially at your level or even above your level in their area of expertise in the team. And then we can utilize the next leadership style, which is called cooperative leadership. And that means that the what is now not defined by you, it is negotiated with the employee , uh, because they can potentially judge a situation better than you can. They can either judge what's possible, what a good goal would be, or if you maybe have an already fixed goal you need them to achieve, they're going to be better at judging how much time it's going to take them to achieve this. So you together can negotiate the goal, the topics you can negotiate, there are the actual goal, like what's the end results , OKR , the definition of done and so on. You can together negotiate the timeframe , uh, in which this result could be achieved. And you can of course discuss and negotiate the conditions like how many resources, how much budget does the employee have to achieve this goal? And , uh, you negotiate, discuss those, come to an agreement, write that down of course, and then it's up to the employee to do the how, working out how to achieve that and taking full ownership for all required steps from end to end. This leadership style is the foundation of all agile models, the user story usually provided by a product owner. So that basically means the, you know, the what is defined, what the end result looks like, and in the sprints basically on a two week basis, the team decide how much they can do in that timeframe, right? So they're always deciding the time factor of this and then working out how to get from A to Z themselves. The final leadership style , um, in some organizations used more. However, typically more uncommon to use is called the entrepreneurial leadership style. That basically means that we leave it up to the employee to define their tasks and their goals, and of course how to get there. This can be used for extremely experienced employees like c-level executives, country managers. However, there are also situations where this gets applied in everyday business. For example, technical debts. Uh , a team defines what is the technical debt and they define what good would look like. Um , so they're defining the what and of course developing the how. Um , or other examples of the entrepreneurial leadership style are that you give teams 1, 2, 3 days, maybe even a week to do whatever they want. Uh , code a topic , um, develop something that contributes in some way to the feature. As long as they have something finished and complete, at the end of that time, it can be viewed as a success. So we've been talking about these five leadership styles, right? Who does how much of the what and how, who plans, how much of the, how Of course, the employee's gonna do the how at the end of the day it's , it's them to take the actions, providing as much support as an employee requires, but also giving as much freedom as needed so that they can really bring in their skills and be motivated and proud of their results. So far in this podcast, we've been looking at this from the perspective of giving an employee a task or , uh, them taking a user story from the board. However, these leadership styles can also flow through every interaction with an employee. Every might be a bit much, but many, many, many typical interactions with an employee. For example, maybe a , an employee makes a mistake. Let's say a very new junior employee makes a mistake, something goes wrong in what they're doing, then of course they're gonna need our support. And so then we can explain the what, like what's the goal now and also how to mitigate this mistake. Maybe you have an employee that's a bit more experienced , uh, they've made this mistake, they know some of the solution, but maybe they're missing some additional information. Um, so they're still newer in the team typically. Then of course, you can define the goal, like what do you want to have achieved? You define the what and together discuss how that could be done. First asking the employee and then adding knowledge, adding information, adding hints where they're lacking knowledge gaps. And then we, of course, at the end we ask them, okay, how confident are you at going and implementing that? And if they give you a thumbs up and say they're confident, you've probably done a really good job. Next step, a very experienced employee or just an experienced employee that you would typically lead by delegating, giving them their ownership and their babies to work on, they make a mistake and they approach you. Then in that case they might say, you know , I've got this and this mistake or , or this and this problem has happened. And in that case we can also say, you know, the goal now is, you know, we define the what and then ask them how they would like to get there, what different ideas do they have? Um , potentially also asking them to always come with those ideas. So you can just discuss them through and help them gain clarity. And we can walk through this into all different kinds of situations. It's the same in feedback discussions and giving an employee feedback about a behavior about something they've done that was less optimal. If they're brand new, I tell them what and how. If they're, you know , still learning in the organization, I give them the what and together we discuss how they could achieve it. If I have an experienced employee, then of course I can still define the targets, the goal, what they should achieve with what, and then ask them how they could achieve that, what would be their preferred and best way to do this. And without these leadership styles can flow through all different interactions with employees, always with one thing in in mind, and a specific target in our head to make sure that employees feel they have as much support as they need to feel safe and as much freedom as possible so that they can bring in their skills, own their babies, and generate great results for you. I hope you enjoy exercising leadership styles and enjoying it, and also watching lots of different situations where other leaders act and seeing, you know , what would be the best possible leadership style here. Fascinating topic. I'll see you in the next one of the Gain the Lead podcast. If you enjoyed this or you have any deeper questions, please always feel free to reach out to us. 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