As the business climate evolves, so must leadership practices. Learning initiatives must incorporate new trends in leadership and management skills for current and future leaders alike to equip themselves with knowledge, competence and skill sets needed for effective leadership roles.
Leaders must possess the agility to quickly adapt to changes or shifts in customer behavior or market conditions, foster collaboration among their employees and create an atmosphere conducive to them feeling purpose in their jobs.
Authoritarian Leadership
Authoritarian or directive leadership refers to leaders that exert absolute control and authority over subordinates, usually demanding unconditional obedience from followers (Farh and Cheng 2000).
Authoritarian leaders typically employ tactics designed to maintain a strict hierarchy, suppress subordinate emotions, and utilize top-down communication strategies; such tactics create distance and distrust between employees and leaders that eventually leads to poor employee performance.
Authoritarian leaders tend to rebuke and punish subordinates severely when they fail to achieve goals set forth by them (Farh and Cheng 2000; Guo et al. 2018).
Such behavior can have devastating repercussions for employees’ self-assessments and work performance, and reduce their willingness to share information with their leaders.
Autoritarian leadership can have detrimental consequences, making it harder for new managers to build trust with their subordinates. Therefore, new managers should position themselves properly so as to build credibility amongst their followers.
Production plant managers could implement a new system that identifies and eliminates the most defective items from each shift to improve efficiency and avoid defective goods reaching further production stages. This would ensure maximum effectiveness by eliminating those products which might otherwise reach production.
Finding success as an authoritarian leader requires striking a delicate balance between imposing order and allowing room for individuality. While this may be challenging for new managers, it is possible if you can understand and respect each member’s needs and expectations.
Research has demonstrated that authoritarian leadership styles can assist a workgroup in accomplishing its objectives when rewards are low, team power struggles are minimal and group size is large. Furthermore, this form of leadership makes sense in situations in which success matters while failure won’t cost too much and high participation levels are expected.
However, scientific debate on the effects of authoritarian leadership styles remains incomplete and further research on this style of leadership is required to fully grasp its repercussions. Over the last decade, various fields have participated in this discussion which is both temporally and geographically diverse reflecting various points of views regarding authoritarian leadership styles.
Transactional Leadership
As leaders navigate organizations through increasingly dynamic environments, it is essential that they remain self-aware and use questions as trail markers. Furthermore, they should possess tools and strategies necessary to overcome any potential hurdles along their journeys.
As an example, transactional leadership involves setting short-term goals with contingent rewards and consequences, often used by managers in many industries and sales teams offering commissions.
Transactional leadership is often utilized by teams that must complete tasks quickly and efficiently in order to meet deadlines, though in more critical situations like when production needs to ramp up rapidly for a new deadline it could prove invaluable.
Leaders utilizing this style are adept at quickly assessing their team members’ performances and taking appropriate measures as necessary. Furthermore, these leaders are swift to recognize when employees achieve predetermined goals, rewarding them accordingly.
Employees that do not reach their goals may also face rewards being withheld or even being punished, depending on the team leader. While this form of leadership works well when teams must complete tasks quickly and efficiently, it may not be appropriate when developing collaboratively and creating an overall vision for an organization.
Sports teams commonly utilize transactional leadership through coaches setting team goals for winning specific events or games, where leaders will encourage team members to attend training sessions or games in order to meet these targets.
Leaders who employ this style may provide their team members with feedback to keep them on track and ensure they’re doing the right thing, which may prove particularly helpful when employees struggle in their work roles. Such feedback could serve as a helpful reminder of where actions need to change in terms of actions and behaviors taken and behaviors exhibited – for instance when one worker is struggling.
However, this style of leadership doesn’t promote creativity and innovation among team members, thus restricting how quickly a company can adapt and improve its products or services if it already has an established business model in place.
Flattened Organizations
Flattening organizational structures remove multiple levels of management, such as layers of middle managers, by placing decision-making rights closer to tasks and employees responsible for each one. This can help speed up decision making in companies by eliminating unnecessary layers of control while making sure people understand their roles and responsibilities and what decisions they have the power to make.
Decentralized decision-making can also promote employee involvement by eliminating layers of middle management. Cutting costs while streamlining communication within an organization.
Flattened organizations are quickly becoming a favorite choice among global business executives, but there can be challenges associated with them. One challenge involves scaling such models for large organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees.
Flattened structures may also have unintended repercussions for leadership development in the workplace. This may cause chaos and power struggles when employees don’t report directly to one boss, and teams cannot focus on reaching specific project goals due to not having an assigned leader.
These issues can be effectively addressed by training leaders to think and act more like coaches and mentors than traditional managers who oversee people. Training them on identifying their team member’s strengths and enhancing them so they work more cohesively can address these problems effectively.
Leaders charged with transitioning an individual contributor into a manager must possess strong coaching abilities and can assist the transitionee by developing tasks relevant maturity that allows them to thrive in their new role, without becoming overly judgmental or harsh. Furthermore, this transition should also ensure the new manager understands exactly what their new task requires of them and how to support their team to complete it successfully.
Flattened organizational models pose one major drawback: an imbalance between generalists and specialists at work can create confusion and frustration among employees and management in an organization. One way to combat this situation is encouraging specialists to pursue projects which support all aspects of an organization.
Embracing an Experimenter’s Mindset
Experimentation is one of the cornerstones of innovation and growth. Looking at companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter as examples – their success cannot simply be attributed to tools or technology alone but their culture of experimentation.
Accepting an Experimenter’s Mind-Set
There are various approaches to adopt an experimental mindset. A prototyping and evaluation approach may help uncover assumptions that need challenging, while pushing limits beyond existing collections or experiences in museums.
Museums have long been at the forefront of experimenting with various designs and experiences to create dynamic environments. However, this experimentation may not always be readily visible within their walls – making it hard for visitors to identify which museums may be encouraging experimentation.
Adopting an experimental mindset can be accomplished through these steps:
1. Curiosity
A great scientist begins an experiment by asking herself an intriguing question such as, ‘Can the color of a room affect human behavior?”.
Important questions should be meaningful and captivating enough to stimulate curiosity; then you can gather data, form theories, and conduct further investigation.
2. Complete Focus & Flexibility
Successful experimentation typically requires both focus and flexibility when conducting experiments; particularly the latter when deciding if an idea is desirable or not.
An experimental mindset should include more than simply being open-minded; it must also be flexible and adaptable as rigid mindsets can stifle innovation.
3. Controlled Outputs & Unexpected Effects
The HLRW program is an experimental process and may produce unexpected side-effects that must be resolved. As such, Belgian RWM organization took proactive steps to adopt an experimental mindset and address unpredictability by realizing that its final result (deep geological disposal) may remain unknown beyond conceptualization phase.
