Leadership Styles Overview

Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and I want to take a minute to talk about leadership styles. What are leadership styles? In essence, leadership styles are the ways you lead. It's the ways you adapt to your current leadership environment. It's the choices you make that inform how you get the best performance out of your people. There's all sorts of different ways to be an incredibly effective leader. What our research has found is that there are really 4 dimensions that define leadership styles. Feeling, Challenge, Structure, and Directiveness. Somebody who's high in Feeling, this is the leadership style that wants to know what people's motivators and demotivators are, you know, so they can increase the motivators and decrease the demotivators. They care deeply about the personal needs of their employees, and they want people to find their work personally fulfilling. Now, the leader high in Challenge is somebody that is going to push people to develop their weaknesses, not just do what they're already good at, but actually fix their weaknesses and push employees to give absolute maximal 100% effort. So like the late Steve Jobs once said, they can go make a dent in the universe. The leader high in Directiveness is somebody who is focused on maintaining final decision-making authority. They're going to tell people exactly how they want work to be done, and they're also going to tell people what happens if the work doesn't match up to that. And of course, leader high in Structure is somebody who is focused on formal rules, having predictability, having procedures and processes to get things done. Now, the way these 4 characteristics and qualities come together really define leadership styles. How we assemble them defines leadership styles. And what we've discovered is there are really 4 major leadership styles. The pragmatist leadership style, very high on challenge, much lower on feeling, kind of moderate on structure and directiveness. This is the hard-charging, make a dent in the universe kind of leader. FDR, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Steve Jobs, they would all be examples of that. The diplomat leadership styles, kind of the reverse of that. The diplomat, very high in feeling, significantly lower in challenge, and also pretty low in structure and directiveness. This is the leader that's going to create an environment where people love coming to work, where people really feel connected to their leader. Gandhi would be one. David Glass, former CEO of Walmart, would also be another diplomat example. The steward. This is our process and procedure leadership style. Lower on feeling, lower on challenge, but very high on structure and directiveness. This is the leader where things are going to happen predictably. The trains are gonna run on time. Mother Teresa and George Washington would be some very famous examples of that. And then the idealist, very high on feeling, very high on challenge, much lower on structure and directiveness. This is the leader that is going to ensure that people are growing and developing and excited about their work. You can think of Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, or Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, would be examples of this. Now, in all of these 4 leadership styles, what we've discovered after studying more than half a million leaders is there is no one right leadership style. All of these leadership styles can be effective if they're put in the right situation and used with the right people. Contrary to what most business books would have you believe, there is no one right way or one perfect only way to be a great leader. FDR and Dwight Eisenhower were both incredibly successful leaders, but their leadership styles were an absolute study in contrast. And leaders like Tim Cook from Apple and Elon Musk from Tesla have also achieved success with wildly different leadership styles. While there's a lot of different approaches to leadership, like servant leadership or transformational leadership, we do still need to understand leadership styles. For example, All 4 types of leadership styles can act as transformational leaders. They just each do it in unique and different ways. So I'm going to encourage you to dig deeper into leadership styles. Of course, start by taking our leadership styles quiz, and once you know your primary style, explore the rest of this page to really start honing your skills.