Is Your Leadership Style a Motivator or Morale Destroyer?

by Judy Rathwell | Sep 24, 2024 | Communication, Decision-making, Feelings, Influence, Leadership Development, Setting Expectations

Is your leadership style a motivator or morale destroyer

There is no right or wrong leadership style. Every leader has their own unique voice and their own individual approach to people and projects. However, it is important to realize that different styles may work best at different times, and to achieve different purposes.

While being genuine is an essential part of leadership, you must learn to adapt your leadership style as the business environment, team members and goals change around you. Any leader, even a highly collaborative one, uses a range of different styles at different times – even, perhaps, in the course of a single day.

The different leadership styles fall into five basic categories:

1. Authoritative Leadership

Authoritative, or autocratic, leadership works best when a team needs strong direction. This type of leadership identifies the challenges ahead and focuses the team on a common goal, yet allows individuals to decide how their efforts will get the desired end result. Authoritative leadership doesn’t work if the team members are more expert than the leader because you can’t be authoritative on a subject where you lack deep knowledge and experience.

In an era marked by rapid change and uncertainty, authoritative leadership can be particularly effective in driving swift, decisive action when navigating crises or pivoting business strategies. However, with the increasing value placed on collaboration and innovation, leaders must balance authoritative decisions with opportunities for team input, ensuring that employees remain engaged and motivated despite top-down directives.

2. Coaching Leadership

This style of leadership is most effective when employees are receptive to change and learn. The coach does just what the name implies: Helps employees grow and learn. This leadership style focuses on long-term personal development as well as job-related skills. Coaching is least effective when an employee is defiant or if the leader lacks proficiency in what they’re trying to teach.

Coaching leadership is best applied when performance or results need improvement. When using this style, your goals should be to help others to advance their skills, build bench strength and provide a lot of guidance. This can be especially helpful when faced with challenges around reskilling and upskilling, like when a team needs to adapt to new technological advancements.

3. Coercive Leadership

Coercive leadership is also called transactional leadership and is the most directive of the leadership styles. Think of it as the “do what I tell you right now” style. Coercive leadership should be used sparingly because it stifles creativity and enthusiasm. However, this style works well if the building is on fire, a teammate is out of control, or the organization requires an immediate overhaul.

Coercive leadership is best applied during a crisis or during a period of significant change. A manager might also employ this style when a business unit is not operating profitably due to wasteful practices. However, as organizations increasingly prioritize innovation and employee engagement, over-reliance on coercive tactics can hinder creativity and morale. Leaders must know when to deploy this style to stabilize situations without stifling the organization’s culture.

4. Democratic Leadership

It’s easy to understand what democratic leaders do: They let their team have input in decisions and share their ideas. Democratic leadership works when the team needs to feel ownership in the plan or goal. Everyone is given a seat at the table, and discussion is relatively free-flowing. This leader will synthesize all the available information into the best possible decision. Since this style is time-consuming, it should be avoided if a deadline is imminent or employees don’t have the expertise or experience to offer helpful advice.

Democratic leadership is best applied when situations change frequently. This style offers a great deal of flexibility to adapt to better ways of doing things, but it can be somewhat time-consuming to make a decision in this structure. With the rise of remote and hybrid work environments, democratic leadership has gained prominence as it encourages team involvement and fosters a sense of ownership, even from a distance.

5. Pacesetting Leadership

Think of this style as lead-by-example leadership. Pacesetting leaders set high expectations and demand quick results. It works if the team is already motivated and skilled at their jobs. Used too much, pacesetting leaders risk burning out their team and depressing innovation. It also doesn’t work when training or coaching is needed.

Pacesetter leadership is best applied when a business or department needs quick results from a group that is already highly motivated and competent. There is no time to learn on the job or teach someone a skill with this leadership style. However, with the increasing awareness of the importance of mental health and employee well-being, leaders must be cautious not to push their teams too hard.

How to Choose a Leadership Style

To determine which leadership style fits a given situation, you must first know what your team needs for the task at hand. Analyze your team’s and your strengths and the needed results, then flex your leadership style to fit the end goal. For that reason, being conscious of both your own style as a leader and those of others you hire can be crucial to keeping your organization on the right track.

And, while it’s easy to say you should change your leadership style to fit different teams, employees and situations, it’s not that easy to do. Spend some time thinking about what you think your default style is, and consult a trusted colleague or mentor to ask if they agree.

Questions to ask yourself: How do I behave under stress? Do you find yourself asking others for opinions or do you tell everyone what to do? Which leadership style seems most comfortable to you?

From there, it will take more time to discover what best motivates your people in which circumstances.

Eventually, you will create your own leadership style, one that is authentic, balanced, adaptable, visionary and best leverages your employees so that you all achieve great things.

Source: Lisa Jasper, Insperity

“You don’t have to hold a position in order to be a leader.”
– Henry Ford

Did you know this about disc?

DiSC is an assessment that aids with effective communication

Group map

The main feature is the Group map. Similar to the group map and poster available through the Group Culture and Group Facilitator reports, the map shows everyone’s dot location and their icon from Catalyst. This tab also shows the group members and their priorities and this list can be filtered by primary DiSC style. The “more info” link will take you to the “Your colleagues” comparison page with that person.

Groups Video

5 Benefits of Team Building for Remote Teams

by Judy Rathwell | Aug 7, 2024 | Adaptability, Engagement, Leadership Development, Setting Expectations, Working from Home

5 Benefits of team building for remote teams

In today’s digital era, remote work has become standard, giving employees flexibility and autonomy. Yet, maintaining strong team bonds remains a challenge. At Aha! Leadership, we see team bonding as essential, not just a bonus, for our success. Here’s why:

1. Fostering Trust and Collaboration
Regular team bonding activities help build trust among team members. When trust is established, collaboration becomes seamless. Employees feel more comfortable sharing ideas, asking for help, and working together towards common goals.

2. Enhancing Communication
Team bonding events provide opportunities for open and relaxed communication. These interactions can break down barriers, making it easier for team members to connect on both professional and personal levels, ultimately improving day-to-day communication.

3. Boosting Morale and Engagement
Engaging in fun and meaningful activities can significantly boost team morale. When employees feel valued and connected, their engagement levels rise. Engaged employees are more productive, motivated, and committed to their work.

4. Promoting a Positive Work Culture
A strong team bond contributes to a positive and inclusive work culture. It fosters a sense of belonging and community, which is especially important in a remote work environment where physical interactions are limited.

5. Supporting Mental Well-Being
Remote work can sometimes feel isolating. Team bonding activities offer a much-needed break from the routine, providing mental and emotional support. It helps employees recharge and return to work with renewed energy and focus.

What are ways your team commits to nurturing connections? Would enjoy hearing and learning from you!

Robyn Marcotte
Founder – Aha! Leadership

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment”.
– Jim Rohn

Did you know this about disc?

DiSC is an assessment that aids with effective communication

Agile EQ Edition

Everything DiSC Agile EQ doesn’t just measure a person’s EQ. It provides a foundation for improving EQ by focusing on observable behaviors that are measured by DiSC.
Agile EQ helps learners understand their emotional responses by using both the language of DiSC and a new concept called Mindsets. The Agile EQ Mindset map helps learners recognize what behaviors are associated with the different mindsets(below).

Effective Leadership: 3 Keys to Seeing the Future Through the Fog

by Judy Rathwell | Jul 23, 2024 | Change Management, Engagement, Influence, Leadership Development

3 Keys to seeing the future through the fog

Effective management is a solution to many of the problems companies face today – as well as in any work environment.

But what does effective management mean in our current climate?

How do managers need to evolve going forward?

What new skills do they need to acquire or enhance?

1. Managers as coaches

A manager is no longer a “boss” or a delegator, but instead acts as a coach and facilitator of success for their team members.

To be an effective coach, managers must engage employees regularly so they can:

Have meaningful conversations that allow them to understand each employee’s personal situation, preferences, strengths and professional goals
Involve employees in establishing performance goals
Set expectations and systems of accountability

This builds trust. Furthermore, by accentuating their strengths, helping employees plot their career paths and guiding them toward opportunities that will help them accomplish those goals, managers can boost:

Employee confidence
Feelings of inclusion
Engagement

Engaging employees in this way also helps to eliminate common areas of frustration and perceived disrespect. If a manager knows who their employees are as people, including their personal challenges, desires and innate tendencies, they can cater their management style to each person’s needs. Because everyone is wired differently, managers can’t expect to treat everyone the same and expect consistently good results.

As an example of how employees can be so vastly different, Gallup recently conducted a survey of 15,000 workers asking them whether they prefer, post-pandemic, that their work and personal life are separate or blended. Surprisingly, the result was 50% in favor of separation and 50% in favor of a blend. Now think about the people you manage – and imagine the friction that could be created if you didn’t know which category each of your employees prefer.

2. Effective leaders as deliverers of a consistent culture

In times of uncertainty, organizational culture can be a powerful differentiator between good and great workplaces. A culture with desirable qualities can:

Attract and retain star employees and, as a result, elevate the customer experience.
Can help employees to be more resilient and enable companies to better weather tough times.

Despite the increased focus on employee wellness in company culture, Gallup has found that the number of employees who strongly agree with the statement “my employer cares about my wellbeing” has dropped from nearly half to less than a quarter. This is a major problem, and managers must work to combat this perception and help to close the gap between executive leadership and employees.

Managers are the leaders who employees interact with the most. To many employees, their direct manager is the face of the company and represents the brand and culture to them. Therefore, managers have the most regular opportunity to embody and model the organizational culture to employees.

3. Effective leaders as architects of resiliency and engagement

Leaders must build resiliency and engagement in their employees to counteract negative emotions, such as change fatigue. To do this, they must balance flow and burnout.

Flow is the state at which employees experience challenges, but they rely on their strengths and manager’s guidance to perform at their best.
Burnout is when employees experience challenges plus barriers in their way.

Both flow and burnout share “high challenge” in common. Challenge is good and you don’t want to remove it from the workplace. What effective leaders should remove from the workplace are the barriers that hold employees back and frustrate them, so they can help employees accomplish what they need to do.

There’s also the recent phenomenon of quiet quitting, which really just means that employees are not engaged. If managers understand their employees and their personal situation, and take steps to intervene, quiet quitting doesn’t have to happen.

As Gallup has found, the average engagement level in the U.S. is at 32%. At great companies, regardless of geographies or industries, engagement levels are consistently at 70% or higher. What this statistic tells us is that high engagement is achievable and that leaders have an important role to play.

Source: Insperity

“The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails.”
– John Maxwell

Did you know this about disc?

DiSC is an assessment that aids with effective communication

DiSC is a valuable tool for managers. It gives you insight into your own management approach. And it helps you understand when and how to adapt your approach to the people you manage. Get a quick overview of how it works.

Management Video

4 Differences Between Learning and Development

by Judy Rathwell | Sep 26, 2023 | Continuous Learning, Executive Leadership, Influence, Leadership Development, Recognition, Trust

4 Differences between learning and development

HR professionals are under a lot of pressure to prove that leadership development programs have a return on investment. When leaders’ time is precious and financial resources are limited, how do organizations get the most out of their programs? One way is to focus on the difference between learning and development. But what is the difference between learning and development?

Learning is defined as gaining new knowledge. Development is applying that knowledge to drive results and growth. When it comes to leadership, we simply can’t afford to build programs where leaders are learning but not developing.

For starters, if your leaders are learning but not developing, you might see one or more of the following:

1. The organization relies too much on self-directed learning.

It’s common to hear that leaders should own their development. Yes, it’s true that leaders should fully participate in development and try to apply what they’ve learned to get better. What this doesn’t mean is that we should only rely on self-directed learning.

Many organizations invest in huge online libraries of learning content. They promote them to leaders as a “one-stop shop” for building leadership skills on demand. Sounds great, right? As an added bonus, this content is often high quality and presented in a compelling way.

Unfortunately, this “build it and they will come” strategy doesn’t provide the same benefits as a more coordinated leadership development program. But what does a more coordinated program have? Leaders can also practice skills in a safe environment and socialize new behaviors while working with their peers.

Lately, leaders have been asking for more development experiences with a social component. In the era of virtual and hybrid work, leaders feel more isolated from their peers. According to DDI’s recent Global Leadership Forecast, their most desired development experience is instructor-led training. Meanwhile, self-paced digital learning is near the bottom of the list of preferred learning methods.

2. Leaders participate in programs but don’t change and grow.

Learning only becomes development when it’s applied on the job. When leaders go to training programs but don’t change their behavior, they may have learned, but they certainly haven’t developed.

Does this cause a lack of change and growth? It’s often a shortage of self-insight. Resources like 360 feedback tools and simulation-based assessments uncover blind spots. These resources also do a good job of showing leaders why they need to change and how they can do it. In addition, with the data and insights these tools provide, leaders become more committed to making a change.

Leaders also have a hard time changing when they feel their employee development isn’t connected to the organization’s business or cultural priorities. If the same learning programs have been in place for years despite significant changes to the organization, leaders may see the programs as outdated, irrelevant, or a mere formality. But how do top organizations avoid this? Regular leadership needs analyses are a good place to start. It can also be helpful for organizations to align development offerings with the challenges their leaders are facing today.

3. Learning is episodic and lacks “connective tissue.”

When learning is event-based and not part of a bigger development experience, it’s hard to build the momentum for meaningful leadership development. Leaders may have a desire to make the most of leadership development opportunities, but ultimately, they need guidance and direction to do it. As a leadership development professional, your job is to create that structure, accountability, and engagement.

For this reason, many organizations have adopted a learning journey approach. This approach treats development as behavior change that takes place over time. Leaders achieve behavior change through a focused mix of formal learning, one-on-one coaching, assessment, and online reinforcement tools (like job aids, microcourses, chatbots, and practice simulations). In a learning journey, leaders are given a road map for development as well as all the ways they can apply their learning on the job.

DDI research on the impact of learning journeys shows that organizations that adopt this approach are 3.4X more likely to have high-caliber leadership development. These organizations are also 2.9X more likely to have high leadership strength and 2.5X more likely to be financially successful.

4. Learners don’t have support from their leaders.

Learners have the best opportunity to develop when their own leader supports them with coaching. In this environment, learning is the means to better performance, but not the end. For learning to become development, the learner’s leader must challenge them to apply new skills and provide meaningful feedback.

Some well-meaning managers may send struggling leaders to training programs so that “HR can fix them.” While someone struggling with their leadership skills should certainly participate in leadership development, relying on HR to fix performance issues is a sign that the leader’s leader could play a more active role in their development.

Source: DDI, 2023

“If you cant fly, then run. If you cant run, then walk. And, if you cant walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward”.
– Martin Luther King Jr.

Did you know this about disc?

DiSC is an assessment that aids with effective communication

Your Colleagues

In the Your Colleagues section in Catalyst, users can:
- Learn their colleagues’ strengths, when to pull them into a project, and what stresses them out
- Compare preferences and tendencies across a range of workplace behaviors using the DiSC model
- Gain access to tips that help them work better together in a variety of situations
Many Catalyst users review this section before heading into a meeting or kicking off a new project with a coworker.

Constructive Feedback through This Medium Isn’t Caring and Can Be Misconstrued…

by Judy Rathwell | May 3, 2021 | Communication, Conflict, Leadership Development, Newsletter

I started touring colleges this past week with my oldest son, a high schooler who’s pretty curious about the whole college experience.

I was excited about the first college we toured; I felt it suited him perfectly. We’d watched a few videos on YouTube about the school and its programs, as well as attended a virtual tour. When we got there, the first impression of the institution was solid but, within minutes, I hate to say it, the cracks in the veneer began to show.

I won’t go into details (discretion is the better form of valor), but I will say that I went from a huge fan of the college to a critical evaluator of the institute and its programs.

I started to write an email to admissions to let them know a few of my gripes, quips, and disappointments. Once the note was complete, and before I hit “send,” I re-read what I wrote and decided to hit delete. My note felt snarky and the tone just didn’t seem right. The feedback I wanted to share didn’t seem helpful and it just wasn’t meant for an email.

I opted for a phone call instead. Rather than a one-sided note flung through cyberspace, I felt that a conversation would be a better medium – it’d convey my respect, interest in helping improve the admissions process, and share helpful insight into my observations. (The call’s scheduled for this week.)

This brings me to the point of this email. I know many of us like to share feedback with others via email. I get it entirely – it feels safer to articulate our words in text and hit send than to have a face-to-face where conflict or disagreement might ensue. But have you ever thought that constructive feedback through this medium isn’t caring and can be misconstrued?

Here’s the deal – email is great for admin. You’ll need, though, either a phone call or a face-to-face when the following criteria apply:

You have to say something that could be taken the wrong way
You have critical/constructive feedback to deliver
There are stakes involved in the dialogue
You don’t want what you intend to put in writing to be printed and/or forwarded
The other person might feel disrespected if you don’t talk to them directly

Delivering feedback in this manner can be difficult … I know. Sometimes it’s hard to follow my own advice. But there are times when we have to remind ourselves that we’re leaders. Leaders do the hard stuff because they recognize that when things are uncomfortable, they’re stretching, growing, and probably doing the right thing.

Written by Angie Morgan via Leadstar. Visit Leadstar to read the full article.

6 Tips to Help Your Team Burn Bright Instead of Burning Out

by Judy Rathwell | Feb 26, 2021 | Leadership Development, Newsletter, Productivity

Organizational leaders may say they are committed to employee well-being, but unintentional messages and behaviors can signal otherwise, leading employees at all levels to default to their draining routines. How we leverage time and calendars can be a powerful, reinforcing message around valuing resilience and recharge.

Six ideas to get started are:

Create a daily ‘away from the office’ routine — for example, during lunchtime — to set boundaries and manage expectations.
Send no email after 7 p.m. local time or opt to use “delay send.”
Walk as part of your meetings. If possible, skip the video in exchange for an old-school phone call and walk while talking. Build movement into your meetings, pausing every 60 minutes or so for everyone to take a brief stroll or stretch.
Consider no-meeting Fridays. If that’s too bold, start with no-meeting Friday afternoons.
Schedule shorter meetings to allow for a rejuvenating “commute” between video calls and meetings. For example, 25 instead of 30 minutes…or 50 instead of 60 minutes.
Surprise and delight! Give a Friday off, an extra PTO day, or another reward that makes sense for your organization.

Sustained, peak performance is achievable when individuals and organizations prioritize intentional recharging. Burnout is not an inevitable phase of our work life, nor a badge of honor to wear. With intention and attention, we can create the conditions for ourselves and our employees to burn bright.

What are ways you help your employees burn bright? I would enjoy reading. Email us at aha@ahaleadership.com

Excerpts from Chieflearningofficer, February 2021