The aim of this teaching is to further understand your leadership style and make adjustment where possible.

3. Laissez-Faire Leadership

Laissez-faire leadership is accurately defined as a hands-off or passive approach to leadership. Instead, leaders provide their team members with the necessary tools, information, and resources to carry out their work tasks. The “let them be” style of leadership entails that a leader steps back and let team members work without supervision and free to plan, organize, make decisions, tackle problems, and complete the assigned projects. The laissez-faire leadership approach is empowering to employees who are creative, skilled, and self-motivated. The level of trust and independence given to the team can prove to be uplifting and productive and can lead to job satisfaction. At the same time, it is important to keep such a type of leadership in check as chaos and confusion can quickly ensue if the team is not organized. The team can end up doing completely different things contrary to what the leader expects. According to research, laissez-faire leadership is the least satisfying and least effective.

4. Transformational Leadership

Transformational leadership is all about transforming the business or groups by inspiring team members to keep increasing their bar and achieve what they never thought they were capable of. Transformational leaders expect the best out of their team and push them consistently until their work, lives, and businesses go through a transformation or considerable improvement. Transformational leadership is about cultivating change in organizations and people. The transformation is done by motivating team members to go beyond their comfort zone and achieve much more than their perceived capabilities. To be effective, transformational leaders should possess high levels of integrity, emotional intelligence, a shared vision of the future, empathy, and good communication skills. Such a style of leadership is often associated with high growth-oriented organizations that push boundaries in innovation and productivity. Practically, such leaders tend to give employees tasks that grow in difficulty and deadlines that keep getting tighter as time progresses. However, transformational leaders risk losing track of individual learning curves as some team members may not receive appropriate coaching and guidance to get through challenging tasks. At the same time, transformational leaders can lead to high productivity and engagement through shared trust and vision between the leader and employees

To be continued…