By Sallina Jeffrey
Founder and CEO
Throughout your career, you will experience many different forms and approaches to management and leadership. Managers generally follow processes and procedures, whereas leaders can and have transformed organisations. Great leaders are an asset, and poor managers are a liability to a company. A poor manager can break a collaborative culture and diminish the love you have for your role, causing you to become disengaged. A poor manager can destroy years of hard work and built up trust in months. I struggled to understand poor leadership.
Gaining insight into hierarchal behaviours can assist individuals to identify and navigate the experience in order for an individual to understand why a manager or leader is acting the way they are to a subordinate.
Through my experience, research and studies, I understand and have gained insight into many different approaches to leadership and how a leadership approach directly impacts a companies culture and employees. I want to share insight into three dominant leadership styles in today's society, Transactional, Dictatorship and Transformational.
1. Dictatorship leadership, otherwise known as an authoritarian style. The manager who rules with authority, the silent expectations that you do as I say, do not speak up and conform to fit the company culture and their expectations of, "do your job and do not question anything." Of course, this is very rarely expressed verbally, but it is in the silent cues that are difficult to articulate, but you feel it. Knowing you need to stay within the limitations they have set for you in your role. This leadership style does not allow room for innovation, collaboration. If you observe the organisation as a whole, you will find a high turnover, high rate in absenteeism, and highly disengaged teams.
2. Transactional leadership generally exchanges things of value with followers to advance their agendas. They will reward upon budgets being met. They tend to follow processes and policies and focus on meeting, and exceeding numbers set out and signed off by them or hierarchy. Transactional leaders do not possess collaborative leader's traits, quite the opposite, dependent upon the role and the environment; this leadership style leads to disengagement and low productivity in the long term.
3. Transformational leadership mainly put their people at the forefront; they look for their team's growth potential to transform that individual into the best version of themselves. Transformational leadership involves a distinctive form of influence that inspires followers to accomplish more than expected of them. It is a leadership style that is concerned with emotions, values, ethics and long term goals. If you have been fortunate enough to be led by this leader, you will look upon this leader with fondness and gratitude, as they took the time to get to know you and did not act in ways that were for their own self-gratification and self-interest but your best interest and they truly cared about you as an individual and your personal and career goals.
It is argued that leadership styles can depend upon the environment, and these different styles are required; I wholeheartedly agree with this. However, every leader no matter what style the environment requires they should approach every situation, process and individual with traits of a transformational leader. A leader that genuinely cares and embraces an environment where everyone has a voice, is heard, has a purpose and feels valued.
Leaders are not born; people can learn the traits of a Transformational leader. It involves a lot of self-awareness and the ability to be open to honest feedback and challenging conversations with your team members.
It consists of unlearning behaviours and letting go of your ego. Authentic and genuine leaders create a culture that boasts happy and engaged teams who will work with their leaders to create a great culture contributing to sustainable and long-term profit.
Sallina is the founder of The Mentoring Movement (TMM), which provides a cloud-based mentoring platform to empower organisations to manage mentoring relationships effectively and efficiently. Mentoring can transform organisations through empowering individuals to be fully in control and immersed in their career goals and aspirations through personalised, structured and result-oriented experiences.
TMM evolved from Sallina, identifying that organisations struggled to improve engagement and their overall culture; they find it challenging to execute and successfully manage and measure their mentoring programs; TMM provides a solution to this challenge and is a key tool to improve organisational cultures overall.
Sallina has over 20 years of industry and leadership experience, has studied business and leadership throughout her career, is extremely passionate about improving the daily work lives of individuals to drive change in the workplace and contribute to an overall positive social impact on the world.
Sallina is also studying at the Australian Institute of Business for a Master of Business Administration (MBA) to ensure she is equipped to help others at the highest level.
(Northouse 2018)
Comments