Yesterday night a colleague and I were discussing the different leadership flavors that a dependable project manager should deploy in different situations. Here’s what we discussed:
There are 4 basic types of leadership flavors:
- Enigmatic/non-enigmatic: Enigmatic leaders leverage their personality and their inspirational qualities. These are visionary leaders who are result-oriented, risk takers and fantastic communicators. Non-enigmatic leaders leverage their knowledge, their calmness and their methodical approach in dealing with the problems.
- Democratic/arbitrary: Democratic leaders encourage people to participate and involve themselves in decision making while Arbitrary leaders impose their decisions using their position to force people to do as they direct.
- Enabler/ Rulers: Enablers inspire their people with their vision and empower them to accomplish the common goals. Rulers command people to obtain their agreement.
- Transactional/Transformational: Transactional leaders trade money, employment, and security for compliance. Transformational leaders motivate people to strive for higher level goals.
The factors affecting the degree to which a leadership style is appropriate are:
- type of organization;
- nature of work;
- characteristics of the group, and
- the personality of the leader!
A dependable project manager should be able to adopt any of the above leadership styles depending upon the needs of the situations he and his team in. For instance, the same Enigmatic Leader might have to act like an Arbitrary Leader in specific mission-critical situations.
As we end this post, why don’t you ask yourself the following:
- What kind of leader are you?
- …and how adaptable are you to the situational demands?
