Human Challenges : Weblog

Friday Aug 10, 2007

Leadership Styles Application

Let me come back to the Goleman Leadership Styles. How best use these styles to practically work with them helping a leader improve his leadership abilities? In an earlier blog entry describing our HR Organization I mentioned Sun's Organization Consulting group that built a simple tool based on Goleman's work that I want to share. Special thanks to Terry who designed it as part of an entire “Leadership Effectiveness Application Journal”!

The purpose of the tool is to identify a leader's strengths and improvement areas by assessing how he/she uses the variety of styles. So basically the coach starts to identify to what extent the leader uses each of the different styles referring to specific situations. All this will be listed in the table below. Then the actual situations would be compared to the situations you should use the style for and a gaps analysis is done that gives you the foundation for a development plan and discussion with the leader. I find this really compelling as it is so straightforward and easy to use!

Style	Points	Situations used	Appropriate Situations to Use	Gap
Coercive	3	Under tight deadline	In a crisis, to kick-start a turnaround, with problem employees	High – personal stress causes use of Coercive Style
Authoritative		Never	When a clear / new direction is needed	High- this style was needed when integration of acquisition was done
Affliative		Never	To heal rifts in a team / to motivate people during stress	Low – team is generally not under stress nor does it exhibit rifts
Democratic	3	To ensure high level of commitment	To build buy-in / get input from valuable employees	None - Low – seems to use this correctly
Pacesetting	4	With new goals / programs	To get quick results from a highly competent team	Low – tends to get people quickly engaged in new programs or directed towards new goals
Coaching		Never	To help improve performance and develop strengths	Medium – some people seem to need coaching so this style would be helpful
Total Points	10