The Hero leader
Style: Trait-based leadership
Characteristics:
- Impact is made by the individual leader alone.
- The personal characteristics and behavior of the leader make the difference rather than the context in which the leader operates.
- One can become a great leader by emulating the personal characteristics and behavior of great leaders.
Issues:
- The mindless application of heroic traits may lead to inauthentic behavior, which undermines trust.
- Top-down.
- Assumption that “one size fits all.”
The Chameleon leader
Style: Situational leadership
Characteristics:
- Leadership is situation-specific and adapts as the world and people change.
- Leaders adopt different styles based on the maturity of the people they are leading.
- Can be developed by enabling individuals to understand the context and to adapt their behavior accordingly.
Issues:
- Difficult to determine the correct behavior in a given context.
- Losing oneself in the context and lacking authenticity.
- Merely externally oriented, without a strong internal sense of purpose.
The Transformational leader
Style: Transformational leadership
Characteristics:
- The role of the leader is to be a role model, to create a shared vision, and to build a team’s trust and capacity to work together.
- Leaders create an environment in which individuals transcend their individual goals to achieve the higher mission of the organization.
- Leaders create desirable outcomes in organizations and have to be able to transform the context rather than simply react to it.
Issues:
- Not all leaders have visionary personalities, and these may be hard to develop.
- All attention goes to the visionary leader instead of the issues that s/he is trying to address
- High risk as the reputation of the organization is determined largely by the visionary leader.
- Dependence of the organization on the visionary leader, potentially a lack of empowerment of leaders at lower levels within the organization.
The Servant leader
Style: Servant leadership
Characteristics:
- Role of leadership is one of service, not just to customers but to employees as well.
- Primary focus is on people and not the organization.
- People are treated fairly and humanely and supported in their personal growth.
- Leaders can be trusted to serve the needs of the many rather than the few.
- Teamwork, community, values, service, and caring behavior are important principles.
- The ideal is self-giving without self-glory.
- Leaders enhance dialogue and understand social dynamics.
Issues:
- Focus is on the quality of relationships instead of delivering results.