Leadership is more than just technical expertise. It’s a careful mix of hard and soft skills, strategic thinking, and the ability to inspire and delegate effectively.
Even with a great mix of skills, some managers can fail due to an irrelevant leadership style. A style that dictates how you connect with your team, influence others, and drive results.
Before my annual series of meetings with Smartexe's tech team leaders, I sought ways to guide them to be the best managers they could be.So, I decided to sharpen my understanding of leadership styles.
After exploring long lists of leadership styles, I collected six styles that are the most prominent in tech. Let’s start by examining them:
1. Servant Leadership Style: Prioritizing People Over Process
In servant leadership, the focus is on nurturing and empowering your team. It’s about putting people first — a method we’ve found to be highly effective in our support and HR teams. Servant leadership boosts loyalty and long-term engagement by prioritizing personal and professional growth, which is crucial for reducing turnover.
In our customer support and human resources departments at Smartexe, servant leadership helps sustain a motivated team committed to high-quality service. Is it great for tech leaders though? Let’s return to this point later.
Pros: Builds a loyal and trusting team environment. Cons: Lack of assertiveness in decision-making.
2. Democratic Leadership Style: Collaboration for the Win
This style involves team members in decision-making processes, helping to foster greater commitment and collaboration. This leads to more creative solutions and greater buy-in when decisions are made.
At Smartexe, we’ve seen how democratic leadership helps generate innovative solutions—especially when navigating complex technical challenges.
Why It Works in Tech: Democratic leadership fosters buy-in from the team, leading to more committed and creative solutions. However, it can slow decision-making, particularly when consensus is hard to reach.
Pros: Encourages team involvement and satisfaction. Cons: Slows down decision-making.
3. Autocratic Leadership Style: Decisive and Efficient in a Crisis
This leadership style involves clear, top-down decision-making with little input from team members. It involves clear, directive leadership from the top, which can help streamline decisions and actions during crises.
Why It Works in Tech: When every second counts, like during a security incident, autocratic leadership cuts through the noise, ensuring swift, decisive action.
Pros: Efficient and clear decision-making in crises. Cons: Lead to employee dissatisfaction if used excessively.
4. Agile Leadership Style: The Catalyst for Innovation
Agile leadership thrives in environments where rapid response and flexibility are paramount. With ever-evolving customer demands, this style enables leaders to encourage innovation and adaptation.
At Smartexe, agile leadership has fueled our product development teams, empowering them to push the boundaries of what’s possible.
Why It Works in Tech: When launching new products or managing big pivots, agile leadership fosters a clear vision, team motivation, and strong collaboration. While it promotes innovation, it can sometimes come at the cost of detailed planning.
Pros: Inspires innovation and strong team cohesion. Cons: Can neglect detailed operational planning in favor of agility.
5. Laissez Faire Leadership Style: Letting Experts Thrive
While far from ideal for teams with low motivation, a manager with this style allows experienced employees to take ownership of their work, which can be a significant driver for creativity and innovation.
This approach is prevalent in our R&D department, where innovation is key, and team members thrive under minimal supervision.
Why It Works in Tech: Giving teams the freedom to operate without micromanagement allows creativity to flourish. But, without oversight, it can sometimes lead to inconsistency.
Pros: Promotes independence and innovation. Cons: Risks include a lack of direction without proper oversight.
6. Data-Driven Leadership Style: Informed Decision-Making
Data-driven leaders utilize analytics to inform decisions and understand trends, and operational efficiencies. This systematic approach ensures that strategic decisions are grounded in factual insights rather than intuition alone.
Why It Works in Tech: The ability to back decisions with data minimizes risks and maximizes the chances of success.
Pros: Enhances decision-making with empirical evidence. Cons: May overlook the human element that qualitative insights provide.
What’s the Best Leadership Style?
At this point, I believe you can see through the small trick I did in this post: there’s no optimal, one-size-fits-all, leadership style. The best leaders don’t stick to a single style—they adapt.
For example, Laissez-faire leadership is a problematic management style for inexperienced teams, but it can be perfect for high-performing teams that require little guidance.
Furthermore, a specific situation can dictate an optimal leadership style. Servant leadership can be optimal for experienced teams nearing burnout.
At the end of the day, a good leader should ask themselves: is my style optimal for this team at this point? And stay flexible when moving from one style to another.
So How Can You Use This Information to Guide Your Managers?
I decided to take these styles to my annual meetings with tech-team leaders. At the meetings, we explored:
- which style they currently use
- is it optimal within the context of the projects they currently run
- which style they can adopt to improve the performance and the satisfaction of their team.
Can this work for you?
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