Balancing Leadership Styles

How are you shifting your approach from being directive to being supportive?

As a leader, you need to be conscious of how you should be acting in different situations, with different team members. When should you be more directive? When should you be more supportive?

Most leaders only use one approach, however there are times to be both. Consider these three things to decide whether to be supportive or directive:

1. The employee’s task competence and confidence.

Team members will have varying degrees of competence and confidence depending on the job. Somebody who is very new to your department and new to the equipment in your department would really appreciate you being much more direct and specific to them. When someone is new to a task and lacking in competence and confidence, you are going to find yourself needing to be more directive.

2. When the tasks change.

Frequently, things change over the years that someone is on the job. They may have been confident and competent when they started, but now if you are introducing a new system or technology, that person will need you to be more directive with them until they get comfortable with the changes.

3. When performance changes.

When you notice that someone starts to struggle and they are not delivering as well as they used to, that may be the time when you need to jump in and get more directive with them. As they become more comfortable and their performance improves, you are going to be more supportive, and back off a little bit.

If you can figure out how to master being directive and supportive at the correct moments, then you will be far better than many leaders who only use one leadership style.

Once you have worked on your leadership style, you are going to work on other leadership capabilities, and that is where we come in.

No matter how you embrace us, we want to be your leadership resource for excellence in retention and performance.