Leadership Life Cycle ... and Leadership Styles

When people begin to lead teams and organizations, their unique style starts to emerge. Daniel Goleman has developed a useful way to approach leadership styles. His work relates leadership styles to emotional intelligence. 


EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE: the ability to manage ourselves and our relationships effectively.

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Since the 1990s, Goleman has drawn on studies of thousands of people in managerial and leadership positions to come up with four "emotional capabilities" along with twenty "emotional competencies." Effective leaders have strengths in at least six of the following competencies:


SELF-AWARENESS
- emotional self-awareness
- accurate self-assessment
- self confidence


SELF-MANAGEMENT
- self-control
- trustworthiness
- conscientiousness
- adaptability
- achievement orientation
- initiative


SOCIAL AWARENESS
- empathy
- organizational awareness
- service orientation


SOCIAL SKILL
- visionary leadership
- influence
- developing others
- communication
- change catalyst
- conflict management
- building bonds
- teamwork and collaboration

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Out of these emotional capabilities and competencies emerge six distinguishable leadership styles, according to Goleman. The individual leader usually develops more than one leadership style. Indeed, the best leaders use different styles as the situation warrants:
- coercive
- authoritative
- affiliative
- democratic
- pacesetting
- coaching

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SOURCE: Daniel Goleman, "Leadership that Gets Results," Harvard Business Review, March-April 2000, pp. 78-90. See also his path-breaking books, Emotional Intelligence (1995) and Working with Emotional Intelligence (1998). Although these works are now a generation old, they nevertheless continue to exert a wide influence on leadership studies and coaching.