Report: Leaders Struggle to Use Appropriate Management Styles

According to a new survey, leaders aren’t in sync with their employees about how their leadership styles are perceived, and leaders also struggle to “flex” across different management styles.

Management Styles: Are You the Manager You Think You Are?, published by the American Management Association, was released last week. The report argues that organizations generally use four distinct management styles—autocratic, democratic, laissez-faire, and facilitative—that are fit for different circumstances. However, leaders and employees diverge on perceptions on how those styles are used, and how effectively. For instance, 56 percent of surveyed leaders say they use a democratic leadership style, but only a third of their direct reports agree with that.

That disconnect can be a source of tension in the workplace. “Gaps between how a supervisor manages and how team members perceive their style represent a gray zone of potential hard feelings and needlessly eroded motivation,” the report said.

The pandemic and its transformation of the workforce from an office context to remote and hybrid environments has profoundly disrupted the ways leaders need to manage their teams, said KC Blonski, senior vice president, North American sales at AMA. “The old skill set that they may have used in a true office-like environment just isn’t enough now to drive equal levels of satisfaction from their employees,” he said.

The disconnect is pervasive: According to the AMA survey, only a bare majority (54 percent) said they were managed in the style they preferred. And leaders aren’t as capable of shifting their leadership styles as they might think. While nearly all leaders (92 percent) said they are “adept at knowing when to flex their style,” only 60 percent of staffers agreed with that assessment.

The report suggests that the disconnect may be a function of a lack of formal leadership training: According to the study, 71 percent of male leaders and 64 percent of women leaders received formal training before stepping into a management role. “This signals not only room for improvement for management and leadership training, but also that not all managers and leaders are prepared and set up for success when moving into these important roles,” the report said.

“Organizations really need to focus on the development of their leadership teams, including understanding their styles to effectively execute and lead their teams,” Blonski said. “Without understanding how to effectively manage the process and their people to drive outcomes, you receive various levels of success. So it’s really important for managers to understand how best to work with their teams. How do I communicate? How do I motivate and ultimately, how do I get them basically rowing in the right direction to achieve success?”

Leaders surveyed by AMA acknowledged there’s room for improvement: 34 percent said “they could benefit from improving their ability to read others and recognize their strengths and weaknesses in order to help them achieve their goals,” according to the report. 

“If you don’t know what motivates a team to get them and keep them engaged, you won’t know how best to collaborate and support the team and drive employee engagement, which is so critical to every organization these days,” Blonski said.

[iStock/Nuthawut Somsuk]