9 Leadership Styles + How To Find Your Leadership Style

Every leader wants their business to be healthy, efficient, and successful. As the boss, improving your own skill set is one of the best ways to help your organization reach these goals.

Strong leadership can help increase profitability, decrease employee turnover, and boost production. According to research from McKinsey, strong leadership reduces the likelihood of financial stress by 59%.

However, leadership styles aren’t one size fits all. Learn about nine common types of leadership styles to find the right philosophy for your personality and organization.

What are leadership styles?

Your leadership style is the way you approach managing people and making decisions. It shows up in how you behave, how you communicate, and how you relate to your team. Some leadership styles, like bureaucratic and autocratic leadership, can also shape the structure and culture of your organization.

Leadership is a skill you can improve with practice, self-awareness, and reflection. Understanding your leadership style is the first step toward leading with intention. When you know how you lead, you can be more intentional and more effective in the way you impact your team.

The 9 most common leadership styles

1. Autocratic leadership
2. Bureaucratic leadership
3. Coaching leadership
4. Democratic leadership
5. Laissez-faire leadership
6. Servant leadership
7. Transactional leadership
8. Transformational leadership
9. Visionary leadership

Leadership style refers to a general approach to management and organizational structure, but there’s room for interpretation. Leaders will often personalize or combine different leadership styles to find what works best for them and their company. Here are some of the most common leadership styles:

1. Autocratic leadership

Autocratic leadership is rigid and top-down. Organizations with this type of approach to leadership tend to have strict rules, hierarchical structures, and a single, centralized source of authority. Autocratic leaders retain unilateral decision-making power, and team members are expected to follow directions without question. While an autocratic leadership style can be efficient in high-stakes situations or tightly controlled industries, it may lead to dissatisfaction over time if employees don’t feel empowered or respected in their roles.

2. Bureaucratic leadership

Bureaucratic organizations rely on a clear, hierarchical chain of command and standard operating procedures to create stability. Bureaucratic leaders retain ultimate decision-making power. Lower-level managers are responsible for enforcing rules and managing teams.

This style is well-suited for tightly regulated industries. In the medical field, for example, bureaucracy helps ensure strict adherence to safety regulations. Nurses and physicians follow detailed protocols, including thorough hand-washing, donning latex gloves, and working with sterile instruments before each procedure. In the operating room, the lead surgeon makes decisions quickly and unilaterally. There’s no time to debate during open-heart surgery.

3. Coaching leadership

Coaching leaders focus on developing and empowering their team members. These leaders take care to recognize individual strengths and provide mentorship to nurture professional development. This leadership style relies on emotional intelligence, active listening, and conflict resolution to encourage strong team dynamics. This leadership style often creates a positive work environment, but can be emotionally demanding for leaders, potentially leading to burnout.

4. Democratic leadership

Democratic leaders value input and collaboration. Also known as a participative leadership style, this management style emphasizes equality, open communication, and shared decision-making. Leaders seek out employee opinions and incorporate them into their decisions. A democratic leadership style can bolster engagement, as team members are more likely to invest in their work when they feel their opinion matters. However, this style requires flexibility and a willingness to compromise, as team disagreements may slow down the decision-making process.

For example, imagine you’re the leader of a boutique nail polish ecommerce business, and it’s time to launch a new product. As a democratic leader, you might gather a cross-functional team of marketers, customer service representatives, and product specialists for a brainstorming session. After discussing with your team, you’d weigh everyone’s ideas and input before making the final call.

5. Laissez-faire leadership

Laissez-faire is a French phrase that translates to “let do” or “let them do.” Laissez-faire leadership takes a hands-off approach to management. Leaders delegate tasks and grant employees a high degree of autonomy, and teams are often trusted to make their own decisions with little oversight. This approach can work well with experienced, self-motivated employees, but a laissez-faire leadership style does little to nurture talent and can lead to employees becoming disengaged if they feel unsupported or overlooked.

6. Servant leadership

The servant leadership style emphasizes employee satisfaction. Servant leaders focus on understanding individual needs and promoting harmony. They use leadership skills like active listening and conflict resolution to foster community and build strong relationships.

Tony Hsieh practiced servant leadership as the CEO of Zappos. Hsieh established a caring corporate culture that prioritized employee well-being. He also encouraged team members to apply this mindset to customer service to create a positive consumer experience.

7. Transactional leadership

Transactional leadership is based on a system of rewards and consequences. Leaders clearly define expectations and may offer incentives, like bonuses or other perks, to motivate employees. Transactional leadership brings clarity and structure, but can sometimes discourage creativity, as employees may fear punishment if they take a risk or deviate from standard protocol.

8. Transformational leadership

Transformational leadership focuses on motivation through empowerment and growth opportunities. Leaders provide mentorship to their employees and aim to create a nurturing environment where people feel comfortable proposing bold, new ideas. Leaders are willing to delegate and model integrity and empathy, leading by example. The idea behind this approach is that when employees are inspired by their leader, they’re motivated to achieve their goals.

9. Visionary leadership

The visionary leadership style is all about imagination and storytelling. Visionary leaders see a distant, possible future, create a plan to achieve it, and inspire others to believe in that plan enough to work toward it alongside them. Like transformational leaders, they aim to empower and inspire their employees to achieve their goals. But the visionary approach hinges on the strength of the leader’s ability to bring people along with their ideas about the future.

How to find your ideal leadership style

• Review organizational needs
• Get to know your team
• Connect on a personal level
• Ask for feedback
• Flex across styles

What will be the most effective leadership style for you depends on your strengths, team members, and the organization’s needs.

But you don’t have to limit yourself to one style. Leadership is a skill, and effective leaders adjust their management style to suit the circumstances or may combine leadership approaches to find the right fit.

“It really depends on the situation, the employee, and the specific circumstances,” says author and podcast host Connie Steele, who co-founded the consulting firm Flywheel Associates. “No one uses the same exact leadership style for every single thing.”

Try these tips to find the right approach for you:

Review organizational needs

Reflect on your goals and the nature of your company, as these may help steer you to the right leadership approach. The founder of a tech start-up seeking to shake up the industry may choose a model focused on inspiration, like transformational or visionary leadership. On the other hand, a seasoned executive taking over the CEO role at a legacy pharmaceutical company might prefer a more stable approach, such as bureaucratic leadership.

This also requires looking at the experience level of your team, both individually and as a group. “In instances where there’s a junior team or a new group of people put together in a reorg,” she says, “they may not have a clear direction of anything. Somebody then has to take over and define the way forward.” In these cases, you may be best served by a more autocratic style.

If your team is more experienced—and your employees are highly self-motivated—you might opt for a more hands off leadership style, or one that prioritizes empowerment and delegation.

Get to know your team

Choosing the right leadership style requires knowing how your team members work and what motivates them. “If you don’t understand the needs and wants of your team and really get to prioritizing what may be beneficial to them and how they work, then you’re really not going to understand how to best optimize your team,” says Connie.

She emphasizes paying attention to team members’ behavior, and recognizing when something might be off kilter. “There’s a rhythm to how people work, like a cadence to their communications with you, their style of communication, and so forth. When it’s off, you should know,” she explains. “If somebody’s usually quick to respond typically to emails, and all of a sudden they’re not responding in the same timeliness, then you might ask ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’”

Connect on a personal level

While it might be easy to keep the focus on work, good leaders connect with people on a personal level. They get to know their team members as whole people, not just the people they are at work.

“It’s about getting to know that they’re a human being outside of work. There’s a whole person behind the worker,” Connie explains.

“The simple questions are, ‘What did you do this weekend? How was your weekend?’ That opens up a lot,” says Connie.

Ask for feedback

Check in with your team to gather feedback. Ask them to evaluate your leadership style—they may have different opinions about your skill set. Encourage employees to describe their ideal manager relationship. This will help you identify a leadership style to meet their needs.

Asking for feedback also means staying open to the idea that you might make mistakes.

“Can you have the openness and dialogue with your team to say, ‘Hey, what are ways that I could support you better or be clear on what it is that we are working towards?’” says Connie. “You’re trying to create a culture of psychological safety, and saying, ‘Hey, you know what? We are going to mess up, but that’s the way we’re going to learn.’”

Flex across styles

Test out a few different leadership styles—or combine elements of several styles into a hybrid—to find what works best for you. But don’t let your choices become static. Make sure you stay flexible to meet the demands of the moment.

“Leadership in many instances has to be more fluid now, because so many things are changing all the time,” Connie explains. “Not just within your own business or your own team—but even the business dynamics in the industry.

“A leader has to be self-aware. They have to be very self-aware of how their words, their actions or behavior has an impact on their team, and how to motivate them.”