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Management Style
A manager is somebody who is responsible for managing the effective output of a business or team and the people who work within it. Management Styles cover a multitude of possibilities, and as a result management style has been debated for centuries. No doubt as our ancestors were struggling to make fire, there would have been one assertive individual instructing the others in how to strike their flint correctly and, then in turn, wondering how they could market the concept to neighboring tribes! Management style has equally no doubt been written about since man first committed images to cave walls.
Truly effective managers know that different situations and indeed different individual personality styles require different management styles. Any effective sports coach knows that a team about to win a major championship will require a different form of motivation than one that is fighting to survive relegation in their division. Effective managers adapt their management style to suit the circumstances that they encounter, and preferably the circumstances that they anticipate may arise; i.e. they are proactive rather than reactive. However, some people are one trick pony’s who never vary their management style, and consequently may find themselves upwardly managed by their supposed subordinates!
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The two extremes of management style are authoritarian management and participative management. The authoritarian management style is likely to be evidenced by a rigid rules system and an expectation of obedience to authority. A typical example of a well established authoritarian management style is the military chain of command structure, where decisions are passed from the top down, with each layer of command transmitting orders and demanding absolute acceptance of that instruction. Outside of the military context, a manager who takes absolute control of a workplace situation, without reference to their team’s views and input would be exhibiting an authoritarian management style. The participative management style exists where the workers allow themselves to be organized, but accept responsibility for what they do, and actively participate in process improvement, target setting and performance monitoring. The role of the manager is to facilitate the work of the employees and he or she in turn will participate in the decision making process of his or her superior.
The budding student of management style need not look far; any traveler through a commercial airport will not have failed to notice the bookshelves groaning with the latest management style guides, be they textbooks or “I did it my way” business leader autobiographies. These volumes are generally handily placed to catch the passing manager. Those en route to close the next deal or build that winning team, are perfect fodder for the conscience pricking management style, which may well be purchased and left in the bottom of the briefcase when the plane attendant produces this month’s Sports Illustrated! However the bookshelves represent just the tip of the management style analyses iceberg. A quick internet search for the keywords “management style” revealed 113 million items, so there is plenty of scope for insomniacs! A huge range of courses, instructional DVD’s, and seminars are also available, although only 42 million hits resulted for the keywords “management style courses”, reducing the filtering task by more than half!
A short cut through the maze of available information would be to refer to the early gurus of management style, whose concepts are constantly re-modeled and re-packaged by new generations of theorists. Management style features in Frederick W Taylor’s “scientific management” theories, Abraham Maslow’s writing on the “hierarchy of needs”, Peter F Drucker’s concept of “scientific management”, Edward de Bono’s “lateral thinking”, Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y work, Ken Blanchard’s “situational leadership” model and Dr Meredith Belbin’s work on “team roles”. |
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