Daniel Goleman Leadership Styles Pdf

[Mariam Obregon]

As a CEO, I find the six leadership styles based on Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman the most useful set of leadership styles out there. I have used this framework for years, and it has helped me develop the methods and skills I use today in my job as a CEO of a global company. You can take our leadership styles webinar to learn more today.

The Six Leadership styles by Daniel Goleman are commanding, visionary, pacesetting, affiliative, democratic, and coaching leadership which should be used situationally in order to provide resonant leadership which is based on emotional intelligence.

All the Goleman leadership styles should be used to different proportions depending on the situation. As a rule, pacesetting and commanding leadership should be used sparingly, and the visionary, democratic, affiliative, and coaching styles should be used regularly and in larger proportions.

This article explains each of the six leadership styles, the concept of Emotional Intelligence, and Resonant leadership which boost organizational performance. This theoretical and practical framework enables you to take your leadership capabilities to the next level. You will also get my personal advice on how to use these styles based on decades of leadership experience. Watch our video on the six leadership styles below, or continue reading below.

After these two outline questions and answers, let us get introduced to the framework itself. You can find more information about the origins and background of the six leadership styles based on emotional intelligence closer to the end of this chapter. I assume that most of you want to understand the tool itself and its use rather than the theoretical background. (To read about other leadership styles and frameworks, you can visit our portal here: leadership styles.)

Emotional Intelligence is the basis of the entire framework, together with the concept of resonant leadership. To understand the six leadership styles and how to use them, you must take in the profound meaning of these concepts, so let us start at that end.

Emotional intelligence is one of the first and single most important parts of leadership. To lead, you as a leader must understand the emotional sides of different aspects as well as the emotions of the people you lead. For the team to believe you, understand you, and be willing to follow you, there needs to be some basic rapport and emotional understanding, and you need to know how you are perceived and understood by others.

Emotional Intelligence is a big topic, and you can read more details in this article: Emotional Intelligence. Since the six leadership styles based on Emotional Intelligence are the focus of this article, we will merely scratch the surface enough to put the leadership styles in context. (Get a free copy of our E-book "7 Tips on How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence" here: Newsletter Emotional Intelligence E-book.)

You need to understand your own emotions, strengths, weaknesses, values, and drivers. Accurate self-awareness means setting clear goals that are in sync with core values. Self-reflection is an important part, and a self-aware leader will consider what they need to improve, realize when they are making mistakes, and have a limited need for prestige. Self-awareness also means that you understand how your behavior is perceived and what emotions you signal.

Self-management is about emotional self-control while also being honest and open with your own emotions. It is not about never being worried or angry. It is about knowing when to be worried or angry. A leader with good self-control does not have sudden aggressive outbursts. If he or she gets angry, it will be in a controlled fashion, for good reasons, and at the right place at the right time. Self-management is also about adapting emotionally to change and having the capability of pushing yourself to your targets, i.e., an internal drive for success. A good leader will be positive and optimistic as a primary stance but will adapt emotionally when this basic stance is no longer suitable. Being positive all the time, regardless of what happens, will seem inauthentic to others after a while. Understanding and controlling your own emotions requires quite a bit of work inside your mind. I suggest you read our article on that topic: Intrapersonal Communication.

Empathy is a major cornerstone of Social Awareness. Through empathy, you will understand how others feel, how they perceive things, and how things impact them. Social awareness also means understanding social settings such as networks and hierarchies, formal and informal, in the world surrounding you. As part of understanding these social settings, you will also understand what your stakeholders need and expect from you. Ranging from your boss to your customers, team members, etc. you need to gauge their needs and expectations.

The fourth of the Emotional Intelligence competencies involves influencing and developing others, bonding, handling conflicts, and many other interactions between people and teams. You need to be able to figure out how to get others to move in the desired direction. How to inspire people and how to get them to cooperate towards the same goal, for instance.

As you can probably tell, these four competencies connect and depend on each other. If you lack self-awareness, how will you be able to be genuinely empathetic? After all, you will not understand how your behavior impacts others. Furthermore, relationship management will be challenging if you lack self-management, etc.

All these competencies of Emotional Intelligence come together, and they need to be balanced. Develop your own Emotional Intelligence with purpose and proper goals. I will show you how to do this in my leadership styles course.

Let us go back to my example of the overly optimistic leader above. In that case, the leader did not have enough social awareness to understand how concerned the team was. Furthermore, poor relationship management meant the leader did not understand how closely connected some of the managers in this team were with the people about to be fired. The leader lacked self-awareness and failed to understand just how much optimism was signaled. Finally, there was a lack of self-management as this leader probably should have entered with a more serious mood to such a tough meeting topic. To this day, I do not think the leader understood what happened in that room. I know how I reacted, and I could tell and was also told, that some of the other team members responded the same. That said, no one is perfect, and this leader was great in many ways. We all make mistakes. Mastering the art of Emotional Intelligence means you will make fewer mistakes, perhaps very, very few mistakes. That is what we should aim to reach. (Get a free copy of our E-book "7 Tips on How to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence" here: Newsletter Emotional Intelligence E-book.)

Given this, the leader in the previous example was creating the opposite of resonance, which is dissonance. Despite that, this leader was one of the most resonant leaders I have ever known. The weak moment described exemplifies dissonance, but this was a very infrequent behavior for this person.

Resonant leadership is the ability of a leader to create a positive emotional impact using Emotional Intelligence. Resonant leadership imprints positive and energetic emotions and puts people in emotional synch. Successful implementation of resonant leadership in a team results in emotional comfort, cooperation, idea sharing, and strong emotional bonds that help the team through difficult times. Check out our leadership styles webinar for better guidance on how to become a resonant leader and use the six styles by Goleman effectively.

Here is our video on Resonant Leadership. You can also read much more this leadership framework as well as how to implement it in our article on Resonant Leadership. The article continues below the video if you prefer reading more about the six leadership styles.

These leadership styles are briefly introduced below and described in detail in their own in-depth articles at Leadershipahoy.com, available via the links above or in our leadership styles portal. At this point, we are approaching some very concrete tools for you to deploy in your leadership.

For the third time, the whole concept builds on using as many of these leadership styles as possible, depending on the circumstances such as the situation, the people involved, the topic at hand, and other factors. This cannot be stressed enough as you will set yourself up to fail if you focus on using one single style at all times. That would be a behavioral approach to leadership and that is unfit for the modern leader.

Each of the leadership styles and how they contribute to resonance is explained further below after the overview picture. Consider learning how to use the styles and switch between them by learning from our leadership styles webinar if you are serious about becoming a better leader.

In commanding leadership, the leader makes all the decisions and gives orders to his or her team without explanations. Close and tight control and follow-up combined with high clarity in rules, roles, and expectations are core parts of the commanding leadership style. Commanding leadership can in fact be efficient, but with few exceptions only in low-skilled teams, and when decisions must be made very quickly. Commanding leadership can easily lead to micromanagement, which is negative for employee engagement, especially in teams with high skills in complex environments.

This style drives resonance since it can reduce fears and panic in critical situations through high clarity and high execution speed. Outside of these situations, it quickly leads to dissonance with people feeling overrun, disrespected, treated like machines, victimized, and generally unhappy and unmotivated. According to research by Daniel Goleman, Commanding leadership has a negative correlation with team climate and is especially detrimental to concepts of flexibility and responsibility in the team.

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