They took us through Goleman's six styles of leadership (As follows) and having watched last nights apprentice I thought it would be a useful exercise to look at the leadership styles expressed in yesterdays episode.
I cant for the life of me remember the team names and for the sake of this post its largely irrelevant, but there was definitely a team that won and a team that lost.
Team Lose
To start with the losing team, Where the project manager displayed a clearly commanding style, and followed it all the way to catastrophe. It appeared that she wanted to come across as decisive, dynamic and visionary. But with a fresh team of unknown talents it came across like a steamroller, charging towards a cliff edge. The impact this had on the team was one of alienation both with the task, and the product itself, they didn't appear to be pushing the team forward and so lots of mistakes where made, and ultimately, a lot of distrust began to creep into the project. Where ideas where shot down quickly it stifled creativity and left the team with very limited options right from the start. This in turn forced the project manager to get even more commanding, and so a cycle became entrenched.
Ultimately the success or failure of the task became narrowed to the project managers instincts, and the rest of the team either became very quiet, or openly hostile. I guess this approach could have paid off superbly if the project manager knew her business and made the right calls, but unfortunately for team lose, the PM made a series of ill informed and ill judged calls, so the team was doomed to directly to failure.
Team Win
Contrast this style with team win, who Lord sugar credited with being very successful and one of the best he'd seen. Here the leadership wasn't abrupt and wasn't closed, most of the team were ultimately supportive of the PM, but then he won so why wouldn't you support him. The most criticism suggested that he was delegating risk of failure but taking credit for successes. For me he displayed a visionary style of leadership though it took a process of elimination to get to this conclusion.
The team as whole were set a broad brief and knew where they were going, each appeared to have clear roles and got on with it. With the PM not actually doing anything in particular. It wasn't all plain sailing and mistakes were made, Whilst the PM set a vision and clearly wanted to trust his team, he just couldn't let go, maybe he hadn't quite built up enough trust. The result, he displayed a lot of helicoptering, where he allocated tasks went off but then flew right back in again right down to the detail, at times undermining the work of his team. This went some way to re-enforcing the view that he was trying to abdicate himself of responsibility whilst retaining credit for success.
Ultimately this worked very well and there was none of the usual backstabbing and bitchiness. So with a new team it paid off in spades.
So as far as Goleman goes last night seems to support the theory that visionary is the, most positive style and commanding one of the most negative. Maybe I'll try this again after next weeks episode.
end notes
And whilst I have the chance a special thank you to those of you who have given me feedback for this process, its been most insightful and very useful.
Leadership program with thanks via www.tvha.co.uk and http://www.parksims.co.uk/
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