Leadership Styles in Project Management

Leadership is a very broad topic in itself.

Everyone tends to have a personal leadership style but as a Project Manager you need to adapt to the project environment. The project environment can comprise of several things including, but not limited to, organizational culture, project uncertainties, interpersonal relationships within the team etc.

Here are the 6 common leadership styles that you should know as far as Project Management is concerned,

Transactional

This leadership style is about having explicit goals for the team that everyone should work towards accomplishing. The transactional leader will provide course correction if the team deviates from the goals.

Interactional

This leadership style is dynamic as it changes based on the situation at hand. In a given situation, whatever approach that works will be adopted by the leader.

Laissez Faire

This leadership style is about staying “hands-off” and letting the project team members do their own goal setting and take care of day-to-day leadership requirements. This doesn’t mean that the Laissez Faire leaders don’t do anything, they do step in for decision-making as a last resort.

Transformational

This leadership style is all about inspiring the team members with ideal goals and encouraging them to change the project environment for better. Transformational leaders motivate project team members to be creative and bring about positive change.

Charismatic

This is the leadership style of those that have magnetic personalities and strong convictions. Not to be confused with Charismatic Power as this is about using charisma to create a team culture that encourages innovation and aligns the project team with goals based on the strongly held convictions.

Servant Leader

Think of Agile and one of the important leadership concepts that shows up is Servant Leadership. This is the leadership style that focuses on serving the project team, removing roadblocks or impediments and helping the project team members achieve their goals. Creating a collaborative team culture is the focus of the servant leader.

Check more articles on Project Management Basics