Hi everybody and welcome. My name is Jen, and I'm a Career Coach at Indeed, with over 10 years of career services experience, I've personally worked with hundreds of job seekers in a variety of different roles, from individual contributors to CEOs. Today, I'm going to share eight common leadership styles, their benefits and challenges and signs that one might be your natural style. At the end of the video, I'll share a strategy to help you decide which leadership style is best suited for you. Different situations may have different needs, so it's important to know when a specific style might work best. Let's begin with our first common leadership style. Coach, a coaching leader quickly recognizes the strengths, weaknesses and motivations of others to help them improve. They often assist in setting goals and provide regular feedback with challenging projects to promote growth. Coaching leaders are skilled in setting clear expectations and creating positive, motivating environments. The coach leadership style is one of the most advantageous for employers as well as the employees they lead. Unfortunately, it's often one of the most underutilized styles, mostly because it can be more time intensive than other types of leadership. Coaching leadership might be a natural style for you. If you're supportive, offer guidance instead of giving commands. Value learning as a way of growing, ask guided questions and balance relaying knowledge with helping others find it for themselves. Coaching leadership is positive in nature. It promotes the development of new skills, free thinking, empowerment. It revisits company objectives and fosters a confident company culture leaders who coach are often seen as valuable mentors. While this style does have many advantages, it can also be more time consuming, as it requires one on one time with employees, this can sometimes be difficult to obtain in fast paced environments when you have time sensitive priorities. An example of coaching leadership style in the workplace is to mentor someone who is interested in your role or area of business. You assess what they know and where their gaps of knowledge are, then recommend readings, videos or courses they can take to learn more. Set up a follow up meeting and discuss what they've learned, assess the knowledge gained, and determine new areas to work on. You can also send interesting articles or resources to them as they come up, and don't forget to congratulate them periodically on their progress. For more information on coaching leadership and when to use this style, be sure to check out this career guide article. Now if you find that you naturally lead through inspiration and confidence. You might be a visionary leader. Visionary leaders have a strong ability to drive progress and change. They inspire employees and earn trust for new ideas. They are also able to establish a strong organizational bond and strive to foster confidence among direct reports and colleagues alike. This type of leadership is especially helpful in small, fast, growing organizations, but it can also be helpful in larger organizations experiencing transformations or corporate restructuring. You might be a visionary leader. If you are persistent and bold, strategic, risk taking, inspirational, optimistic and innovative. Visionary leaders can help companies grow. They unite teams, the overall company, and improve outdated technologies or practices, often focusing on the big picture. They should be careful not to miss important details or opportunities. They may also sacrifice the resolution of present day issues because they're so future oriented, which could leave their team feeling unheard. On the other hand, a leader that is known for helping their team feel fulfilled is a servant leader. Servant leaders live by a people first mindset. They believe that when a team member feels personally and professionally fulfilled, they're most effective and more likely to consistently produce great work. Their emphasis on employee satisfaction and collaboration can lead to achieving higher levels of respect from their team. A servant leader is well suited to perform well in different industries and company sizes, but it's especially prevalent within nonprofits. These types of leaders are exceptionally skilled in building employee morale and helping people reengage with their work. You may be a servant leader if you motivate your team. Have excellent communication skills, personally care about your team, encourage collaboration and engagement and commit to growing your team. Professionally, servant leaders have the capacity to boost employee loyalty and productivity. They can also improve employee development and decision making, cultivate trust and create future leaders. But servant leaders have to be cautious. They can experience burnout by putting the needs of their team above their own. Since they develop such close relationships with their team, they may also have a hard time being authoritative when they need to be before I move on. Let me know if this video is helpful by liking and subscribing for more career and job search advice. All right, let's say you prefer to make decisions with little to no input from others. You might be an autocratic leader, sometimes called an authoritarian style of leadership. This type of leader is someone who is focused almost entirely on results and efficiency. They often make decisions alone or with a small trusted group, and they expect employees to do exactly what they're asked. This leadership style can excel in organizations with strict guidelines or in a compliance heavy industries like military, manufacturing, law enforcement and healthcare. It can also be beneficial when used with employees who need a great deal of supervision. An example might be with a new member of a team who has little to no experience. However, this leadership style can stifle creativity and make employees feel confined and micromanaged. You may be an autocratic leader, if you have self confidence, are self motivated, communicate clearly and consistently, follow the rules are dependable, value highly structured environments and believe in supervised work environments. Autocratic leaders can promote productivity through delegation. They provide clear, direct communication and reduce employee stress by making decisions quickly on their own, but this style of leadership can also cause stress to the leader who has to bear all of the weight of the decision making. The lack of flexibility and rigidness, as well as the lack of interest in hearing the ideas from others, can also cause resentment on the team. To learn more about the autocratic leadership style, be sure to check out this career guide article. Now let's say you prefer to delegate tasks and provide a lot of autonomy. You might be a laissez faire leader, often referred to as hands off leadership. This style is the opposite of the autocratic leadership type. Hands off leaders focus mostly on delegating tasks to team members while providing little to no supervision, because a laissez faire leader does not spend their time intensely managing employees, they often have more time to dedicate to other projects. This leadership style works best when all team members are highly experienced, well trained, and require little oversight. However, it can cause a dip in productivity if employees are confused about their leaders expectations, or if a team member needs consistent motivation or boundaries to work well, you might be a laissez faire leader if you effectively delegate. Believe in the freedom of choice, provide sufficient resources and tools will take control if needed, offer constructive criticism, foster leadership qualities in others and value autonomy. This style encourages accountability and creativity within a relaxed work environment. Because of this, it can also increase employee retention. Try to avoid this style when working with new employees as they need guidance and hands on support in the early days, an example of hands off leadership in the workplace might be if you give your employees the option to set their own working hours, as long as they work the 40 hours in a work week and hit individual goals. Now, if you like to consider the opinions of others before you make a decision, you might be a Democratic leader. The Democratic leadership style is a combination of autocratic and laissez faire. A Democratic leader is someone who asks for input and considers feedback from their team before making a decision. This leadership style is often credited with fostering higher levels of employee engagement and workplace satisfaction, but this is because they drive discussion and participation. It's an excellent style for organizations focused on creativity and innovation, like the tech industry, you may be a Democratic leader if you value group discussions, provide all information to a team when making decisions, promote a work environment where everyone shares their ideas, are flexible and are good at mediation. Under this leadership style, employees can feel empowered, valued and unified. It has the power to boost retention and morale. It also requires less managerial oversight, as employees are typically part of the decision making process and know exactly what to do. One thing to be aware of is that this leadership style has the potential to seem inefficient and costly. It takes time to organize big group discussions, obtain ideas and feedback, discuss possible outcomes and communicate a decision. Now, if you're the type of person who likes to set high standards and focuses on performance, you might be a pacesetter. The pacesetter leadership style is one of the most effective for driving fast results. These leaders are primarily focused on performance. They often set high standards and hold their team members accountable for hitting their goals, while the pace setting leadership style is helpful in fast paced environments where team members need to be energized, it's not always the best option for team members who need mentorship and feedback. You may be a pacesetter leader if you set a high bar, focus on goals. Are slow to praise, will jump in to hit goals if needed, are highly competent and value performance over soft skills. Pace setting leadership pushes employees to hit goals and accomplish business objectives. It promotes high energy, dynamic work environments, but pace setting leadership can also lead to stress on employees, as they're always pushing towards a goal or deadline. The fast paced work environment fostered under the style can also create miscommunications work environments where this works well include legal, sales, fast food, or any environment that is deadline or results driven the pacesetter approach works well when all team members are self motivated, highly competent and need little direction to be most effective. This style in particular, works best in combination with other leadership styles. Lastly, if you'd like to follow a strict hierarchy and expect team members to follow procedures, you might be a bureaucratic leader. Bureaucratic leaders are similar to autocratic. Leaders and that they expect their team members to follow the rules and procedures precisely as written. This leadership style focuses on fixed duties within a hierarchy where each employee is a set list of responsibilities. There's little room for collaboration and creativity. The style is most effective in highly regulated industries like finance, health care or government. Signs That You Might be a bureaucratic leader could be if you're detail oriented and task focused, value rules and structure. Have a great work ethic, are strong willed, feel a commitment to your organization and are self disciplined. Bureaucratic leaders can be efficient at organizations that need to follow strict rules and regulations, especially if each person in the team or company has a clearly defined role which leads to efficiency. These leaders might separate work from relationships to avoid the clouding of a team's ability to hit goals, while these leaders can lead highly efficient teams, this style does not promote creativity. It can feel restricting to some employees. This leadership style is also slow to change and does not thrive in environments that need to be dynamic. For more information on how to demonstrate leadership skills at work, be sure to check out this career guide article, and now for our bonus tip, how to choose and develop your leadership style, it's important to remember that you don't have to be a manager to be a leader within your team or your organization. If you're interested in a leadership career path or just looking to refine your leadership approach, start by choosing a style that feels authentic or that you respond to as an individual contributor. If you're just starting to refine your style, choose one that aligns with your strengths, choosing one that doesn't align with your personality or values can come across as inauthentic. To find out what style that might be, ask yourself the following questions, would I rather make a decision on my own or collectively? Do I focus on short or long term goals? Does my motivation come from empowerment or direction? What does a healthy team dynamic look like to me if you've determined what type of leadership style you'd like to develop, now try these strategies. First speak with a more experienced leader to gain insight into how they developed their style and what worked for them. Next experiment by trying out varied approaches in different circumstances, pay attention to the outcome and how natural the style felt to you in those moments. Be flexible in changing your approach. Then ask for feedback from both managers and colleagues, although sometimes hard to hear constructive feedback helps you grow into a successful leader. In my experience, I found that the best leaders use a blend of leadership styles. As you gain more leadership experience, you'll start to learn which style to use, depending on the situation. For example, if you were a veteran, you might have used an autocratic style when you were in active duty after entering the public sector, you might try a more democratic approach. For more examples of leadership styles and when they're best used, be sure to check out this career guide article. So there you have it. As a recap, the eight most common leadership styles are coach, visionary servant, autocratic, laissez faire, democratic, pacesetter and bureaucratic. If you're interested in learning more about leadership theories for career growth, be sure to check out this career guide article. I hope that you found this overview of the different leadership styles to be helpful. As you continue to learn more about different leadership types and the outcomes they're designed to achieve, you can select the right leadership style for you in your situation. 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Last modified: Monday, October 6, 2025, 10:35 AM