Women in Leadership: Frameworks of Style

Welcome back for another #TeamTuesdays article!

Last week, we met Michelle Morris CCXP , who graciously shared her experience to leadership, as well as through leadership, in tons of roles, environments, and teams. We're so lucky to have her as part of our Verizon Connect Experience Team!

You'll hear more from more of our teammates, but for this week, we're taking a pause to review more frameworks! This week, we talk about different frameworks of leadership style. Read on to learn more about different views of styles of leadership, and reflect on what styles best suits you!

IMD'S 6 Most Common Leadership Styles

One framework of leadership styles is organized based on commonality. According to IMD , there are 6 extremely common leadership styles:

• Transformational Leadership, which uses an inspirational approach
• Delegative Leadership, a laissez-faire approach
• Authoritative Leadership, a mentor-leader approach
• Transactional Leadership, a structured give-and-take approach
• Participative Leadership, a democratic approach
• Servant Leadership, a, well, serving approach

When reviewing those 6 leadership styles, I spent some time trying to figure out which naturally apply to the work that I do.

After a collective 10 years spent managing neuroscience and psychology labs in academia, an industry-university research center, and UX Research teams for Verizon Connect, I have identified my leadership style as a mix of servant leadership and transformational leadership.

The positions I have held to date have often called upon my servant leadership skills. Servant leadership is an approach defined by putting the needs of others, i.e., the team, above oneself. I start by crafting spaces for the team to voice their needs, however basic or undefined. Through that process, we build strong working relationships, and we collaborate on finding resources and assigning action items to achieve collective success. This approach takes lots of listening, intention, and creative strategy, but it has always resulted in outcomes that align individual and business goals. I can see how this approach comes to me naturally; it's easier for me to act in service of others, and my mindset at work is often centered around how I can help others accomplish their goals.

As I gain more experience and lead larger teams, I recognize strong elements of transformational leadership. The hallmark of transformational leadership is a focus on the future. Transformational leaders have a clear future vision, built on the foundation of what the team has already shared and achieved, while looking forward to what the team has the potential to become and do. When a team feels seen and cared for, it is easy to motivate them to explore endlessly, especially when a leader has taken their intrinsic motivations into consideration of the very fabric of the team. I am now in a place where I seek to work in this space more — to help define long-term strategies that lead to team evolution and maturity, which, in turn, helps the business grow and thrive. I can see how this approach has embedded itself in my practice now that our team is working to expand our UX functions and scale.

It's interesting to note that women ted to take on more of this transformational style than men in similar positions.

HBR's 6 Common Leadership Styles

Harvard Business Review also shares their take on 6 common leadership styles :

• Coercive leadership, or a "command and control" approach
• Authoritative leadership, which gives direction and inspires action
• Pacesetting leadership, which encourages self-direction toward a high bar
• Affiliative leadership, which focuses on connection
• Democratic leadership, which leans on the team as a whole for direction
• Coaching leadership, which prioritizes individual and team development

When thinking about these styles, I believe I am currently exercising my muscles in affiliative leadership and coaching leadership.

Affiliative leadership is particularly useful when the goal of the team is to foster a positive work culture. This is something that is personally important to me; I aim to make all people feel welcome, because when people feel welcome, they are more likely to share their opinions and thoughts. This leads to true innovation, diversity, and collaboration. And it helps as a sort of buffer in dealing with major changes in the business. As we get to know one another as people, we maintain lasting and strong connections with our work colleagues, and we can build upon the knowledge we're gaining from each other, no matter what changes we may experience.

Coaching leadership also rings true to me. Having recently completed mid-year evaluations and thinking forward to end-of-year evaluations, I am openly asking my teammates what their goals are in life, and in their careers. This is a huge difference from how I led at other levels of management; earlier in my career, I might've focused more on day-to-day experiences, or helping people move to the next step. Now, I like to stay tapped into what my team is interested in pursuing in the long-run, which helps us identify career opportunities when they naturally come up. This has been a particularly satisfying aspect of my work, and I'm grateful to get to work with such inspirational and motivated people!

Gender and Leadership

I keep going back and forth on the idea that we need to talk about gender specifically when it comes to leadership discussions, especially style. Past research has shown that as more women have entered the workplace, we naturally have gone through an evolution of meeting the status quo, and then changing it. For instance, initial differences between men and women described differences in the use of transactional vs. transformational leadership. Further, there is a trend within women leaders to lean on more democratic practices, sharing power and encouraging participation from the team; this has been shown to de-risk strategic decisions, and enhancing teammates self-worth and energy help individuals to collectively raise the bar for the team. This made me think about how research about women leaders centered around bench strength and full team development, and how that leads to healthier teams and better business outcomes.

However, I continue to wonder if making these gender distinctions are always helpful.

Some authors, like Susan Colantuono, find that this leads to a certain level of token-ship , relegating women to middle management positions. This certainly aligns with the past research that women are often promoted to management positions in times of crisis, thus leading to the phenomenon of the glass cliff . In essence, one the one hand, addressing these gender differences means that women get more representation, but on the other hand, women are often set up to fail. Thus starts a vicious cycle that Colantuono shares her disdain about; no real change is made, and women get stuck at a very specific point on the ladder.

Human-Centered Leadership

This has led me to a research-based understanding of human-centered leadership, written about beautifully by Pirie Jones Grossman in this Forbes article , and so wonderfully modeled by Alicia Nachman (you'll read her article soon!).

Human-centered leadership centers around empathy, embracing differences of opinion and actively working to incorporate multiple viewpoints, and working past limiting beliefs of any kind. Jones Grossman identifies that these practices remove us from gendering the concept of leadership and focusing on the humans in front of us.

The Un-Frameworkable: Style

Centering our practices around the people in front of us helps us accommodate the un-frameworkable elements of style that you just kind of pick up with experience.

For instance, it's important to note that one can move in and out of different leadership styles according to one's own journey, team maturity, team needs, and business needs. In fact, psychologist Daniel Goleman cites this adaptability as a hallmark of great leadership .

It's helpful to understand when to employ these different leadership styles in order to ensure there is something grounding one's strategy and action implementation. But I am also finding that it is necessary to stay agile and in the moment with each of my teammates to adapt to what they need at that time. We don't have to take on these leadership styles as identities. Teams and people rarely move strictly linearly, and in some instances, you kind of have to throw out the framework in order to maintain connection with people.

Through this I find myself reaching back into my toolkit of clinical psychology. By meeting people where they are, you are primed to practice human-centered leadership, and you can use these frameworks simply as tools to help stay connected, and to move forward.

And when thinking about how to help support women and other marginalized groups advancing into leadership, the American Psychological Association offers these particular leadership practices :

1. Identify potential leaders early -- helping people start earlier in their journey allows them to prepare and experience more with each next step in their careers
2. Establish mentorship and sponsorship programs -- sponsorship in particular helps with active support
3. Support women in joining women-led professional organizations -- more representation helps us see what is possible
4. Focus on allyship -- this allows a practice of support, even when you might not identify with a particularly disenfranchised population, i.e., the ultimate show of empathy!

How about you? Are you incorporating any styles into your leadership approach? How have you adapted your style depending on your team's needs, your business's needs, or other factors? Where else are you taking leadership inspiration? Comment below! And join us next week for our next #TeamTuesdays article on Women in Leadership!