What Is the Best Leadership Style?
A new study combed through a mountain of research to determine the most effective leadership style once and for all.
What’s the best leadership style? Every leader obviously has their own personal flair and approach. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates famously both achieved incredible things by being about as different as two people can be.
But experts say there is at least one thing that unites all great leaders, from CEOs and entrepreneurs to parents and teachers, and unfortunately it’s something a lot of business leaders are struggling with these days.
Successful leaders value autonomy.
Just look at Amazon. The tech giant just ordered all employees back to the office five days a week starting in 2025. How is that likely to go?
To get an answer, you could look at employee responses (not good). Or read think pieces on the new policy (a mixed verdict). Or you could take a peek at the scientific literature on the most effective way to lead people.
Hundreds of studies have been done on this topic, but luckily you don’t need to read through them all. That’s already been done for you. A recent review published in Psychological Bulletin examined 139 separate studies on different leadership styles and came to a straightforward conclusion.
If you want to provide a framework in which humans flourish, you need to help the people under you find their own intrinsic motivation and then give them the freedom to decide how exactly to work towards those goals. Autonomy is the secret sauce of all great leadership.
“We found that consistently connecting people to the ‘why’ of their actions, providing choices in how tasks get done, and giving meaningful feedback results in people being more likely to share ideas and to be more collegiate,” explained senior author James Donald of the University of Sydney Business School. “Managing people with controlling, carrot and stick strategies led to people being less likely to share, cooperate, or help others.”
In other words, to bring out the best in people, great leaders do the exact opposite of what Amazon is doing. The likely result of Amazon’s micromanaging back-to-office mandate will be a less cooperative, less innovative workforce.
That includes parents.
All of which should interest you if you’re a business leader. But there’s another group of people that should pay attention to this research too, according to star Wharton psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant — parents.
On X (formerly Twitter), Grant recently highlighted another massive review done by the same team of researchers. This time, they looked at studies not on how bosses lead companies, but on how parents lead families. It came to a startlingly similar conclusion:
The takeaway from these two reviews isn’t complicated. Human beings of every age, and in just about every setting, don’t respond well to feeling controlled. It makes us cranky, anxious, distrusting, and less cooperative.
There are times you can’t avoid control, of course. If your toddler is running towards a busy road, you will tackle them. If your team has a crazy deadline to make, you may need to mandate particular work hours or bribe them with bonuses.
But Donald insists that “if you want to build and sustain a high performance culture, you need to move away from crisis-style management, and actively invest in your peoples’ intrinsic motivation.”
That’s true at home too. “If you want to develop self-aware, responsible young people, you need to move away from command and control, and actively nurture children’s own interests, strengths, and innate sense of what is right,” he continues.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying don’t be like Amazon.
Hundreds of studies with tens of thousands of participants in a huge variety of settings all point in the same direction — the way to get the best out of people of all ages isn’t rules, mandates, and tight control.
It’s freedom. Nurture people’s intrinsic motivation and then give them the autonomy to get on with chasing their goals.
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