Leadership and management: are they the same thing?
How do emotions play a role in leadership?
What are the different forms of leadership?
What is your leadership style?
Leadership and management: are they the same thing?
- Management is a sum of skills
- Leadership is a posture and an energy
- Leadership is at the service of management
- You can be a leader without being a manager
How do emotions play a role in leadership?
Leadership and management – The charismatic leader
A charismatic person plays on our hidden feelings.
According to Max Weber, the first sociologist to combine the notions of leadership and charisma, a charismatic leader is someone who can identify a path and a strategy, particularly in situations of disruption, and who has the ability to make the hidden feelings of his audience explicit. This is quite similar to the visionary leader, with the addition of the psychological notion and potentially complementary emotions.
In this way, the charismatic leader would be a figure capable of empathy and psychology in the face of a collective that guesses and states what the audience wants to hear.
Some analysts have compared Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the presidential campaign in terms of leadership: Trump is said to have been able to appeal to the greatest number of people by speaking to some people’s subconscious and by guessing the oratory strategy to adopt, based on his audience’s anger. He denounces, castigates and uses shocking language, and his “charisma” is linked more to the force of his tone and the shock of his words than to the intelligence of his words themselves.
Charismatic leadership therefore reflects an ability to adapt to the subconscious of the audience by stimulating their emotions. In times of crisis, politicians often exploit this strategy by appealing to anger.
The charismatic leader doesn’t just use anger. Werber describes the ability to appeal to repressed feelings. Other feelings can therefore be called upon: hope, fear, joy, etc.
Watching a video of a charismatic leader is very telling: the tone of voice, its rhythm, and the associated gestures are all indicators of the emotions called up in the subconscious.
Leadership and management: at the heart of emotions
What people gifted with real leadership have in common is their ability to arouse strong emotions. Emotions leave their mark on people’s minds, inspiring the leader’s audience. Generally speaking, emotions have 2 main purposes: to reassure and to inspire.
Leadership and Stability – Feeling of security
“I can let myself be guided by this person. I feel safe, they inspire confidence”
Leaders who inspire this feeling often have a calm, firm tone of voice, use silences, don’t let themselves be diverted, and have an unflappable, serene determination.
Emblematic figures: Gandhi, Simone Veil, Queen Elizabeth
Leadership for change
“This leader understands me, he’s determined, he inspires a new wind. I feel he has the energy to make things happen
Leaders who inspire this feeling of possible renewal are able to put pressure on the current situation as something that no longer exists.
They may also focus on the dream, the possible state, tomorrow.
The associated feelings may be more numerous, involving anger or fear. Hope and the desire for somewhere else.
The charismatic leader can reinforce his message by using images and metaphors that are easy to understand.
Disruptive leadership – A visionary manager
The visionary leader proposes a different, technological world, putting innovation at the heart of his projects… He designs tomorrow’s world with his ideas.
Their vision drives their teams by setting an ambitious course, and their high standards stimulate investment and creativity. He invites them to break out of the box and chart a new course.
He has an impact on the collective unconscious and generates energy. Employees look in the same direction, in the same spirit.
“They didn’t know it was impossible, that’s why they did it” – Marc TWAIN
So leadership is an emotional activator that can stimulate a feeling of peace and confidence, or anger and fear, or hope and admiration.
Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s theory of leadership
Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s (1958, 1973) theory of leadership proposes a model defining seven leadership styles.
In this model, the leadership style can be influenced by the manager himself and also by the group he manages. The adaptability of one style to the other makes it possible to implement a management style that is adapted to the situations and people involved, while taking into account the objectives.
On the basis of this principle, we understand that Hitler’s leadership was born of a particular context of crisis, and a population in search of change. In a stable environment where the population would have had a satisfactory life balance, what appeared to be leadership at the time would have been seen as a sign of dementia in another era.
So leadership is situational. It could be the result of the best match between a need and the response to that need.
In this sense, this model is similar to Blake and Mouton’s model, which is very close to the Herman Brain Dominance Instrument model derived from neuroscience.
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Management and Leadership – the HBDI model and its 4 leaders
According to the HBDI model proposed by Ned Herrmann, 4 major leadership styles are present in the company. They are fairly similar to the DISC model, also known as the colour model.
The Assess Manager test enables you to assess your ability to use these different leadership styles. The more adaptable you are, the more important your leadership is, since it enables you to show leadership in the face of varying audiences and situations, as the various theorists quoted on this page explain.
Paternalistic leadership
Paternalistic leadership is imbued with family values that unite teams around a father who inspires confidence. This paternalistic leader is self-confident, the confidence he shows and the primary instigator of the energy transmitted, while showing a certain benevolence that is sometimes condescending towards his colleagues. The good father of the family is protective, with strong arms to protect the company and its employees. He measures the risks and ensures continuity, managing his business with an iron fist, even if he sometimes has the bonhomie of a casimir. He is less easy to see in the press, as this leader does not necessarily shy away from the limelight. Discreet, the image of benevolent and protective trust is his secret weapon for asserting his leadership. They are exemplary and inspire respect.
Paternalistic leadership: reassures, provides security and draws his audience around fear or people who lack self-confidence.
Dominant emotion: reassuring, calming
Participative leadership
This has a completely different flavour, linked tocollective intelligence. It highlights the qualities of employees and their collective power. This leader is humble, loved and followed for his intuitive ability to detect qualities in people that need to be revealed. His strength lies in his ability to sense employees’ potential and give them opportunities to shine. He will readily take the risk of offering a career opportunity that is disconnected from the employee’s initial training, in order to develop his talent.
In this way, the employee is involved in the project: they give everything, because everything has been given to them. It’s a form of leadership – management based on hope, which creates an ideal to be achieved. The work force will be deployed thanks to the “gap” between the current state and the desired state, which generates a natural collective emulation. Don’t disappoint, rise to the challenge. The vision is collective.
Participative leadership is not easy to manage over the long term, because by not putting themselves forward, the leader leaves a vacancy for power leaders. So, as Antonin Gaunand notes, leadership has a limited duration, particularly for this form of leadership.
Dominant emotion: making people dream, giving them hope and desire
Delegative leadership
Delegative leadership is a form derived from participative leadership. It is similar to participative leadership, but relies more on a vision that it drives. This is what enables it to last longer, because its visionary qualities help it to maintain leadership. He sets the course and defines the objectives. In addition, the delegative leader is keen to rely on the teams to find the way forward, the processes and the implementation of objectives. By giving latitude and a form of freedom to the teams to implement the vision and objectives, the employees are stakeholders in the project and take full ownership of it by becoming responsible for their success.
Dominant emotion: to make people dream, to give them hope and desire while being fully anchored in the concrete.
Directive leadership
If we want to take an iconic representation of directive leadership, Margaret Thatcher, mentioned above, could be a figure fairly close to directive leadership. This leader represents authority. She dictates what needs to be done and relies on the fear of reprisals or the fear of making a mistake. The directive leader is a rather cold personality who will rarely give way to strong, icy anger.
He maintains his authority through fear of his cold anger erupting, which is rare but memorable. He is extremely demanding of both himself and others and cannot tolerate half-truths or approximation. Cold anger potentially translates into scathing, salient and sometimes humiliating comments that establish a form of domination.
Dominant emotion: fear of error, cold anger, reassurance through control.
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