Management Café July 2023: Leadership on a Spectrum and Adair's Action-Centred Leadership
Looking for a podcast about leadership and management to accompany you during your coffee break? Join Pilar Orti and Tim Burgess for 25 minutes (more or less) of informal chat about leading teams. We now have coffee every other week.
From this page you can listen to our Management Café March episodes - but we recommend you subscribe to the show on your favourite podcast app, or subscribe to the Management Café blog, where we post the show notes.
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#58 Leadership on a spectrum: Laissez-faire and authoritative styles
Inspired by the article about leadership on the Asana blog, Pilar and Tim discuss Kurt Lewin's 3 leadership styles. In a seminal study conducted in 1939, groups of 10 year old children were given a craft task and assigned an adult leader using either an authoritarian, democratic or laissez-faire leadership style. They concluded that democratic leadership was the most effective.
Pilar and Tim share their experiences of these 3 styles and spend some time debating the laissez-faire and authoritarian styles. And whether there is a distinction between management and leadership. Pilar throws a few more models into the mix: Ken Blanchard's situational leadership and John Adair's Action Centered Leadership.
Ultimately our default style isn't going to suit every circumstance. We need to switch between styles to get the best results.
#59 John Adair’s Action-Centred Leadership
Continuing with our discussions on leadership frameworks, Pilar and Tim discuss John Adair's Action-Centred Leadership which was first introduced in 1973. Adair uses three overlapping circles to illustrate that effective leadership happens at the intersection of the task, the team and the individual.
And it is this deceptive simplicity which is a big part of the appeal. The model doesn't rely on a particular leadership style or organisational culture. Instead it reminds us that if we "zoom out" of our current situation we can identify which of the three areas needs our attention.
