Mastering Management Styles: Expert Guidance for Managers: Discover and perfect your ultimate management style for success in your role with this book and ebook.

Understanding the various management styles is crucially important to managerial success because it allows the thoughtful manager to choose the right style for each employee, circumstance, type of work, and environment. If you are to maximize your effectiveness as a manager, you must be able to apply the appropriate managerial approach in each situation.

There's another reason why style matters: it goes a long way toward determining the atmosphere of your office and the way employees interact and communicate with you. Your style says a lot about how you view your employees and what you expect of them, and will do much to shape their perceptions of you.

Management styles have several aspects. Some academic taxonomies of management styles get very complicated by mixing up the different elements in various combinations and giving each combination an abstruse name, but it's best to think of management styles in terms of their various elements, and then to combine the elements yourself.

When managing any employee or situation, you should always be thinking of all of these elements.

The key point about these various styles—and if you take one thing away from this book, make it this—is that it's crucial for you to develop the ability to adapt the approach you take, depending on the circumstances. Different people, with different personalities and different levels of experience need to be managed in different ways; and different types of work, done in different types of companies or other institutions, also requires different approaches.

This point is especially true in today's world, where highly educated knowledge workers, and young people raised on social media, will not mesh well with a rigid and inflexible managerial style.

It's also important to understand that the management styles mentioned above are not rigid "either/or" choices. Each one is, in general, a spectrum. For example, when you're looking at the direction/consultation axis, you don't decide which of those two poles you're going to choose; you decide where on a continuum you're going to come down.

Direction –––––––––––––––––––––––– Consultation

You may choose to be highly directive, or highly consultative; but you may also choose to be a bit of both. You can approach a given person or situation from any point on the spectrum.

In the case of coaching and support, the spectrum is more a question of degree; you may offer a given employee a lot of coaching, or you may offer very little. As always, it's a question of adapting appropriately to circumstances.

No coaching –––––––––––––––––––––––– Lots of coaching

Like the two axes, orientation is a spectrum; you'll continually be moving back and forth along a continuum between the interests of the employee and those of the organization.

Employee –––––––––––––––––––––––– Organization

One final point before we start to dig into the meat and potatoes. It's worthwhile to make a distinction between managing work and managing people. Managing work is actually pretty easy; it's mostly a question of being organized and of keeping on top of deadlines. In today's environment, though, you rarely have the luxury of simply managing work; you have to manage people as well. Managers who step into a management role thinking that it's just a question of getting the work done are riding for a fall; you have to be prepared to deal with the people side of things as well.

Incidentally, this is a mistake that people sometimes make when they're hiring: they hire someone who's really good at getting work done, thinking that this is a qualification for management. But the hard part of management is dealing with people. Never forget that. (By the way, sometimes people make the opposite mistake as well: they hire someone with people skills who's no good at the work. Needless to say, that doesn't work either.)

Let's talk about two employees who work in our organization, Dave and Rhonda.

Rhonda is a recent recruit, fresh out of university. She has a liberal arts degree, and she has a bit of work experience from when she was a student. She did three work terms in various types of office, including one that was pretty similar to ours; and during her class terms she worked as a waitress in a restaurant and behind the counter at a coffee bar. She also volunteered in the University library and with disadvantaged children.

Dave is in his early fifties, and is a senior engineer. He has been with our firm for 26 years. Although he is considered highly skilled and competent by both his colleagues and his superiors, he has never expressed any interest in management, and the higher-ups also see him more as an individual contributor than as a manager. Although his interpersonal skills are perfectly satisfactory for doing his job, he doesn't consider himself to be much of a "people person", and he's not hugely interested in the people side of the job, or of anything else for that matter.

As you progress through this book, Dave and Rhonda will appear in various situations and contexts, and you will be asked to think about how you, as their manager, should respond. Although there are no absolutely right answers for this sort of thing, some suggestions as to how you might want to act will be provided at the end of each chapter.

In this chapter, you have:

Now let's take a closer look at the first element of management style, the direction/consultation axis.