I have met several leaders in my creative, academic and industry career and have observed several leadership styles. I will explain those styles by using an example of a team with a leader throwing darts at a dartboard.

In this example, the team's goal is to throw darts at a dartboard to hit a bullseye. There are several players (team members) and there is a leader who is supposed to guide everyone to throw their darts. Ideally, the darts from all team members should land at the bullseye.

Revolver

This leader is continuously revolving and wants the team to throw darts in all possible directions, hoping that some of them will land at the bullseye. He thinks all players have an unlimited supply of darts and just wants them to use all of them. Some will certainly land in the bullseye, but most will not.

Team members who can see through this strategy, seeing their darts getting wasted, will leave this leader.

Semi-critical

This is a leader who thinks the bullseye is somewhere other than it actually is, and will ask his entire team to focus attention on that bullseye and direct those efforts. However, somewhere down the line, he will realize that the darts are not hitting the bullseye and will change the direction.

Team members who don’t care about challenging the leader and just want to follow a leader can happily work in this scenario. However, the team members who had identified that the bullseye was not where the leader said it was will get frustrated and leave the team (non-critical leadership is the reduced version of this type).

Planner

This leader will plan the perfect dart trajectory and weight, clean the dart, make sure there is an appropriate time to throw the dart, educate everyone on how to throw the dart, host workshops, and host lunch-n-learns but WILL NOT throw the dart. He will not even motivate the team members to throw it. All motivation is focused on the plan to throw the dart.

Team members who are biased for action and want to throw the dart at least once in a while will leave this leader.

Visionary

This is my personal favorite. This is the leader who knows exactly where the bullseye is (or at least has a pretty good idea) and, from his prior experience, will know who can do what in his team to throw the darts at the bullseye. Some folks will be better at planning the dart throws, and others might be better at throwing the darts. Some people might be better off looking at thrown darts and analyzing what went wrong.

This leader knows everyone’s strengths and will motivate everyone to see the bullseye from their perspective. This leader will not throw the dart for you. In fact, he may not know how to throw the dart (and most importantly, he knows that he does not know and will say that to the team). But he will know where the dart should land (or maybe where the darts should NOT land) and what everyone’s responsibility is.

People who see this vision and want to work towards it by self-learning will be motivated to stay. People who are tactical workers, who want their job explained to them every day and do not want to do any independent thinking, will get frustrated and leave this leader.

Non-critical

This is the leader who has no clue what the bullseye looks like. He has his own world of bullseye and tries to convince everyone that’s the bullseye they should be working towards. He is actually searching for a visionary leader and does not have any vision of his own, even though it could be very apparent. He is a leader only because someone made him a leader.

People who are looking for some vision will leave this leader. Those who enjoy tactical duties, look busy and work hard will be very happy here. People who know they can make a difference will easily get frustrated and leave the leader.

CYA

This leader’s only motivation is to please his own leader, sometimes at the expense of his team. All this leader thinks about is how his team will look good — at any cost. He is very afraid of failure. His only motivation as a leader is to make his team look good rather than what his team actually does for the business.

He is a micromanager and will want to know everything because he is afraid of missing any detail that will make his team look bad. Sometimes the CYA will go to such heights that he will try to protect himself in his own team meetings. He will lie and make nasty remarks, only to defend himself and make sure his actions are covered.

Team members who can see through this and need a vision to work will leave this leader. Team members who are happy by doing what they are told to do without caring much for the business will be very happy under this leader and will survive a long time.

Have you seen any other type of leadership? I would love to know your thoughts.

Ashay Javadekar