Goleman's six leadership styles: when to use each one

Daniel Goleman's 2000 Harvard Business Review article "Leadership That Gets Results" is probably the most practically useful thing ever written about leadership style. It drew on a study of roughly 3,000 managers and did something unusual: it measured the effect of each style on team climate — how it feels to work there — and then linked climate to financial performance.

The headline finding is that style is a choice, not a personality trait, and that the leaders who got the best results used at least four of the six styles and moved between them as the situation demanded.

The six styles

Two of these deserve special attention because managers get them wrong most often.

Coercive is not the same as being decisive. Used briefly in a fire, it is exactly right. Used as a default, Goleman found it had the single most damaging effect on climate of any style — it destroys people's sense of ownership over their own work.

Pacesetting is the trap high-performing managers fall into after promotion. Setting an exemplary standard and expecting others to match it sounds like leadership; in practice it reads as "nothing I do is ever good enough", and it is often the style behind a burnt-out team with a manager who cannot delegate.

The emotional intelligence underneath

Goleman's argument is that each style is powered by particular emotional-intelligence competences, grouped under self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. The coaching style, for example, needs empathy and self-awareness; the authoritative style needs self-confidence and the ability to read a room.

This is why "just use more styles" is not a useful instruction on its own. If you cannot notice that your team has gone quiet, you cannot know it is time to switch out of pacesetting.

Applied in a UK workplace

A team leader in a contact centre has a team of nine, and inherits three simultaneous problems: a system outage, a long-standing performance issue with one agent, and a new quality framework nobody understands.

• Outage today — coercive. Clear instructions, no debate, get calls answered. Then explicitly step out of it and explain why she took over.
• New quality framework — authoritative first (why this matters and what good looks like), then democratic on the how, because the agents know which call types the framework will make awkward.
• Underperforming agent — coaching, with a documented plan. If coaching does not shift it after a fair period, that becomes a performance-management process rather than a style choice.
• Team morale after a hard quarter — affiliative. Deliberate, visible investment in the team as people.
• Pacesetting — used sparingly on a short push before an audit, and named as temporary.

The skill on display here is not any one style. It is the diagnosis, and the fact that she tells the team which mode she is in and why.

Criticisms and limitations

• Self-report and consultancy data. The research came out of Hay/McBer's commercial database, and the climate–performance link is correlational. You cannot conclude that style caused the results.
• The styles are not cleanly separate. In practice authoritative and coaching blur, as do affiliative and democratic. Coding real behaviour into six boxes is harder than the model suggests.
• It underplays context and power. Culture, union relationships, sector norms and how much authority you actually hold all constrain which styles are available to you. A style that works in a tech scale-up may be unusable in a highly regulated environment.
• "Just switch style" is easier said than done. Switching under pressure is a genuinely hard skill, and the model does not explain how to build it.
• Overlap with older models. Much of it restates situational leadership and Lewin's earlier work in more memorable language. That is a strength commercially and a weakness academically.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

This is one of the easiest models to evidence well, because leadership style is explicitly assessed.

Level 3 — Unit 301 Developing effective leadership skills covers leadership styles and the use of emotional intelligence directly, and Unit 303 Managing the performance of others is where style choice shows up in performance conversations. Suitable evidence:

• A reflective account analysing two situations where you used different styles, why you chose each, and what the effect was. Include one where the choice was wrong.
• A witness testimony from a team member or your manager describing how you adapted your approach.
• Assessment observation of you running a team meeting or a one-to-one.
• A completed self-assessment or 360 feedback as a workplace document, with your reflection on it.

Level 5 — Unit 501 Assessing own leadership performance for the analysis of your own leadership performance, and Unit 504 Leading people and organisational culture where style connects to culture. At Level 5, do not simply describe the six styles; evaluate the model's usefulness against what you observed, and reference its limitations.

Where to go next

• Lewin's leadership styles — the 1939 study these styles descend from.
• Adair's action-centred leadership — a different lens: task, team, individual.
• How ILM qualifications are assessed — what a portfolio actually involves.