5 Types of Managers & Their Roles

One of the challenges for new managers is discovering their management style, a journey that’s both personal and pivotal in shaping how they lead. 

Understanding your unique approach is key to effectively guiding your team. Here, we look at the five most common management styles and the distinct roles they play in helping you meet specific objectives. Each style has its strengths and weaknesses, and the best managers learn to adapt their approach based on the situation and the needs of their team.

1. Participative Management

A participative management style includes team members in the decision-making process, allowing managers to leverage ideas, weigh opinions, and take advantage of different skill sets. 

You can prioritize the most valuable input to help improve your approach and delegate workload by understanding where everyone’s strengths lie.

The role:

• Creative environments and driving innovation
• Improving morale and accountability to get people to feel more invested

2. Network Management

In this case, the focus is on connections and improving communication when working across teams. 

You teach your team the importance of collaboration and show them how it improves results. This is good if you tend to be more of a hands-off manager and have a trusted team that knows what it’s doing. 

For upper managers, you can encourage the junior managers of each department to collaborate and spare you from unnecessary problem-solving and approvals. It leads to improved cohesion across departments and team building through collaboration. As a result, you should also see increased efficiency through a more direct approach to workflow.

The role:

• Ideal for gatekeepers and strategists
• Overseeing teams used to resolving problems
• Situations where approvals are interdepartmental as opposed to management-driven
• Upper management positions where you have more than one team reporting to you

3. Mentor Management

If you have a junior team in entry-level positions where building skills is the priority, the mentoring management style is ideal. 

Your goal is to provide firsthand training and encourage team members to work toward autonomy as skills are developed. In this case, you collaborate closely with your team to identify coaching opportunities. This involves a lot of goal-setting to measure progress. You also have to come to grips with the fact you’ll need to go through the process continuously as each team member gains skills and moves on to positions of growing responsibility. 

It takes a special type of manager to step up to bat and provide the coaching required to help others succeed.

The role:

• Newly promoted managers with a track record of outstanding performance
• Working with underperforming or less skilled teams

4. Pacesetting Management

Pacesetting is all about taking a team that needs to produce and using aggressive goals and deadlines to help them power through. 

It relies on organization and the ability to step back and allow people to work more independently. It’s not the greatest style of management, as it puts pressure on the team. As a result, it works best in environments such as sales, where people need incentives to perform, or even areas such as manufacturing, where productivity is critical.

The role:

• Competitive and productivity-driven departments where expectations circle around meeting quotas

5. Micromanagement

Finally, there’s the least popular management style more commonly referred to as micromanagement. It’s the style to avoid as it tends to rely on hands-on leadership, which leads to resentment.  

The role:

• Temporary situations such as emergencies, tight deadlines, or underperformance
• When you need to achieve something as quickly and with as little friction as possible

While it will take time to find your management style, feeling out your team, understanding your goals, and not being afraid to switch tactics when it’s just not working will ensure you continue to grow as a manager and become a respected, productive leader.

About Focus HR, Inc.

Focus HR, Inc. uncomplicates the people side of business by providing small business owners with outsourced HR, project HR, and Leadership Coaching. For more information, please contact us today! If you liked this post, please subscribe to our blog. You can opt-out at any time. 

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