There are many different ways to be a leader. This episode is about a leadership style continuum that explores three levels to lead decision making in groups. Learn why you need to be able to shift between all three depending on the situation.What You’ll Learn* Three leadership styles and the value of each one.* The connection between the leadership styles and task-relationship-process (from Episode 34).Resources* Episode 34: Three Elements Team Need to Succeed* Episode 36 builds on this episode and explore stages of group development and how your leadership style needs to align with your team’s stage of development.The Weekly ChallengeAsk 3-5 of your colleagues what they think your most prominent leadership style is. Do their perspectives match your view of yourself?TranscriptFeel like reading instead of listening? Download the free PDF Transcript now or read it below. Enjoy!Transcript for Episode #035: The Leadership Styles ContinuumAmy Climer: Hi everyone! This is Amy Climer. Welcome to the Deliberate Creative Podcast Episode 35. Today’s episode is about leadership styles. This episode is specifically dedicated to my friend Mo. Earlier this week Mo and I were hanging out having a beer, a little happy hour get together. We often have really interesting conversations about leadership and group development and team building and yeah, love talking about this stuff with Mo. In our conversation I was talking about Leadership styles. And Mo said “oh, you know, I really need to review that.” I said “Oh, I’ll do a podcast for you.” So Mo, this podcast is for you. We are going to talk about the leadership style continuum. All of us probably have a default style. What is ideal is if we can flex and adjust and adapt our style to the situation and the need of the team that we are leading. Today’s episode I am going to explain three different styles in the leadership continuum. This also relates back to last week’s episode, Episode 34, about the three elements the team needs to succeed. Those were task, relationship and process. We’re going to build on that a little bit. Next week in Episode 36, I am going to talk about the stages of group development and how your leadership style, particularly needs to change based on where the where your group is and their stage of development. We’ll talk about that next week. Episode 34, 35 and 36 all go together, although you can understand any of them if you only listened to this one. [Let’s talk about leadership styles. There are three different styles that we are going to focus on today. Probably you could argue that there are dozens of different styles out there if not hundreds. But, these three are main ones and they fall along a continuum. I think that understanding them helps leaders understands when do I need to behave a certain way and when do I need to behave in a different way. The differences between these three leadership styles are based on how decisions are made and how direction is given or used within the group. So on the far left side of the continuum is the autocratic or directive leadership style. In the middle is a democratic leadership style. On the far right is the abdicratic or delegative leadership style.