When we imagine strict leaders, our mind often takes a journey back in time. Perhaps you imagine a stern manager at an English cotton mill, ordering a child to fix a machine with dangerously moving parts. Perhaps you zoom back to ancient Egypt with the ‘overseers’ of the pyramid construction. Perhaps instead you only jump back a couple of decades, and remember the Head Teacher who used to rule your school with an iron fist. Regardless of where you end up, it’s rarely the place you actually work at now.

I speak for the ‘West’ when I say that managers are far less strict, stern, and aggressive now than they were 100 years ago. Has the sun set on firm (and often brutal) autocratic leadership?

It would seem this is the case. However this isn’t necessarily a good thing for leadership.

The Benefits of a Strict Leader

Strict leadership actually brings many benefits. Several of these benefits bring instant gratification to the leader, hence why this was the natural leadership style for the typical manager all the way up until a hundred years ago, when benevolent and kind managers started to gain traction in industry. I have listed a few of these benefits below:

1. Strict Leaders Can Push Through Change.

With the fear they create in employees, resistance to organisational change is effectively non-existent under a strict leader. While the employees themselves might be incredibly unhappy with the change proposed, this doesn’t actually manifest itself in any blockage to the change. Ironically though, change and innovation in organisations occurs much faster under modern management (due to the accelerating pace of technology, consolidation and competition in global business today).

BUT: The change that a strict leader ‘pushes’ through may be sub-optimal or even detrimental to the business, due to the lack of consultation with the workforce.

2. Strict Leaders Can Create Efficient Processes.

Particularly in Ford’s era, strict managers could look analytically at a process and design the most efficient arrangement of labour to produce a specific product. This approach resulted in the creation of ‘specialist’ roles. I.e. where employees did as narrow a task as possible, as many times as possible. This created employees who were extremely skilled at the specific task they were required to do.

BUT: This resulted in a workforce that was inflexible and bored to death. Stories have been told that Ford workers used to play games of mental chess with each other, by keeping track of the pieces in their heads. If an employee has enough cognitive ability leftover to be able to keep track of, and play chess, Ford was severely under-utilising his employees.

3. Strict Leaders gain followers.

An uncompromising, perfectionist approach to quality can actually produce followers. Such a passionate for perfection is inspirational. And as such, many famous (but strict) leaders in the past had no trouble gaining followers. Think of the examples set by various dictators throughout history. Many of these men were evil and unrelenting individuals – but regardless they managed to amass a following, and this demonstrates the sometimes irresistable power of a strict leader.

BUT: For each loyal follower, a strict leader will no doubt make many enemies – which will invite conflict.

For more infomation on leadership and conflict, see Stephen Warrilow’s Practitioners Masterclass.

Now don’t mis-interpret the meaning of this article. I do not support or condone dictators or cruel slave masters. Nor do I think that any modern managers should attempt to mimic these leadership styles exactly. However these extreme examples clearly show that elements of strict leadership have an almost magnetic effect, and as far as legitimate leadership techniques go, these should not be brushed under the carpet during the next ‘weekend spiritual retreat team session’.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 10:38 pm and is filed under Leadership Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.