What is Leadership Grid?
The Leadership Grid is a behaviour-based leadership approach that explains what leaders accomplish instead of who they are. It's important for assessing a person's leadership style. There are millions of variables that determine a leader's performance. Despite their overwhelming number, these elements may be grouped into several leadership styles.
Understanding Leadership Grid
The Leadership Grid shows how putting too much focus on one sector while neglecting the other suppresses production. These grids show how firms get tasks completed and meet their objectives, not just how executives lead. They could also tell which leaders should put more emphasis on getting things actually accomplished rather than pleasing others, and vice versa.
Jane Mouton and Robert Blake came up with the concept in 1960. This classic management model assists in the analysis of managerial styles of leadership. Leadership Grid is the name of the technique that underlies this.
According to these grids, the two factors for evaluating leadership are a concern for people on the vertical' axis and concern for production on the 'horizontal' axis.
Concern for the people
This is the style where the leader acknowledges the preferences, goals, and opportunities of individual relationships between team members. It is carried out in order to determine the most effective methods for completing a task.
Concern for production
When the discussion takes place to accomplish the work in the most effective manner possible, this is the style where the leader emphasizes the need for organizational efficiency, strategic goals, and high productivity of the employees. The model correctly described 5 leadership styles based on their relative positions on the grid:
- Impoverished
- Produce or perish
- Middle of the road
- Country club
- Team
Practical Example
Niya is the manager of a fashion company. On a daily basis, she has to manage and supervise almost 50 people to get the job done. Most of the time, Niya accommodates her people's needs and gives them a priority and understands their goals, and motivates them accordingly. Here, in terms of the leadership grid, she entails the style of concern for the people. On the other hand, her friend Jack is the Senior Officer of a manufacturing company where the efficiency of production is most important. He implements all the best possible strategies to accomplish the task and organization's goal. Here jack uses the concern for production style.
In Sentences
- The Leadership Grid is a functional model of leadership that was established in the 1960s to compare the importance of output vs the importance of people.