Leadership styles 101 Autocratic Leadership How Command and Control Saves Lives

So you’re really starting to “get” how the participative leadership style drives innovation through heightening collaborative learning and through fueling intense intrinsic motivation.

You’ve also witnessed how participative leadership not only brings out the very best in people, but also how it brings out the truly unexpected.

But what about Participative Leadership’s so-called polar opposite: The Autocratic Leadership Style?

Does it ever make sense to Lead people without providing them little or no opportunity to make key decisions or to have any input on strategy or the action steps to flow out of it? Let’s start by defining what we mean by The Autocratic Leadership Style in The first place.

People who are not well versed in the study of leadership styles often think of ruthless psychopaths like Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein when they hear the term “Autocratic Leader”.

These guys embodied psychotic dictatorship not leadership. They succeed by “coercive control” not by any legal or acceptable leadership strategies. Their use of torture and other forms of psychopathic violence have more to do with their true mental health status than anything else.

Autocratic Leadership simply means that the leader has full decision making control. Followers have little if any input. They simply follow directions; they don’t come up with them.

Performance targets, measures and corrective feedback are also clearly top-down rather than bottom-up in an autocratic leadership scenario.

Yes, the autocratic leadership style is sometimes the only style through which an organization, group or individual can get from the current to the desired goal-state or outcome.

Think of a situation in which a group of followers simply don’t possess the required knowledge, skills and abilities to effectively accomplish their goal, let alone define it.

Consider the example of a large modern industrial manufacturing plant. In this kind of organization there are often thousands of employees, massive complex production lines, advanced and varied technologies (i.e. computers, robotics). All of these working parts have to work smoothly together.

The average frontline employee in a large complex organizational system simply doesn’t have the specialized management and production process knowledge to make big-picture strategic or work-flow decisions. All of their efforts are focused on their own often increasingly technical roles.

The classic example of a situation where the autocratic leadership style is an absolute critical success factor is in complex military settings.

Just as in the giant high-tech factory setting, a successful military operation can often involve the orchestration of highly technical and widely geographically distributed roles.

Think of the modern battle field where there are multiple live data-streams and channels of communication informing a dynamic and ongoing strategic operation. Human lives are at stake.

Distributed leadership and collaborative learning take time. These kinds of split-second decisions have to be made often and in rapid succession with literally no room for error.

With planes in the air, feet on the ground, ships at sea, and countless formal and often technical roles to manage simultaneously, collaborative leadership is simply not possible. It’s even harmful in these complex and fast changing environments.

Not only do the sheer complexities and geographic distributions of many military operations (even in peace time), require autocratic or command and control leadership to effectively succeed, but in the heat of battle, stress levels can run high. Under these conditions, soldiers often need clear direction on how to optimally perform in their respective roles.

These challenging technical and emotional factors are also clearly seen in emergency rescue roles and organizations as well. When an emergency rescue team is saving people from their helicopter during intense weather conditions, there’s often no time to collaborate on next best moves. This is where clear communication is required from an experienced chain of command.

Finally, think of the operating room where a single brain surgeon leads a team. The nurse-practitioner, physician’s-assistants and anesthesiologist simply lack the specialized neurological and surgical training to make complex real-time surgical decisions.

So yes, there are clearly definable situations where effectively implementing the autocratic leadership style can literally make the difference between life and death. It’s not just a choice, it’s a leadership necessity.

This is precisely the guiding question that sparked this leadership 101 series to begin with: What is the best possible leadership style for effectively navigating the environmental/strategic and technical complexities of our current national and global economic challenges?

For so many people across our planet resolving these and related issues surely represent a clearly life or death scenario.

Not only that but the sheer technical complexities, the fiscal and economic science and political realities, must in some senses represent the technical complexities faced by the average brain surgeon or the most highly decorated General.

Yet at the same time, many of these complex decision making and strategic planning roles must require some level of task interdependency and distributed, participative leadership. We do still live in a democratic society, don’t we? What do you think we most need right now from our leaders, a participative or an autocratic leadership style?