When you recruit a new team member, what's your priority? Is it to focus on tasks by explaining the first year's objectives to him or her? Or, do you spend time understanding his strengths and interests so you can give him tasks that he'll enjoy?
No one leadership style is best for all situations, but it's useful to understand what your natural approach is, so you can develop skills that you may be missing. It's unwise to neglect either tasks or people. But, equally, a compromise between the two approaches will likely result in only average team performance, because you neither meet people's needs nor inspire excellent performance.
In this article, we look at the Blake Mouton Managerial Grid, a popular framework for thinking about a leader's "task versus person" orientation.
Also known as the Managerial Grid, or Leadership Grid, it was developed in the early 1960s by management theorists Robert Blake and Jane Mouton. It plots a manager's or leader's degree of task-centeredness versus her person-centeredness, and identifies five different combinations of the two and the leadership styles they produce.
Understanding the Model
The Blake Mouton Managerial Grid is based on two behavioral dimensions:
Concern for People: this is the degree to which a leader considers team members' needs, interests and areas of personal development when deciding how best to accomplish a task.
Concern for Results: this is the degree to which a leader emphasizes concrete objectives, organizational efficiency and high productivity when deciding how best to accomplish a task.
Blake and Mouton defined five leadership styles based on these, as illustrated in the diagram below.
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