Consultative Leadership Style: Definition and Advantages

As a team leader or manager, you can use your leadership skills like the Consultative Leadership Style, where you take opinions from subordinates while making decisions.

This article will teach you the benefits and critical components of consultative leadership. You can be a strong consultative leader by following the simple steps in this article.

What is Consultative Leadership?

Consultative leadership is where team leaders can influence people rather than impose their thoughts on subordinates. It targets team building style and uses subordinates’ skills to create plans and decisions.

It involves those who need help finding ideas for a solution in decision-making. A leader includes their team while deciding to know their subordinate’s point of view. It helps them to make effective decisions and decisions.

For example, suppose a company wants to make any production decisions. In that case, the manager needs to consult with the engineering department so that they can provide quality input as they were involved with the production process.

How is the consultative leadership style different from other leadership?

Though there are different types of leadership, like Authority leadership or participative leadership, in which management involves making decisions with subordinates, consultative leadership involves less authority involvement compared to any other form of leadership.

Rather it focuses on spending more time combining skills, ideas, and experiences from outside resources. And it helps the manager to receive better outputs with effective decision-making. It emphasizes open communication.

Essential components of the consultative leadership style:

It has a few essential components that make up how it works. Here are some main components of the consultative leadership style:

The Role Of Mentoring In Leadership Development

With this leadership style, the leader becomes the mentor for their team and encourages them to learn to facilitate their ideas, grow, and work on skills. They assess the path of the mentee and guide them to perform in a better way.

They include opinions from their team and colleagues and indulge them in decision-making. Good mentoring helps to build trust between team leaders and the team. It helps in good productivity.

Influence and engagement

Consultative leadership focuses on new ideas and thoughts from everyone. A leader can’t accept everyone’s ideas. Still, it generates a good engagement with their subordinates and gives them the into each potential and how they see their work and difficulties in handling any situation. It also motivates them for the better. Leaders are there to influence their subordinates to work better.

Focus on greater creativity and innovation.

In any problem, when each individual makes an effort to come out with a solution, it promotes creativity and generates. It allows us to understand the problems better and develop innovative solutions.

Creates a Sense of Involvement

While before making any decisions, they were asked for their opinion and regularly in touch with them, which helped them to generate a sense of involvement while making decision-making. They will work hard on the given project as they are likelier to feel they are the project owners.

Help people feel comfortable while speaking up.

Leaders need to make their subordinates feel comfortable to speak up their thoughts and share their opinions on any particular topic. And regular conversation makes this possible. Team members start considering themselves as valuable part of the team.

Advantages Of Consultative Leadership

Consultative leadership gives many Advantages to leaders in their workplace. And when you understand these Advantages, then you can choose what is best for you to choose as a leader that can suit your work environment:

Creates deeper bonds among leaders and their subordinates

The consultative leadership style helps build greater relationships among colleagues and subordinates. When you exchange your thoughts with your subordinates, they will also feel a sense of appreciation and value. It only happens when you consistently share your thoughts and suggestions, which allows you to create strong bonds with whom they are working.

Helps leaders know it’s OK to accept help

In consultative leadership, leaders feel comfortable accepting that they have little knowledge on some topic. Essentially, it helps them understand that it is OK to grow and learn with subordinates side by side while consulting process. They have to trust them.

Creates a sense of involvement

It encourages the employee whenever, before making a decision, their opinion is considered or their opinion is asked. All this helps them to raise their opinion regularly. It is more likely to participate in decision-making and encourage them to work hard.

Listener

In the consultative leadership style, the leader needs to be a good listener who patiently listens to their subordinates before making any decision. It helps the co-workers to understand they are valuable and will work hard to give better output.
How to be a good listener:

• Don’t make a pre-assumption before the speaker finishes speaking.
• Frequently asks more questions.
• Be attentive while others are speaking, and maintain body language.

Giving Feedback

After receiving too many opinions, giving essential feedback is a vital and vital leadership skill. It gives a great opportunity to leaders who want to help their team members.
How to give feedback:

• Immediate feedback is very important, and it also shows respect toward others.
• Try to solve the error with an explanation.
• Let everyone understand their potential through your feedback.

Consultative Leadership Disadvantages

Time-consuming

Though too many steps are involved here, like several rounds of meetings, changes need to be made after that. All this takes a lot of time which may delay the actual work.

Sense of insecurity

The leader needs to manage the conflicts among the team while choosing the best opinion, which results in unhappiness and insecurity when final decisions are made. It may also hamper the work efficiency of an employee.

Slow Decision Making

Due to too many meetings and consultations, it delays decision-making, and problems are not solved on time.

How to become a strong consultative leader?

To become a consultative leader, you must perform certain activities and traits; for that, you must know an effective way to use a consultative leadership style. You can follow these steps to become a strong consultative leader:

Help people feel comfortable speaking up.

It creates a culture where people speak up and share their thoughts on your team, and it can gain valuable insight, information, and advice, which you might have to get from outside if team coordination still needs to be made.

Learn facilitation skills

You need to spend more time learning and improving your skills so you can use these skills to understand business problems. These facilitation skills can save time, and collaborative thinking gives you the best results.

Get to know your team.

Spend more time with your team and staff to ensure the best relationships.

You can also learn more about your team and how they process information, whether task-oriented or not, and their personalities in the workplace, which will help you manage the group more effectively.

Stay in touch

After gathering information and suggestions from your employees, provide them with information about how you use those ideas.

Though it is impossible to share every detail, sharing a few details or just giving them an update will make them feel included in the decision-making process. It will also make them feel valued, and they will give you better ideas in the future.

FAQs

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