The democratic leadership style

The democratic leadership style, also known as participative leadership or shared leadership, is a type of leadership style where members of the group take a more participative role in the decision-making process. This type of leadership can apply to any organisation from private business environments to schools and local and national government.

We discuss The 6 Leadership styles at length in our 12 month Action Focused Leadership and Management Program:

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What is Democratic Leadership? 

The democratic leadership style is a very “open to all style” of running and managing a team of people. It’s an environment where everyone’s ideas are welcomed, encouraged and listened to, not just by the leader but by the whole team. 

Researchers have found that this is a great style to adopt for any style of business but especially for fast paced changing environment where it’s important to keep everyone involved with the business and up to date with the decisions. 

The democratic leader is a great communicator and facilitator of the conversations needed to encourage the team to share their ideas and generate the ideas from the team. They need to be strong decision makers and have the ability to co-ordinate the information and communicate future action that is chosen.  

Some of the primary characteristics of democratic leadership include:

  • Group members are encouraged to share ideas and opinions, even though the leader retains the final say over decisions
  • Members of the group feel more engaged in the process
  • Creativity and innovative thinking is encouraged and rewarded


It’s been suggested that good democratic leaders possess specific traits or core values that include:

  • Honesty
  • Intelligence
  • Courage
  • Creativity
  • Competence
  • Fairness

Strong democratic leaders inspire trust and respect among followers.  They are sincere and base their decisions on their morals and values. Followers tend to feel inspired to take action and contribute to the group. Good leaders with a democratic leadership style also tend to seek diverse opinions and do not try to silence voices with an opposing opinion or those that offer a less popular point of view.

How to be effective with a democratic leadership style

Keep the communication open:If your promoting an environment where ideas are welcome, everyone needs to feel comfortable enough to put their ideas forward. The democratic leadership style thrives when all the considerations are laid out for everyone to examine.

Focus the discussion:It’s hard to keep unstructured discussion productive. It’s the leader’s job to balance the idea of being open to ideas and keeping everything on-topic and focused. If the conversation begins to stray, remind everyone of the current goal and then steer it back. It’s important to take note of unrelated comments and return to them in the future.

Be ready to commitwith the democratic leadership style, you get presented with so many possibilities, suggestions and ideas, that it can be overwhelming and difficult to commit. But as the leader, when the time comes, you have to choose and do so with conviction. The team depends on the clear and unambiguous mandates to be committed.

Respect the ideas:You and your team might not agree with every idea, and that’s ok. It is important, however, that you create a healthy environment where those ideas are entertained and considered, not scorned, or the flow of ideas will slow to a trickle.

Explain, but don’t apologise:You want the advocates of the solutions that were not selected to understand that their thoughts were considered and had validity, but that ultimately you had strong reasons to go a different direction. It’s important that the decision be communicated, but you should not apologise for deciding on what you think.

Thanks for visiting our democratic leadership style page here's a link to our homepage. You may also be interested in having a look at Dan Goleman's book on leadership

As well as lots of smaller businesses and organisations, below are examples of some larger organisations who have received training from our director of learning at Ultimate Leadership Training:


spring care

arches
Zeelo

branded
Gatwick School

ned
catch

Nimbus
CAB

Please contact us to discuss any training requirements you have, we either deliver for you or sell you the course for your trainers to deliver to your team