Autocratic Management Style - What's The Deal? (2024)

The way you manage your team depends upon your particular strengths and weaknesses, as well as the types of personalities you have in your workforce. If your staff are quite inexperienced and unsure, an autocratic management style could be a good choice for you.

An autocratic management style is basically the strictest type of style. In this case, managers will make decisions with no input from employees and rather than asking opinions and finding out what employees think about certain things, they will be told what to do instead.

This doesn’t mean you’re working within a dictatorship, but it does mean that you’re not going to be able to put forth your ideas and expect them to be listened to.

From that description, you might think that this management style is quite rigid and therefore not the best option, but every style has its pros and cons.

For instance, if you have an inexperienced team, as we mentioned earlier, and you have employees who aren’t quite so confident, and autocratic management style could be a good option. In this case, employees don’t have to worry about coming up with ideas or being too involved withbehind the scenes running of the business, and they can simply focus on working to the best of their ability, in the job they do.

However, if you have employees who are quite full of ideas, employees who want to collaborate around the boardroom tables and who are always trying to understand the inner workings of the company they work for, this type of management style is not going to suit them well. As a result, you might find that morale falls and employees feel like they’re being dictated to all the time. This means team spirit is going to be non-existent.

There is no ‘bad’ management style, but there are a lot of bad managers out there, simply because their skills aren’t up to scratch.

Check out this video which talks about the autocratic management style in a bit more detail.

Do you think this management style would suit your business?

Perhaps you’re not the type of manager who feels comfortable with an autocratic style. You might be more about people and talking, discussing things and being open to ideas. If that’s the case then you might find a democratic style more fitting for you. However, there are some very successful companies who use the autocratic style to great effect, with McDonalds being one of them.

In this case, McDonalds don’t ask for suggestions or input from employees on any decisions the business makes or when it comes to changing working practices. Employees are simply told about the changes as these are implemented. However, this doesn’t make McDonalds a bad company to work for, because they have one of the most successful and high profile career progression programmes around.

Many McDonalds employees stick with the company for many years, so this just goes to show that the autocratic management style might sound rigid at first, but it can work in situations that suit it.

As for productivity, this type of management style can be successful because employees don’t have to worry about coming up with suggestions or worrying about what’s going to change because everything is communicated to them and they’re left to do the job they’re employed to do.

Whether or not this style suits you as a manager is a different thing because you have to be quite confident in your ability to manage a team in this way and to make strong decisions. If however, you’re someone who enjoys leading by example, someone who likes to deal with people on a day to day level and isn’t quite so engrossed in the business and decision-making side of things, the autocratic style may not be for you.

This is more of a strict management style, compared to a leadership style that allows autonomy for employees.

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