How leadership style affect employees performance

I used to think my team needed a stronger leader. The kind who could walk into a room, make a decision in three minutes, and push everyone to deliver faster. I tried it for a quarter. Revenue grew. So did churn. My best engineer stopped talking in meetings. Our operations lead began to mirror my urgency with her team and burned them out. I was told I was inspiring and intimidating in the same sentence. That was the first hint that style is not seasoning you sprinkle on a plan. It is the plan. It shapes how information moves, how people decide, and how work feels at 11.30 p.m. on the last day of the month.

Founders love to debate which style is best. Do we need a visionary or a servant leader, a tough coach or a consensus builder. The honest answer is less pretty. Your style is either helping the business ship value repeatably or it is creating drag that you cannot see because your title protects you from the consequences. What your team does when you are not in the room tells the truth. I learned this in Kuala Lumpur, in Riyadh, and in Singapore. Different markets. The same tension. Style without design breaks execution. The damage shows up in missed handoffs, rework, and people who start playing it safe because the safest person wins the meeting.

In one Saudi accelerator I coached a founder who ran product by gut. He was charismatic and fast. His team tried to match his speed. They shipped ambitious features, then rushed fixes. Users loved the vision and complained about reliability. When I asked who had authority to block a release, everyone looked at him. He thought he was empowering. What he had done was make himself the only real owner of quality. The team learned a dangerous lesson. If the founder is excited, details are optional. That is a leadership style problem dressed up as market urgency.

I also worked with a Malaysian e-commerce team run by a gentle CEO who avoided conflict. They liked him. He wanted to be supportive. He ran long weekly check ins that stayed pleasant even when revenue dipped. People came out of meetings feeling heard, but nobody made the hard calls. The marketing head kept campaigns alive even when repeat purchase data showed they were losing money. Everyone waited for alignment that never arrived. Morale did not drop. Output did. The CEO wore kindness like armor, but kindness without boundaries becomes avoidance. Avoidance is expensive.

Then there was a Singapore B2B startup built by two cofounders who split the difference. One pushed, one soothed. On paper it looked balanced. In practice it created whiplash. Teams calibrated to whoever spoke last. Sales got a big quota after one call, then a softer target after the next. People learned to lobby the cofounder who matched their preference. That is not culture. That is politics with nicer lighting.

Here is the pattern I now trust. Style defines what people believe will be rewarded or punished. People then optimize for that belief. Work quality follows the belief, not the words on your values poster. If your style rewards speed over clarity, you will get fast code and fragile systems. If your style rewards harmony over truth, you will get calm meetings and expensive surprises. If your style rewards whoever sounds confident, you will get confident guesses and quiet data.

So how leadership style affect employees performance. Start with what performance actually is. It is not busyness or smiles or a demo that impresses new investors. Performance is the repeatable creation of customer value with the smallest amount of chaos your stage allows. Anything that increases chaos more than value is a tax. Your style can either reduce this tax or add to it.

The moment my thinking changed was not in a workshop. It was during a Friday retro where I asked a simple question. What did we ship this week that made a user’s life better, and where did we make our own lives harder to achieve it. My product manager pulled up a list. Two things shipped. One solved a real issue. The other created five new support tickets. She showed me the approval path. It had my name on it three times. I realized my style had become a bottleneck disguised as standards. I was slowing things down and making people work around me. I gave great feedback and trained everyone to need it. That was not leadership. That was control.

Here is what I rebuilt the next quarter. First, I separated my identity from the need to be the smartest person in the room. It sounds small. It is not. Style starts with what you are trying to prove. If you need to be the hero, your team becomes your audience. Audiences clap. They do not own. I told the team my new job was to make my presence optional for the system to run. I meant it. We set a rule that any decision below a certain risk threshold could be made without me. We documented what risk meant in our context. We defined what a reversible decision is. We made a call on who owns the rollback when something goes wrong. That gave everyone a way to move that did not depend on my mood or calendar.

Second, I stopped giving half feedback. Half feedback is when you say this could be cleaner without defining clean. It leaves people guessing and performing around your taste. We replaced taste with criteria. For product specs we agreed on what a good spec contains. For marketing we listed what a good experiment must prove by day 14. For sales we wrote the three signals that qualify a lead. Once criteria live in the team, style matters less because clarity carries the weight. People get better because the game is clear. If they fail, they know why. If they win, they know what to repeat.

Third, I changed the meetings. I used to speak first. Now the owner of the topic speaks first. I used to critique line by line. Now I ask the owner what feedback they need, then I give just that. I used to close the meeting with my summary. Now the owner closes with theirs and the next steps. These are small moves. They teach the team that authority lives with the person who does the work, not with the person whose name is on the company record. Respect follows ownership. Performance follows respect.

Fourth, I built a conflict rule that works in Southeast Asia and in KSA where face and dignity matter. We do criticism in private within 48 hours. We do praise in public within 48 hours. We do decisions in the open with the reasoning written down. People stop guessing when the reasoning is visible. They stop hoarding when they know praise will land in daylight. They stop storing resentment when they know hard conversations will not be delayed until QBRs.

I will not pretend these changes are easy. A founder in Riyadh told me that giving away decisions felt like giving away purpose. I told her to try the two week disappearance test. Imagine leaving for two weeks with your phone off. What still happens and what collapses. Your style should make the first list longer and the second list shorter. If everything slows, you are not leading a company. You are running a show. Shows end. Companies continue.

Here is the quiet truth that took me too long to accept. People do not need a leader who is always right. They need a leader who makes it safe to surface what is wrong early and then fixes the system that allowed it. They need consistency more than intensity. They need rules that respect the market and the culture they live in. In Malaysia, direct confrontation often backfires. In Saudi, social trust is currency. In Singapore, speed is expected but so is precision. A smart style bends to context without betraying standards. That is not being fake. That is being effective.

Let me talk about servant leadership because it gets romanticized. Serving your team does not mean saying yes. It means building the scaffolding that holds decisions when things get heavy. It means taking the first hard call so others can learn what it looks like. It means removing obstacles that people are embarrassed to name, like a broken procurement process or a calendar that rewards back to back meetings and punishes deep work. It means modeling the behavior you keep asking for. If you want people to be on time, start on time. If you want honest updates, thank the person who brings bad news first. If you want ownership, stop rescuing.

If you are a visionary leader, your risk is weather. Teams work hard on sunny days and get lost when the forecast changes. You have to anchor vision in a cadence that people can trust. Tie the big story to the next sprint. Translate the three year dream into what success looks like by Friday. Do it every week until it bores you. Bored leaders create stable teams. The showman in me resisted this. The operator in me knows this is where performance lives.

If you are a tough coach, your risk is learned helplessness. People stop taking initiative because they expect correction. Set a minimum threshold where you do not intervene. Let a non critical mistake land. Watch how the team repairs it. Reward the repair more than you punish the mistake. The market will punish you anyway. Your job is to teach recovery that gets faster over time.

If you are consensus driven, your risk is drift. Consensus feels respectful until it postpones truth. Set time limits on alignment. Define what consent means. Often it is not I love this. It is I can live with this and will support it. Write that sentence on your wall. Then ask people to say it when you close a decision. People are brave when you make it simple to be brave.

So how leadership style affect employees performance in the end. It shapes whether your team spends energy doing work or managing you. It dictates how fast information moves from the field to the roadmap. It decides if meetings are performance or progress. It turns values into habits or into posters no one remembers. You will know your style is working when output becomes calmer while quality goes up. You will know it is not working when people look to you for permission more than for context.

If you take one step this week, do this. Ask three people at different levels what they think you reward and what they think you punish. Do not defend. Just write it down. Then compare their answers to what you think you reward and punish. The gap is your real leadership style. That gap explains your performance trend line better than any dashboard.

I wish someone had told me earlier that leadership style is not about who you admire. It is about what your team needs to repeat without you. It is about building a system that survives your bad days and your great ones. It is about designing meetings, rules, and defaults that match your market and your people. It is about being boring in the right places so the work can be brave where it counts. When a team stops performing around the leader and starts performing around the work, everything changes. Customers feel it. Revenue shows it. Retention reflects it. That is when style becomes substance. That is when you finally get to lead the company you imagined, not the one that depends on your mood.

If you are there already, protect it. If you are not, do not panic. Pick one ritual to redesign. Shift who speaks first. Make your approval optional. Write the reasoning. Praise in daylight. Correct in private. Do it for a quarter. Watch who steps up. You will see the culture you have built, not the one you hoped for. Then you will know exactly what to change next.