Pacesetting leadership is one of the many leadership styles available in the modern business world. Just like other leadership styles such as transformational and transactional leadership, the pacesetting leadership style has its own unique characteristics.
Pacesetting leadership is a type of leadership that can be seen when a leader leads the team from the front. They constantly set high standards for the team and expect the team to achieve exceeding the expectations with minimum supervision and management. This can be seen when the manager sets the rhythm to the activities and demand the team to continue based on that intensively and perform exceeding management expectations.
In simple terms, pacesetting leadership is when the leader sets an example by showing high performance, high quality, and high pace in business activities. Team members are expected to follow the leader. Pacesetting leaders are highly result-oriented and expect the team to provide results exceeding the expectations.
This kind of leadership is ideal for reaching short-term goals in business. It is also identified that this leadership method can be unfavorable for the employees in the long term as it can demotivate the employee’s performance and engagement.
Pacesetting leadership has several prerequisites for it to work well in an organization.
– The team should consist of a highly skilled team that requires minimum supervision and management
– The leader should be skillful and capable of leading the entire team from the front
– The environment and the culture of the team should be supportive for constant improvement
– The requirements from the team should be clearly communicated to the team and the leader should get confirmed whether all the team members are thorough with the expectations from them
-The team members should be self-motivated as the business process to exceed the leader expectations can be highly intensive
There are many advantages and disadvantages that can be identified in the pacesetting leadership style.
Advantages of Pacesetting Leadership
– Quick achievement of business goals
The concentration of the output and achieving the requirement within a strict timeline is the specialty of pacesetting leaders. As it is ideal for achieving short-term goals, it can be advantageous for the organization to achieve the business goals quickly but successfully.
– Allows highlighting the abilities and competencies of the skills of the team
Being able to achieve the expected outcome even with the pressure of the process can be used as a method of showing the capabilities and the skills of the team. Pacesetting leaders work well with a highly-skilled, experienced, and motivated team. Such teams are already aware of the effective utilization of competencies and capabilities of each team member and how to use those skills to achieve the best and fast results. Apart from that, this leadership style allows the leader to recognize the strong competencies and skills within the team and use those skills to improve the productivity of the production process.
-Fast and quick address of issues
Since the process is intense and extremely result-oriented, it is necessary to address the issues in the production process as quickly as possible and take necessary actions to solve the issues and minimize the impact.
Disadvantages of Pacesetting Leadership
– Cause demotivation to the employees
Since the pressure and expectation are high in the pacesetting leadership style, the employees have to work extra hard and they should give their maximum effort to achieve what is expected by the leader while following the leader’s working pattern. This can be stressful and demotivate employees. Lack of business innovation and result orientation by following leader’s footprints can be exhausting and it can create a high employee turnover rate in the business.
– Repetitive and boring work routines
Due to the extreme level of result orientation, there is a lack of room for creativity and innovation. The tight deadlines simply push the employees to continue repetitive work patterns performing their specialized tasks.
– Little or no feedback from the leader
Pacesetting leaders expect the team to follow his footsteps and achieve the targets with minimum supervision. This leads to a minimum or no feedback from the leaders. It blocks the employees’ opportunities to grow and increase their skills and capabilities.