As a leader, you are always trying to be a better manager. Countless thought leadership pieces have been drawn up that attempt to illustrate the perfect management style. However, in my opinion, there is no single answer.

No single management style works for everyone. You could be the perfect manager, but depending on your strengths, characteristics and experience, your management style will differ from other great leaders. You may even find that your management style changes over time and in different situations. Great managers often adapt their management style to accommodate their employees and their current business climate.

Even though you may not find a predetermined management style that fits you to a T, there are elements of management styles that you can target to better yourself as a leader. Here are three management styles to consider.

Be a coach.

This is a popular type of leadership style that has been written about for years. We often hear managers and owners use sports metaphors, calling employees teammates, so it’s hardly surprising that some business leaders like to think of themselves as coaches.

Being a coach is the opposite of being a dictator. Sure, there have certainly been successful athletic coaches who use their temper as a strategy — I won’t name names, but you know who they are. The best coaches, however, are the ones who inspire their players to excel and don’t frighten or threaten them to improve. I recommend aiming to be one of those coaches the team loves to work with. Your blood pressure may thank you.

Be a visionary.

It’s exactly what you think. Visionary leadership (subscription required) is a concept in which business owners and managers look to the future, set goals and do everything they can to get the company there.

Visionary leadership is important and sometimes vital. It’s why a company like IBM is still around. IBM made time card clocks for companies when it was founded in 1911. You don’t start off making time card clocks and become a computer giant by having people at the top who aren’t thinking ahead.

NCR Corporation is another fun example — a hugely successful company that, among other things, makes ATMs and barcode scanners. It started in 1881 making cash registers. I don’t claim to be an NCR historian, but I assume they’ve had a few visionary leaders at the helm.

Now, of course, just because you are visionary doesn’t mean your vision is right. In the 1990s, if you were a camera manufacturer, you might have thought that it was ridiculous to prepare to compete with cell phone companies, and, well, you would have been wrong.

So, while you want to be able to inspire people to see your concept of the future, and hopefully get them just as excited about achieving long-term goals as you are, it’s also smart to recognize that your prophecies for your own company may not be accurate. You should surround yourself with other visionary employees so you don’t make decisions in a vacuum.

As the saying goes, if you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Be transformational.

This sounds like visionary leadership, but it’s really a combination of coaching and visionary leadership that leads to transformation. For me, the hallmark of transformational leadership is encouraging your employees to think for themselves, to innovate, have good habits and to have high standards.

It’s really about living your best work life. If you think about it, it’s hard to excel if you aren’t engaged in good daily habits and if you aren’t empowered to think and come up with new strategies to do things better. To be a transformational leader is to strive to be your best self and encourage your team to be their best selves.

It isn’t an easy pursuit to be an effective transformational leader, and more days than not, you’ll probably fall short of where you want to be. But if you’re continually working hard to be a transformational leader, that’s exactly the place you want to be.

Most businesses, after all, don’t endure because they stay the same. Sure, an ice cream company might brag about how its recipe has remained the same for 50 or more years, but that business hasn’t remained the same. It once ran ads in the newspaper; now it’s selling ice cream through its website, social media and app. If my hypothetical ice cream company is truly transformational and visionary and coaches its employees, management may be looking into self-driving delivery trucks and drones that deliver ice cream to homes.

Your business can thrive if you and your team are continually trying to grow, evolve and improve. That starts and ends with your management style. That’s because if you ever become uninterested in leading, at some point, your employees and customers are going to follow somebody else.

View the original article here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2021/04/08/three-management-styles-to-target/?sh=3331187c5c21