The Five Leadership Styles for Business Growth: Autocratic Leadership

If your team can’t move without you, you don’t have a productivity problem, you have a leadership bottleneck. We dig into autocratic leadership, the management style built around centralized decision making, top-down communication, strict rules, and tight oversight. It can look like “high standards” on the surface, but for most small businesses and growing service companies, it often creates slow decisions, stressed leaders, and a culture where employees stop thinking for themselves.

We walk through the core pillars: limited feedback loops, rigid workflows, and compliance-first execution. Then we get specific about the difference between real leadership and micromanagement. Monitoring can be healthy when it’s paired with coaching, mentoring, and consistent positive feedback. When leaders only “catch” mistakes, morale drops, psychological safety disappears, and employee autonomy collapses. That’s when your best people leave and you’re left wondering why you can’t keep rock stars.

There’s nuance here, too. Autocratic leadership can be useful in true crisis management, high-stakes environments, and moments where leaders must make high-impact decisions without asking for permission. The goal is learning when to be decisive and when to empower, so your organization moves fast and your team grows stronger instead of smaller. If you’re building a culture of innovation, faster decision making, and sustainable business growth, this will help you spot what to keep and what to cut. Subscribe, share this with a leader who needs it, and leave a review. Where do you think you overcontrol right now?

Transcript

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Five To Thrive Series Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, welcome back inside the studio as we continue on with our five essentials for record business growth series, which I call the Five to Thrive. We're currently in leadership. We're in the midst of a nice series that's gotten really good feedback. Remember, a couple goals that I have for all of you. And if you're just tuning in, I'll link everything you need below so you can start from the beginning. This is like a book. We're going chapter by chapter here. Always better watch from chapter one. You're gonna get more out of it. So I'll link that below if you're just tuning in. But a couple goals that we're hitting here with this particular series is one, we're trying to coin a brand new leadership style called iconic leadership. So all of you out there that follow me across the globe, the podcast listeners, our clients, people watch me on stage. I want all of you to be the iconic leaders that I know you can be, and you'll be the first type of leadership style ever called that. And it is gonna be amazing because what we're doing is we're gonna be taking the positives of all of the ones that we we're talking about. We're talking about the five leadership styles, right? We're entering part three today, and we're taking the positives of each, right? They all have their drawbacks, some more than others. And today's an example of one that has more drawbacks than the first two parts did. We're still gonna find some positives in this and we're gonna put them together and we're gonna make you the iconic leader I need all of you to be. The other goal that we have as we go through this series, remember is great leaders constantly self-reflect. So I need you to be looking at each leadership style and saying, hey, I that's me, right? Or hey, I'm a little of that, and a little of this one, and a little of that one, which is probably more true for everybody out there, right? But you also need to find the drawbacks and say, man, I'm doing that, I've got to stop. Okay, you need you to self-reflect and take good notes as we go through this journey together. Coming off transformational leadership, which was part one. Then we hit servant leadership, and now we're gonna talk about autocratic leadership. Let's find out what

What Autocratic Leadership Means

SPEAKER_00 1:54

that is. And that centralizes decision making with little input from the group, useful in urgent or high-risk situations, also useful in urgent high-risk businesses like emergency room, like life or death, or I need to cut off the right leg, amputate the right leg, right? Military, right? So while it's some of that is good for those businesses, those same things that are good for those high-risk businesses are also bad if you're a restaurant, a hotel, an orthodontic practice, maybe you're in Visaline as a corporation, right? Something like that, right? So you can see how maybe good for the high-risk business, not so good for the others. And we're gonna talk about that more as we dive in further. So let's dive into the core pillars of autocratic leadership. And the very first one is top-down communication style. That's information that flows almost exclusively in one direction. Policies are dictated, and feedback loops are minimal or non-existent. If you start back and you go through this entire leadership series, I reference feedback loops quite often, right? We're not gonna dive into that today. But when you come across the feedback loops and why they need to be consistent and why several people need to be involved, right, and why that's a positive in this new economy. This is a downside for it with this particular leadership style. Okay, it's kind of the opposite of all the good that can come back from feedback loops or come from feedback loops, okay? So they're minimal or non-existent. And the information is basically CEO to the janitor in that order, and it all stops with the CEO, which can create a lot of roadblocks stop gaps, and we're gonna talk about that here momentarily. Now, rigid structure and rules. Work environments are heavily standardized with strict workflows, guidelines, and boundaries. And you can see how, I'm gonna stop there, you can see how that would be great for military. That would be great for an emergency room in a life or death situation, right? So that's the positive. But these, and and I'm not telling you not to have strict guidelines, standardized workflows, that's good for all of you out there. It's just how it's verbalized and how it's carried out. Because autocratic leaders carry that out different. Transformational leaders, servant leaders that we dove into, right? They have very they're standardized, right? They've got the strict workflows and guidelines. Those are good things, right? It's just again, how are you communicating those? How do you handle those when they're broken and they're not followed? These leaders handle them in very different ways. Okay, autocratic leadership is not gonna look at a mistake as a positive, right? And that goes back to if I go in to get my left leg amputated in your emergency room and you take off my right one instead, no one's gonna look at that as a positive, right? I certainly am not gonna look at that as a positive now that both my legs are amputated, right? And they're not gonna look at that and go, hey, surgeon, that's okay. You learn from that and grow, right? Totally, totally different. Now, that mistake may lead to it never happening again, but still not a good thing, especially in the moment, right? But the way you look at that is very different inside a dental practice, orthopractice, restaurant, hotel, plumber, law firm, right? The mistakes are not life and death. The mistakes oftentimes you can look at them as a learning and growth opportunity, which we talked about in transformational leadership as well as servant leadership. So you can see how they're different in different types of businesses. Maybe good for one, definitely not so good for another one. Now, success relies on strict compliance with procedures rather than personal initiative and problem solving. And I'm gonna talk about this again in a minute. That goes back to autonomy and the importance of your employees having it, having them be free to make decisions on their own, right? If they come across a situation where they could choose A or B, let them make that choice and learn from it. Looking at mistakes as growth opportunities, autocratic leaders do not do that. All right, if they come across an A or if your employee comes across an A or B, I don't know which, what should I do? Right, autocratic leadership says, stop there and come ask me, right? And that's where the roadblocks can come in because come and ask me, they may not be there. They could be on an airplane, they could be in a meeting, they may not be there to make the decision. So the whole organization stops at that point, you can't move forward. And I'm gonna talk about that again here in just a minute. So success relies on strict compliance with procedures rather than personal initiative and problem solving. Again, going back to if you're an emergency room and it's a life or death situation, you're going back to military on the battlefield. This is good. This is good. Okay, if you go back to your a restaurant, right, that we help, your hotel that we help, your an orthodontic practice that we help, right? Those not so good. You want a you want autonomy. Otherwise, every five seconds your door's knocked on, and it's like, hey, you got a minute, you got a minute, and then you wonder why you have no time in your day because you're not dealing with higher level outcomes, which you should be, but most of you aren't. All right. Now, another one

Oversight Versus Micromanagement

SPEAKER_00 6:58

is strict oversight and monitoring. Now, there's some good for all businesses here, but how autocratic leaders carry it out, that's the difference. All right, that's what I don't want you to do, and that's what we're gonna be diving into right now. So, leaders closely supervise processes and individual performance to ensure tasks are completed precisely as specified. Let's stop there and talk about it for just a second. That a lot of times is good. Okay, so I want all of you, and I think this is a big mistake a lot of you make, is that your leaders, air quotes, your lead clinical assistant, right, your lead salesperson, your your lead VP of business development, your lead waiter, whatever it may be, they don't lead. Meaning that there's no time in the day where you have blocked, where they monitor what's going on. They they write down the weaknesses, they wipe down the strengths, they give instantaneous, like right then and there feedback of the positive. And that's where a big part of it, the transformational and the servant leadership, that's different than what autocratic is in these situations. Meaning, autocratic leaders, they monitor closely the processes and individualized performance to ensure tasks are completed precisely as specified. They're looking for errors and they are looking to make sure people are on point, following it step by step, and they are not doing their own thing. Again, going back to that is good in emergency room and that is good in the military, right? And I'm sure there's others out there, but those are two obvious examples. That is not good for your business, most likely. All right, because this right here, unfortunately, one of two things happen. One, you're not monitoring your people at all, right? And two, if you are, and this is what autocratic leaders do, right? They are looking for people to be on point and they are catching people, making mistakes, and giving them feedback right away. And if you're doing that in your business, you're gonna demoralize your team, your rock star employees are gonna leave. We're gonna talk more about this in a minute, right? What you need to be doing is monitoring these things and giving feedback about the positives, right? If if your husband or wife is always telling you everything you do wrong, right, and you're gonna tune them out. It's like, well, don't I do anything right? Your employees are the same way. If you're constantly catching people doing things wrong, but you're not saying, hey, Betty, great job. That was amazing at what you just did. You handled that so beautifully. Here's a couple tips, right? Let's add these tips next time you're handling that situation, but great job. I'm really proud of you. So many of you out there are completely missing that part of leadership, right? If so, it's not monitoring people to find them doing things wrong, it's monitoring people and catch them doing things right while also notating the things that they may be doing wrong, some of their weaknesses, so we can coach them and mentor them later, right? In our in our weekly block meeting, right, whatever it may be, in our role play sessions and our practice sessions, right? So we can give that feedback and make them better. That's mentorship, that's coaching, and that is leadership. But you can't do any of that if your lead clinical assistant, your lead waiter, your lead VP of business development, if they don't have block time in the day to watch, you can't do it. And that is such a major problem for so many of you out there because you have your lead clinical assistant chair side all day. You you have your lead waiter waiting tables all day. You've got your lead VP of business development selling all day. Meanwhile, you have all these team members that need help and guidance and mentorship, and you're not giving it. But what you end up giving is telling them all the things they're doing wrong. Right? So the autocratic leadership, this is great again for emergency rooms. You don't want people doing their own thing and you don't want autonomy there. Military, and I'm sure there's exceptions in the military, but but on the battlefield, right, we can go A or B. Like these are good things for the military in high-risk urgent situations. Not good for your business, not good for your business. All right. So two things I'm gonna reference and go back and review. You've got to have block time so your leaders can actually be leaders. They've got to monitor the floor, they've got to watch what other waiters are doing, watch what they're saying, those kind of things. Give feedback, role play with them. Your orthodontic practice, the assistants have to do the same thing. If you bring me in, those people are also gonna be responsible for making sure people are doing what I'm coaching. Right? They're my eyes on the ground floor in your day-to-day interaction. They have to have the block time to do it, and once you have the block time to do it, you have to be catching people doing things right. It's great for morale, great for the culture. Now, this minimizes, according to autocratic leadership, this minimizes errors, but significantly minimizes employee autonomy. Going back to if it's a high-risk emergency room, right? High risk situation military, you don't necessarily want autonomy, right? That's not gonna grow your business. Compliance grows your business. Okay, in your world that I'm talking to out there, autonomy is a great thing. And you're not gonna get it if you're overlooking their shoulder, looking for them saying, looking for them doing things wrong. You're looking over the shoulder, making them afraid to make a decision on their own, right? Making them afraid and they don't feel empowered to make a choice. And if that choice happens to not work out, right, you're gonna rip them a new one, right? You don't want those things, right? So we want autonomy in the businesses I'm talking to. We don't want autonomy in that high-risk, urgent situation, life or death. That is different. Now, also minimal delegation of decision

Delegation Gaps Create Bottlenecks

SPEAKER_00 12:23

making. So let's look at this. Tactical tasks are assigned to workers, power and autonomy are retained at the top. So the autonomy and autocratic leadership sits with the business owner, sits with the entrepreneur, sits with the CEO, sits with the president. And beyond that, it doesn't exist. Everything must be run by them, okay? And that is the opposite of what I am teaching all of you out there. Again, different if you're in emergency room, high high-risk situations. But to you all out there, this is not good. Okay, and subordinates execute operations, but strategic choices, problem resolution, and resource allocation remain solely at the top. So it sticks with the business owner. Now, so many of you have trouble scaling because of this. So many of you wonder, where does my time go? And it's because you're doing everything. Now you may not actually be doing it, but you're the one making the decision that allows people to do it. And they don't do it unless they ask you. And if they ask you and you're not available, then they have to wait and your whole business stops. And we're going to talk about that here again in just a second. So there's these bottlenecks waiting for you to give a yes or no. That is horrible for your small business, that is horrible for your corporation, that is horrible if you're an entrepreneur. You have several kinds of businesses, it is bad for all of you out there, and you should avoid it at all costs. All right. Again, going back to we want autonomy, we want our people to feel safe. So psychological safety, we want our people to feel empowered, and then they have to be trained. We're coming off people development. That was our past series. We want them to be trained, and that was part of the core dimensions of leadership. We want them to be trained, and if you have all those things, then they can make decisions on their own. And this leaves you with making high impact choices, high impact decisions. It frees you up, okay, and it reduces bottlenecks greatly. So, this again, minimal delegation of decision making, if it's high risk, right? Extremely urgent business matters out there, different story. Okay, but the vast majority of decision making is not high risk, it's not life or death. So it absolutely, absolutely delays

When Autocratic Decisions Make Sense

SPEAKER_00 14:32

things. Now, when it works, okay, and I here here's the thing. Again, it goes back to there's some good and there's some not so good of all of these. As we go through them, though, after servant and transformational leadership, those have way more positives than the rest. But the problem is many of you out there probably lead your organization more like this one that we're talking about today, or the other ones we're gonna be talking about in future episodes of this series. So, again, self-reflect, take notes, self-identify the good you are, the not so good you are, so you can start improving on your leadership skills. Okay, now when it works, like I was just referencing, best used in crisis management high-stakes environments like emergency rooms and military, like you've heard me reference many times already, right? But it also some other times for all the businesses out there where I where I've been referencing the majority of you, right, with some of the positives of Autocratic in the emergency room. It's not a positive for you in your business. But there are some, and I want to look at this high-level, high impact decision making. There are decisions as a corporation, there are decisions as a small business, there are decisions you make as an entrepreneur, there are decisions you make as a VP of sales, there are decisions that you make as an office manager, right? Which we which we coin the term chief leadership officer, right, inside your practice, right, is the restaurant manager. There are decisions that sometimes the employees do not need to know anything about, right? And that if you can make it, you can keep rolling the business, there's no bottlenecks, it can keep flowing, and you can explain it later, right? Those do exist. And autocratic leadership, those are great because so many of you, and we're gonna talk about this in another leadership style here. In I think it, I think it's in two more episodes beyond this one. There's some of you that want to get your team involved in everything, right? There's some of you that want to let the team make the decision, and that is not good leadership. Getting them involved in a lot of things, letting them be part of the decision-making process, that's good a lot of times, but that still doesn't mean they should make the decision for you. And then there are times where you just need to dig in and make the decision for yourself, and that's where this is good, okay. Now you as a leader have to determine when and where to use that, okay, when to get your team involved and when not to. And that's something I work with our private clients on for sure, to make sure Autocratic is used in the right scenarios. So, again, high-level, high impact decisions make decision making, and also when leading large change initiatives. And I I if you've followed me for a long time, you have heard me say this many, many times, no doubt about it. I'm gonna say it again.

Why Leaders Must Decide Alone

SPEAKER_00 17:14

Your employees are not there to make decisions for you. And there are all there are many, many times that you're gonna want to do something as a business owner when the employees aren't. Okay, and if you come in and and I've said this many times, how many people, business owners I've talked to in my career that needed what I do, that wanted to invest in what I do, and I could have helped them tremendously. That said to me, I need to go sure I need to make sure my team's okay with this. We've got to talk together. And and I'm like, no, you don't. And they're like, Yeah, I do. I got to get their permission. I don't feel comfortable doing this without their permission. And I knew after that phone conversation it was over. Because imagine this. Okay, team. Like this, this is me being you. Okay, team. Let's sit down. All right, okay, I've got this idea. I'm gonna bring this guy. His name's Brian Wright. You know, here's what he does. Blah, blah, blah. So one of the things he does is gonna make you role play, right? Another thing he does is gonna get you uncomfortable, right? He's gonna make you, he's gonna put you in scenarios that that you're placed in with our patients every day, with our customers every day, with our clients in the hotel every day. He's gonna put you in those scenarios. You're gonna be in front of your peers, right? And he's gonna go, go, handle it. And then he's gonna give you on-the-spot feedback and he's gonna say, implement that feedback. And we're gonna watch on-demand courses together, and we're gonna pause when he says pause, we're gonna role-play this together, we're gonna take notes, right? We're gonna get uncomfortable together, we're gonna get better together. So therefore, you all have the skill sets to go grow the business, right? But it's gonna be uncomfortable, but I need you to be on board. Okay, okay, imagine that, and that's not even how the conversation goes, right? The conversation is lack, I guarantee it's lackluster, it's permissive, there's no edification around it, there's no excitement around it, right? And imagine the conversation going the way it is said. Nine out of ten hourly employees is an example, and even nine out of ten executive level employees, they're not gonna want to do it. That's the last thing they're gonna want. Uncomfortable, role play in front of my peers, like learn presentation skills, be able to stand in front of a crowd and speak. That's the last thing I want. No way. And then the business owner's like, okay, we won't do it. And then they I either never hear from them again or I get a message, uh right, because they're too afraid to call. So I get a message like, sorry, we're not gonna do it. Boom! Exactly what I exactly what I expected. Right. So there are times where autocratic leadership, right, means make the freaking decision yourself and stop asking for permission from so many people. And we're gonna get into another one. It's called the Republic versus the permissive leadership style. And that's coming up, and it's a very similar conversation that I'm gonna have with you, just in a little bit different way. Some many of you, many of you out there, you need to put on the big boy pants, and you need to be okay with making a decision yourself without asking 20 of your friends, without without, without asking all of your employees, right? And and you've got to make the decision for yourself. And it goes back to does this decision impact in a good way your vision, your cause, your why? If the answer is yes, you do it. It does not matter if five of your friends say don't. They have different visions, they have different lives, they want different things out of their businesses. Stop asking for people's freaking permission and do it yourself. Right? And that's where the good part of autocratic leadership comes in. All right, a very, very positive.

Morale Loss And Rock Star Turnover

SPEAKER_00 20:34

Now, the risks of autocratic leadership. This is not the case. Again, going back to the high risk, the military, you're not gonna have people quitting the military and going back to the emergency room. You're not gonna have your great doctor in there go, screw it, I'm out. Right again, this goes back to all of you out there who I'm really talking to, right? All the other businesses that I've referenced and I always reference is here's the risk. This type of leadership lowers team morale. Okay, now when you lower team morale, right, you're gonna suppress, you're gonna suppress innovation. And and that's what I tell you all is that one of the cultures you should have is your employees innovate. They come with ideas, they know change is a norm in your organization, they know you're welcome to ideas. You they know that you're not threatened when they have a better idea than you, or their idea replaces your idea. You should want that culture, okay? Now, high turnover, and especially of the rock star employees. You say to yourself, Why do my good people leave? Why can't I find any good people? How do I motivate my good people? Autocratic leadership is a surefire way. Your good people are gone. Guaranteed. Because the good people want to be involved, they want to innovate, they want to be part of the decision-making process, which again, going back to that's a good thing to a certain extent, minus some of the scenarios that I was just talking about, right? And also, again, going back to the operational bottlenecks caused by a single decision maker. And I see this with businesses that we that we work with all the time. If you don't have autonomy, your people can't make decisions, they can't make decisions without worrying about the impact of what's going to happen to them. This is a bad thing, everybody. This means they are sitting around waiting for your decisions. And if you have 12 decisions to make, your business stalls. That's why this is a risk. And when those kind of things happen, it aggravates the rock star. The rock star employees are the ones that have the ability to be developed into rockstar employees, they hate that stuff. Right? The ones that are just good with the status quo, they don't innovate. When you ask them, what can I do better? They just sit there, they don't even give their feedback, they're not involved in your employee weekly meetings, right? Your roundtable discussions, they just sit there like a lump on a log. They just want a paycheck. Like you're not going to drive them out, you're going to attract them. And then you're wondering why? Why do I always get the wrong people? Why can't I develop anybody? Right? Then you wonder and you ask them yourself those questions. Well, again, it goes back to your leadership style. Can't you see it? Okay, so the autocratic leader is going to lead to rock stars leaving, bottlenecks, slow decision making. You all know how I feel about the slow decision making. You need to be the fastest decision maker on the planet. Screw it up, mess it up. And again, not if you're an emergency room. Different story. But I want you to screw it up, mess it up, and get it implemented fast because the other guy or girl is gonna take 20 years to implement it. They're gonna screw it up once they do. You screw it up first, fix it, etc. And that's not how autocratic leaders look at things, right? And they're also control freaks, and we've got to let go of that control. Okay, so this is we are rolling along here.

Next Up Empowerment Leadership

SPEAKER_00 23:39

We are doing some great things. The feedback is awesome, and now we're gonna be diving into the fourth part of this series called Empowerment Leadership. And I'm gonna link it below, and we'll see over there.