The Managerial Grid

Disciplines > Leadership > Leadership styles > The Managerial Grid

Description

Leaders may be concerned for their people and they also must also have some concern for the work to be done. The question is, how much attention to they pay to one or the other? This is a model defined by Blake and Mouton in the early 1960s.

Concern for People	High	Country Club management		Team management
	Medium		Middle of the road management
	Low	Impoverished management		Authority-compliance
		Low	Medium	High
		Concern for Production (Task)

Impoverished management

Minimum effort to get the work done. A basically lazy approach that avoids as much work as possible.

Authority-compliance

Strong focus on task, but with little concern for people. Focus on efficiency, including the elimination of people wherever possible.

Country Club management

Care and concern for the people, with a comfortable and friendly environment and collegial style. But a low focus on task may give questionable results.

Middle of the road management

A weak balance of focus on both people and the work. Doing enough to get things done, but not pushing the boundaries of what may be possible.

Team management

Firing on all cylinders: people are committed to task and leader is committed to people (as well as task).

Discussion

This is a well-known grid that uses the Task vs. Person preference that appears in many other studies, such as the Michigan Leadership Studies and the Ohio State Leadership Studies. Many other task-people models and variants have appeared since then. They are both clearly important dimensions, but as other models point out, they are not all there is to leadership and management.

The Managerial Grid was the original name. It later changed to the Leadership Grid.

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