Campbell and Samiec are co-founders of 5-D Leadership, a leadership development training, coaching and consulting consortium. They outline five leadership styles, with examples of each, and they show readers how to build each leadership style for themselves based on the strengths they already possess.

The leadership styles are the following:

Commanding. Used less often in today’s collaborative working world, this style—“taking charge and seeking immediate compliance,” as Campbell and Samiec describe it—still can be necessary in crises. Building blocks to develop a commanding style include learning to set priorities, issue clear directives, track compliance and enforce consequences if directives aren’t followed.
Visioning. If staff members are losing their personal connection to their work, if tragedy strikes the workplace or if the group’s focus grows fuzzy, visioning leadership can create and communicate a clear picture of the future. Visioning requires learning to create a picture of the organization’s desirable future, to communicate that picture and to recognize people’s contributions publicly.
Enrolling. These leaders seek input or use democratic processes at work to get commitment from employees. When leaders need to improve quality, enrolling leadership is appropriate.
An enrolling leadership style is built from eliciting input, actually implementing others’ ideas, giving public credit for others’ ideas and learning to make decisions by consensus.
Relating. The relating leader creates and maintains “harmonious relations” in the workplace in a style best used when there are rifts, communication problems or workplace stress.
Relating leaders care about the whole person, paying attention to employees’ lives outside work and the impact those lives have on work. The book looks at ways to be more encouraging toward individual employees and workgroups and how to mediate conflicts.
Coaching. This leadership style develops individual employees’ potential and performance while aligning their goals with the company’s.
Would-be coaching leaders receive help in assessing strengths, weaknesses, motivations and potential of employees and teams. Finding stretch assignments, giving effective performance reviews and locating appropriate training opportunities build the coaching style.

5-D Leadership contains tools, including checklists of leadership strengths, worksheets to help you determine specific situations when you demonstrated successful leadership (and to help you figure out what you did right), and advice on soliciting and using 360-degree feedback about your skills. The book provides sample scenarios with questions to gauge your reactions and leadership styles in specific situations. Once readers have learned about leadership styles and examined their own strengths, they can draw help from the book in identifying the leadership contexts at work in their offices.

For example, in a fast-paced workplace, visioning and coaching might be needed to maintain focus, while an organization dealing with a sudden crisis might call for a commanding style with visioning and relating aspects.

Campbell and Samiec provide worksheets that let readers look at varied business contexts and then decide for themselves which leadership styles apply.