We have asked Williams Johnston, Commercial Director of the Great Place to Work® Institute in the UK, to set out his thoughts on why leadership style is so important to successful organisational performance.

Old-style imperial leadership is unlikely to deliver the best financial results or get the best out of the people who work for you, argues Williams.

Marnix Eikenboom, the Dutch-born general manager of Danone Ltd, the UK subsidiary of a world leader in dairy products and bottled water, is one of the new breed of business leaders whose company's performance is far outstripping that of its competitors.

What is exceptional about Eikenboom, who also coaches the local hockey team in Woking, is the way in which he has devolved power to those who work for him. But to assume that he is some utopian idealist or that he has relinquished his role as leader would be a grave misjudgement.

"Marnix is very much the boss," says one of his senior managers. "He's approachable and informal. He believes in work-/life balance, but you had better know your stuff because he will hold you fully-accountable. He's no softie."

It is no accident that Danone Ltd topped our 2009 UK’s Best Workplaces ranking. A ground-breaking health programme, dedicated employee training and volunteering programme, among many other features, helped secure its edge over other contenders.

But what really marked Danone out was the style and tone of its leadership. Here at Great Place to Work® Institute we've been working with some of the world's most successful organisations for the past 25 years, helping them to transform their workplaces. We've learned a thing or two along the way, but one thing seems clear: a new style of leader is emerging, and one who is strongly out-performing those who still adhere to old-style imperial forms of authority.

What we are seeing is the type of leadership of Mahatma Gandhi, or even Barrack Obama, where the leader shares and derives power from those around him or her. It is not a soft option, but rather one that imposes stricter accountability on those who work for you.

Despite the recession, Danone has continued to enjoy double digit growth in the UK with sales of €281 million last year – a performance that far exceeds the returns normally found in Fast Moving Consumer Goods. UK staff enjoy free private medical insurance, health checks, healthy living education, free fruit, yoghurt and mineral water at work and a weekly 15-minute head and shoulders massage in return for staff putting a £1 into the good causes kitty.

But strong performance isn't just about generous perks. What makes Danone's leadership so exceptional is its underlying acknowledgement that everyone counts and its commitment to employee engagement. Eikenboom and his top team have devolved power to employees who work in small family-like forums, and who are fully accountable for their actions. Its 'Leadership for All' programme as the name implies is run for everyone regardless of rank.

What our experience at Great Place to Work® Institute has shown over many years is that what employees really want are leaders that allow them the self-determination that traditional management practices have so frequently denied them. The interactive leader:

1. Empowers people around them
2. Nurtures trust and communicates
3. Involves employees in decisions

Conversely companies that fail:

1. Don't consult others or heed advice
2. Are secretive and uncommunicative
3. Lack empathy and self-awareness

Kenneth Lay, the head of Enron displayed many of the above negative behaviours, even though Enron emerged – albeit briefly – as an employer of choice as a result of its generous employee packages. Formula One has been beset by recent high-profile squabbles that nearly split the sport. It is no coincidence that F1A has been dominated by two highly authoritarian figures, Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosely, both of whom appear to wield power in a highly authoritarian manner, which far from inspiring, has alienated the majority of its members who do not trust the leadership.

What we do know at Great Place to Work® Institute is that trust, once lost, is very hard to restore. Consistent winners in our Best Workplaces Programme enjoy noticeably higher levels of trust. That involves their leaders ensuring that rewards are more evenly distributed than in other companies.

One of the most striking characteristics of the current recession has been the erosion of trust. Edelman's 2009 Trust Barometer reveals that 62% of the 4,500 employees surveyed trust businesses less than they did a year ago. Yet the companies that are holding up well take trust very seriously.

Take for example, motor insurer Admiral Group Plc, which came sixth in our 2009 Best Workplace survey, and which has been a consistent winner in our annual survey over a number of years. Founder and chief executive Henry Engelhardt has placed trust at the centre of everything Admiral does – it is regarded as the single most important determinant of its business success.

As a result of this approach, Admiral has been able to avoid the type of high-profile difficulties and layoffs that have beset many competitors. Great emphasis is placed on internal communications. Staff regularly receive business performance updates and reassurances that there are no plans to scale back on jobs. Admiral's senior management has a good track when it comes to integrity – staff tend to believe what they're being told, which also has a direct impact on their motivation to do their best.

Admiral is a company that has also worked hard to ensure that rewards are more evenly distributed. Staff enjoyed the proceeds of the management buyout in 1999, with post room ladies netting in some cases, £33,000 each. But Engelhardt does not believe that money is necessarily behind his company's success. "I don’t hand out £20 notes. People just keep coming up with great suggestions, because, I believe, we give them the freedom to do so.”

The other important aspect about leadership is that the best leadership tends to be rather more long-term than the five years or so which now accounts for the average tenure of a FTSE 100 chief executive. In Admiral's case, Engelhardt has been in situ since 1991, which gives him a perspective and an accountability to his employees that more short-term bosses lack.

In my own country, Brazil, there is a particularly visionary business leader called Ricardo Semler, the majority owner of Semco in São Paulo, who rejected Taylorism, the theory of industrial driven processes that has dominated management thinking for most of the twentieth century. Instead his employees work in family-like units of no more than a dozen people. They are allowed to select their own leaders, set their own goals and even decide the level of pay that they should award themselves. Far from being the recipe for disaster that some might imagine, Semco, once an unfashionable conglomerate, has grown by 900% in ten years, moved in industry rankings from 56th position to number four and number one position in each of the service activities in which it specialises. It has grown from 100 employees to 3,000 and has an enviable staff turnover rate of about 1%.

Semler regards himself as a type of a coach. His job, he says, as leader is to challenge the decisions of others. The company pretty much runs itself, which is just as well since Semler narrowly escaped death in 2005 after being involved in a horrendous high-speed crash on a Brazil highway. His company carried on seamlessly during the ensuing months he spent lying in intensive care recovering from the multiple surgeries needed to repair his shattered neck and face. Numbers were met, deals closed and business carried on. Now that's what I call real leadership.