Institute of Brunei Technical Education (IBTE) is a new autonomous tertiary educational institution, a replacement of the department of technical education. One of the core values of IBTE is to persistently find better ways of doing things and deliver the highest quality of service to the stakeholders. At the same time, IBTE aims not be complacent with the existing accomplishments but rather tries to commit to seek continuous improvement. However, minor investigation has been conducted into leadership styles in tertiary education in Brunei Darussalam, particularly, in departmental leadership. Therefore, the overarching purpose of this study was to determine the leadership styles of academic leaders as perceived by academic leaders themselves and lecturers in IBTE. A quantitative approach informed with post positivist techniques was used in this study.  Survey method was used to directly reach many respondents, administer the instruments and collect the required data. A survey questionnaire was administered to randomly selected academic leaders (N=38) and lecturers (N=36) from 5 different IBTE campuses. SPSS version 23 was used to analyse the data using descriptive statistics such as means, percentages and standard deviations.  The findings of the study indicate that the most prevalent leadership styles used in IBTE, as perceived by academic leaders were, distributed, transformational and transactional leadership style respectively, whereas lecturers perceived the existing leadership styles of academic leaders as distribute, transactional and transformational. It was also found that the least practiced leadership styles were laissez-faire and autocratic leadership style. It is recommended for policymakers and senior leaders of the institute to provide leadership training to further enhance the leadership knowledge and skills of the academic leaders.