Becoming A Situational Leader

Oct 28

Occasionally during a leadership development session, a curious leader will struggle to try to find the right type of style to use when leading people or managing an organization. The answer I typically offer when asked about what style I think they should use is, “It depends!” That may sound like a brush-off or a nonanswer, but stay with me on this. I am a big fan of Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard's situational leadership theory, and I want to use that as a point about a possible answer — but first, let us review where they were coming from.

From my business school studies, I learned of MOB, the management of organizational behaviors, and it was then that Dr. Blanchard’s name came up as one of the authors of the seminal works on the subject in a 1969 book of the same name, Management of Organizational Behavior. That is where he and his co-author, Hersey, originally introduced situational leadership as the “life cycle theory of leadership.” When I heard Blanchard mentioned, my mind raced backed to this little book called The One Minute Manager I had run out and bought when I was struggling as a first-time leader. This book was inspirational to me, but it had been some years since I had last thought about it, so you can imagine I sat up and listened. I am not sure how widespread the book is in this age of information or if it has even been updated and re-released, but for me in 1985, I was blown away by Blanchard.

Basically, their point goes that great leadership is not fixed but a combination of the variables of task and behavior — and there is no “best style.” So, going back to the question about what style to use, as Dr. Mike Clayton suggests in his video on the topic of situation leadership, this question is the wrong question. Using a situational leader mindset, it should be, “What’s the right form of leadership for this person and in this context?”

You see, most of us recognize the differences in people, and if you know your people, hopefully by now you might know how each is different. We know that they each might be motivated by different things. One person may need plenty of clear guidance; the next may just want to know the objective, and let them at it. Others may have a need to analyze all sides of the equation before they come up with action. Every employee is different, and Hersey and Blanchard posit that your style should shift or change depending on the person you are working with and what you are trying to accomplish.

In my leader development workshops and coaching, I use a couple of tools to describe personality or social styles to my participants. Some are branded products, like the Everything DiSC and TRACOM Social Styles. They have some similarities, but both can trace their theories and models back to William Moulton Marston’s 1928 study of the Emotions of Normal People. In that book, he describes how normal people (you and I, which at the time was a seldom-studied group) “do things for various reasons and are motivated by their reasons, not ours.” His point was that each of us could possess many traits, so he developed a system to categorize the different styles people exhibited, which “could change depending upon environmental factors and differing situations.” He called the factors dominance, influence, steadiness and compliance, now colloquially known as DiSC or the DiSC model.

Now, getting back to leadership style and how to decide the approach to take with your charges, and with respect to Hersey and Blanchard and the great work they have done, what might be lost, and to me is an obvious step, is that you must get to know your people first, or you will never know their personality, style or how to adjust your approach in a situation. This goes for being a member of a team or a member of an action group. It is important for you to not only understand the behavior variables, but to also understand the skill and level of commitment of your personnel (or the team).

There has been new thought since Hersey and Blanchard, and more so since Marston, but how one classifies personality styles or identifying the differences in people is a soft skill that leaders must nurture and develop. And then, by understanding how behaviors influence the competencies of our people, we must be able to shift our approach to adjust to those variables.

My final advice is that we cannot be so rigid in our leadership style that we believe there is only one way to do things or that we have to treat everybody the same. Situational leadership takes more mental and emotional energy to employ, but if you are trying to guide and support your people, it is one proven approach that will likely produce better results.