Strategic Management: Situational Leadership

Practice Situational Leadership to strategically adjust your actions to align with the situation and associated needs.

Tool Summary:

Situational leadership is a framework that helps you assess the situation at hand to determine how directive, supportive, or hands-off you need to be as a manager to achieve your desired results. In 1969, Blanchard and Hersey developed Situational Leadership Theory in their book Management of Organizational Behavior. 

There are two steps: (1) assess your situation considering the time available, the skill, and the will of the audience (collectively referred to as performance readiness), and (2) pick the best action to take – telling, selling, supporting, or delegating.

How to Apply:

To apply Situational Leadership you need to start by building your awareness of the actions you take as a manager. You need a level of mindfulness to understand how and when you can and should adjust your actions and behaviors to accomplish your ideal outcome. 

Next, consider your situation at hand from the 3 perspectives below. 

Time:

• How much time do you have? 

• How much time should you spend on the work at hand? 

• What is the risk or impact of this work?

Will:

• What is the willingness (degree of motivation) of your audience to complete this task?

• How bought in and committed are they to the work?

Skill:

• What is the skill level of your team member or target audience?

• How capable (based on their current skills) are they of completing the work? 

• Do they have the required tools, resources, or information?

Considering the time available, the skill and the will (performance readiness) of your audience consider which of the 4 situational approaches would be most likely to yield desired results and lead to success. 

Directing: 

Directive behavior can be considered authoritative or instructive. This approach is most effective when the situation at hand is time sensitive and your team member lacks the skills needed to execute. When a lack of skill and time means that you are unable to quickly delegate tasks, you will need to give instructions instead. 

When you need things done in a certain way and the risks are too great to allow for mistakes or failure, for example in crisis situations, a directive approach may be the best way to resolve the situation quickly. Think about a high-profile client, a big account, or a compliance process – anything where the work needs to be done in a specific manner to achieve results. Usually, your approach needs to be swift and instructional.

If you find you are often using a directing approach for the same tasks, consider whether you could move to a supporting and eventually a delegating approach. 

When the work is too complex to give quick instructions, it is also time to consider how you could shift to a supporting or delegating approach.

Selling: 

Selling is a consensus-driven behavior. A selling approach is appropriate when your audience lacks will and skill, and you have time available. To increase will, you need buy-in. You can build buy-in by involving your audience- asking questions, brainstorming, leading collaborative conversations, pitching a new idea, or facilitating a Q&A, etc. to help you find alignment. 

This is very useful when you want to solicit multiple ideas, innovate on a new solution or ensure everyone is aligned on the work.

Selling takes a lot of time and could lead to stalling from indecision. Consider the culture you need around decision-making, disagreement, and ownership. Depending on the work at hand, determine when and how long to be in selling mode.

When you find your team members are gaining in skills and you no longer need to focus on creating buy-in, you can move into a participating approach.

Supporting: 

Supporting involves participation and is a collaborative behavior. You are using a supporting approach anytime you are working directly with your team and focused on their development. This may look like training, teaching, coaching, shadowing, partnering, pairing, etc. 

This approach is most effective when your audience is highly willing and at least moderately skilled and you have time to participate. 

As with any participation your audience needs to be fully willing, they need to be bought in on and aware of the development target, the gap between where they are now, and what it will take to get there. 

If you do not have the buy-in move back to asking. Once you see that your team members have gained skill and confidence you can move to delegating or do a hybrid, developmental delegation.

Delegating: 

Delegating is a hands-off behavior. This is when you empower another team member to do the work. You can and should still align on basic expectations, especially around timing and metrics of success. It is the least directive approach. How much you align on delegated work depends on how much room there is for variation. Be critical of yourself here. What details are truly important? As long as results are achieved, give your team members space to work in the way that’s best for them.

Example

Directing:

“We have a meeting with marketing tomorrow at 2p and will need the final mock-up of the new product launch by then. Can you implement all of the feedback today by 3p and email it to me, so I can review it and incorporate it into my presentation tomorrow?” 

Selling:

“We have a meeting with marketing tomorrow at 2p and will need the final mock-up of the new product launch by then. How are you feeling about my feedback for the mock-up? What do you think we should change? How should we best distribute the work? What timeline makes sense here?

Supporting:

“We have a meeting with marketing tomorrow at 2p and will need the final mock-up of the new product launch by then. I booked time for us to review the feedback, finalize the mock-up, and practice the presentation together.”

Delegating:

“We have a meeting with marketing tomorrow at 2p and will need the final mock-up of the new product launch by then. Do you have everything you need to get that ready?”

Measuring Results

Ideal results from practicing situational leadership depend on your goals. Maybe you are noticing you are spending too much time on work, you are getting pushback from your team members, you want more collaborative problem-solving, your team members want development opportunities or you need to delegate more. 

In any scenario, start by quantifying results today and consider how you can measure change. Measurements should both be objective and qualitative- what would change look like and what would it feel like? 

This tool can be iterative and fluid at the moment. The most impactful change may be greater awareness of your actions and an ability to pivot live as you receive feedback from your audience. 

Source

Blanchard, K. (2022). Create success with a situational approach to leadership. SLII® - A Situational Approach to Leadership, from https://www.kenblanchard.com/Solutions/SLII