Situational Leadership

Situational Leadership – The Importance of Adapting to Circumstances

Purpose

Whatever type of organisation you work in, every day is likely to bring fresh challenges and new situations. How you deal with these often determines your success as a leader or manager.

Situational Leadership encourages you to analyse every challenge and situation. Following such an analysis, you adapt your management style to achieve the most effective result.

How To Use It

The above sounds challenging. But Situational Leadership provides three guides that help you.

The first of these guides is about leadership behaviour, and has four categories. You can use the guide to give you a better idea of how to deal with staff.

• S1 – Telling. You tell staff what to do. You explain their roles and give them close supervision.
• S2 – Selling. You explain to staff what they must do, but you encourage feedback and ideas.
• S3 – Participating. You allocate jobs and make daily decisions, but your staff are reasonably self-reliant.
• S4 – Delegating. You empower staff to get on with their jobs.

The leadership behaviour you adopt, however, depends on the competence of the staff. This is where the second guide can help. This deals with staff development levels, and again has four categories.

• D1 – Low competence and high commitment. At this level, staff are willing to do a job but have little appropriate knowledge or skills.
• D2 – Some competence and low commitment. Staff have some of the necessary skills for a job but need help.
• D3 – High competence and variable commitment. Staff are capable of doing a job but their confidence and motivation may be poor.
• D4 – High competence and high commitment. Staff know how to do a job, and have confidence in their skills.

With Situational Leadership theory, you employ leadership behaviour that best matches the development level of the staff. Over time, you should aim to increase the level of all staff to D4.

The final guide links staff development to maturity. The four maturity levels are broadly similar to D1, D2, D3 and D4.

• M1 – Staff are unskilled and unwilling.
• M2 – Staff are willing to do a job but don’t want the responsibility that goes with it.
• M3 – Staff have experience but lack confidence.
• M4 – Staff are experienced and confident.

The point of the maturity levels is to help you decide what type of staff you have. Your aim is to raise the level of most if not all staff to M4.

Limitations

The above guides show that Situational Leadership focuses on decision-making. It doesn’t deal with other issues such as problem solving that are crucial for leaders and managers.

Hersey and Blanchard’s approach also fails in another respect. It doesn’t place enough emphasis on inspiration. Many leaders spend a lot of time inspiring people and building enthusiasm.

Despite these drawbacks, Situational Leadership offers a concise view of the dynamics between leaders and followers. Many leaders are willing to adapt their styles to suit diverse situations. Situational Leadership makes clear exactly how you can do this as effectively as possible.