Situational Leadership: A Customizable Approach to Leading Teams and Nurturing Employee Growth

As the pace of change in the workplace accelerates and employees expect more from their employers, the role of managers is evolving as well.

Take, for example, what happened when major tech giant, Google, transitioned to a flat organization—to see if employees’ performance improved without managers. Though “Project Oxygen”—as it was called—was disastrous and short-lived, it proved an essential point: managers matter. And as team leaders returned to Google’s organizational structure, Project Oxygen shifted focus to identify the characteristics that define a successful and inspiring manager in today’s workplace.

Some of their most important research findings came straight from the source—their employees. Through polling, the team received valuable input that ultimately helped Google hone in on a list of sought-after managerial traits that included equal parts leader, coach, decision-maker, advocate, communicator, advisor, and someone who knows when and how to adapt to different employees’ needs depending on the situation—aka a situational leader.

Although Google did not invent the “situational leadership” theory, Project Oxygen’s outcome mimicked its constructs. The concept, in fact, originally emerged more than a half-century before as the “Life Cycle Theory of Leadership” in Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard’s 1969 book, Management of Organizational Behavior. At the time, the two management experts theorized that no singular leadership style is appropriate for every situation and that managers’ and subordinates’ attributes and actions contribute to determining what type of leadership is best at any given moment in time.

Interestingly, Google’s research showed that even though the American workplace has changed in many ways since the late 1960s—one thing has stayed constant: a cookie-cutter management approach is ineffective with employees when it comes to improving productivity or morale.

The good news for small and mid-sized businesses?

Situational leadership is not just for tech giants. By adopting this management style, any company can build a culture that nurtures growth by meeting employees where they are and developing their unique knowledge, skills, and abilities. In addition, this approach can help you build effective and creative teams that propel your business forward in today’s often frenetic and rapidly changing marketplace.

Situational Leadership in Theory and Practice

Hersey and Blanchard's "Life Cycle Theory of Leadership" was renamed the “Situational Leadership Theory” during the mid-1970s. Though they wrote separate books detailing their respective views, Blanchard's “The One-Minute Manager” (1982) and Hersey's “The Situational Leader” (1985) similarly proposed four leadership styles within the overarching theory.These four styles employ different measures of directive and supportive behaviors. According to an Asana article titled, "Situational leadership: 4 styles and qualities,” directive behavior is the extent to which you tell a team member what, how, where, and when something needs to be done, while supportive behavior is the extent to which you communicate with the team member, coach them, actively listen, and provide recognition for task-related progress. The levels of supportive behavior and directive behavior vary depending on who you're managing and in what setting.

The Four Situational Leadership Styles

1. Directing/Telling: A primarily directive behavior, this style is most effectively used when an employee needs close managerial supervision because they're inexperienced or have a low commitment to the task at hand.
2. Coaching/Selling: Employs high levels of directive and supportive behaviors and typically involves a manager assigning a new task to an enthusiastic team member and observing and coaching them as they carry it out. Performance feedback is vital when using this method.
3. Supporting/Participating: High on supportive behavior and low on directive behavior, this style is best used with an employee who has the skills and ability to complete a task but lacks the confidence or motivation to do it successfully.
4. Delegating: Involving low levels of directive and supportive behaviors, this leadership style is often used with employees who are self-reliant achievers and perform best with little to no supervision. This approach promotes freedom and fosters trust.

"The situational leadership model focuses on team members," the Asana article states. "Using one leadership style for all team members is like trying to fit everyone into one box. Situational leadership has a high commitment to each team member and gives them their own space to grow."

Pros and Cons of the Situational Leadership Style

Before implementing situational leadership, it helps to take a thorough look at the benefits and drawbacks experienced by companies that have adopted—and experts who have studied—this management approach.

Situational leadership can:

• Improve your employees' productivity and output
• Provide your managers with adaptive problem-solving techniques
• Help your managers identify each team member's level of skill, motivation, and confidence and apply leadership techniques to optimize performance and outcomes
• Nurture each employee's career-development efforts
• Advance your managers' problem-solving skills
• Boost your team's communication skills
• Encourage collaboration, transparency, and creativity in your organization
• Enable leaders to exert more control over business outcomes

If not kept in check, situational leadership can:

• Cause confusion due to a lack of uniformity in leadership style; some team members may have trouble shifting from a directed task one week to a delegated task the next
• Focus primarily on the task at hand rather than long-term goals
• Place immense responsibility on your managers to assess employees' needs quickly and often, which can be stressful
• Be ineffective in strictly task- or deadline-driven environments
• Place an undue burden on managers who are not adequately trained to lead intuitively or equipped with the skills needed to respond to complicated situations

How to Develop Situational Leadership Skills and Become a Leader Employees Want to Follow

Situational leadership is a customizable approach to management in which team leaders continually assess each employee's skill level and unique needs. This leadership style adapts as employees learn and grow or as their needs change, so flexibility is key.

"Today's fast-changing business environment requires managers to take a nimble and responsive approach to whatever is arising in their team, work environment, and organization,” writes Judy Wolf, MS, PCC, in a “BetterUp” blog titled, "Situational leadership: Learn to develop it through examples."

Tailoring your management style to employees' needs motivates them to:

• Learn new skills
• Accomplish goals
• Further their careers and your company's mission

Situational leadership provides a managerial platform from which to do this, but it requires knowledge, flexibility, and empathy to lead with this approach day in and day out.

"Promotions don't automatically make people great leaders," says Steve Moore, Director of Employee Development for G&A Partners. “There's finesse involved, authenticity, and no small amount of innovation, risk-taking, and disruption." (Get more insights from Moore in G&A's "How to Become a Leader Employees Will Want to Follow" webinar.)

Five Ways Managers Can Develop and Implement Situational Leadership Skills in Your Workplace

The 2020 Perspective: How the Pandemic has Impacted Situational Leadership

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many managers to make significant adjustments in the workplace, including managing remotely and adapting to increasingly stressful conditions that impacted many employees' mental health and well-being.

Because situational leadership is a hands-on, intuitive management approach, managers who employ this strategy have relied on the flexible options it offers and adapted its constructs to accommodate flexible work schedules and a hybrid workforce. However, there is still work to be done.

In “The Importance of Situational Leadership,” Joy Birmingham, Duke University's Assistant Director of Professional Development for Learning & Organization Development writes, "At a time when managers have employees working from home, they can't use visual and auditory cues about how employees are doing. The employee may be able to 'figure out' how to do something, but it is much easier for the manager to increase or decrease their direction and support to each employee. Too much and you are micromanaging, but too little direction and support can make employees feel they are on their own."

Gartner's "How the Best Managers Improve Employee Performance and Health" by Sari Wilde states that it's vital for managers to recognize three seismic changes that have impacted how we’ve worked in the past two years and how to respond to each. These include:

• How, where, and when we work is changing
• Job requirements—and requisite skills—continue to evolve
• Employees want their employers to recognize them as people, not just workers

Communication is key, says Anu Mannathikuzhiyil, an HR expert and Client Advocate for G&A Partners.

"Pay attention to what's going on and check in as often as possible with employees so you continue to build a solid relationship with them based on mutual trust," she says. "If you have remote workers and aren't able to see them regularly face to face, you need to find a way to organize what projects they're working on, what their needs are, what your expectations for them are, and really focus on building that communication with them."

Managers should continue to focus on making employee, team, and organizational connections but will also need to adapt how they create these connections to meet the needs of the new work environment.

Gartner recommends that managers:

• Lead with empathy, ask questions, and diagnose employees' strengths, development areas, motivations, and interests so they can recommend concrete actions that help employees move forward.
• Regularly assess their team's health and work to build a foundation of psychological safety that fosters trust so that employees are invested in one another's well-being and success, not just their own.
• Advocate for their employees' professional and personal growth and help them achieve their full potential.