Your Leadership Style Should Be Situational
As leaders it can be easy to get stuck in the mindset that we have a set leadership style, love it or hate it.
“I just tell it like it is—that’s my style.”
“I prefer to sit back and let them just figure it out on their own—that’s the best way to learn, after all.”
The truth is that while we all have styles of leadership that come more naturally than others, we need to be able to flex based on the situation at hand. Notice I didn’t say based on the “person” at hand.
The Center for Leadership Studies has an incredible framework and training available called The Situational Leadership Model, and I highly, highly recommend it.
The essence of situational leadership is that we all have a myriad of goals in our lives that we possess varying levels of skills at. In karate I am still a white belt (I kind of stopped going to class, so white belt is probably my ceiling), but I’m pretty advanced as a drummer. Therefore, if you were leading me at playing karate I would need a very hands-on, directional style of leadership because I truly don’t know what I don’t know—I’d have no idea where to start, even if I was enthusiastic about it. On the other hand, if you were leading me as a drummer and tried to be really hands-on and directional I’d get frustrated because I already know how to do it really well—it’d be best just for you to step aside and cheer me on.
Likewise the members of our team have varying degrees of skills and competence at the many goals they set for themselves in the workplace. The Situational Leadership Model provides a fantastic framework for assessing where someone is at in their current learning curve of a particular goal or skill, which then informs which style of leadership would be most beneficial to them in that area.
One point I cannot stress clearly enough is that we do NOT apply a leadership style to an entire person. Whenever I bring someone up to speed on the Situational Leadership Model I have to restate this point several times before it sinks in. When we assess where someone is at in the learning curve I sometimes hear someone say, “Well, one of my direct reports just seems kind of unmotivated, so I guess they are an R3” (see training for context on meaning of R3) but this is a misuse of the tool. They are not an R3, but rather in that particular goal or area they may be an R3 (possible low motivation). Perhaps they’ve been on one project for too long and they’re getting burned out. I myself am a very motivated person until you ask me to run a marathon, or to eat black olives and mushrooms. I’ve seen amazing success in switching someone to a new project and finding them come back to life with passion and making incredible impact once again.
The Situational Leadership Model training is an investment, but one that I’d highly recommend for any leadership team.