Org, people & execution
Situational Leadership
A model of four leadership styles, from directing through coaching and supporting to delegating, matched to the follower's development level on a specific task. Effective leaders diagnose competence and commitment first, then adjust directive and supportive behaviour to fit.
Also known as Hersey-Blanchard model, Situational Leadership Theory, SLII, Life Cycle Theory of Leadership. First set out by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard in 1969; the primary source is cited in full below.
Where this is contested
Hersey and Blanchard built the model together in 1969 as the life cycle theory of leadership, then diverged from the late 1970s: Hersey's Situational Leadership Model and Blanchard's SLII use different style labels, follower scales (readiness versus development level) and prescriptions, and the two lines are separately trademarked.
- Format
- 2×2 matrix
- Level
- Team
- Best for
- Plan execution
- Decision stage
- Plan · Execute
- Difficulty
- Introductory
- Time to apply
- An hour to map a team for the first time; the value is in re-diagnosing at each review.
Plate · The model
The components
Supporting
High supportive, low directive behaviour, for the capable but cautious performer (S3, Hersey's Participating). The follower has the skill but variable confidence or commitment, so the leader facilitates, listens and shares decision-making rather than instructing.
Signals of strength
Demonstrated competence on the task · Hesitancy, flat motivation or self-doubt · Asks for reassurance more than for instruction · Performs well when involved in decisions
Coaching
High directive and high supportive behaviour, for the disillusioned learner (S2, Hersey's Selling). Some competence has developed but early enthusiasm has dropped, so the leader still directs the work while explaining decisions and rebuilding commitment.
Signals of strength
Some skill but inconsistent results · Early enthusiasm has given way to frustration · Needs the why as well as the what · Responds to praise for progress
Delegating
Low directive and low supportive behaviour, for the self-reliant achiever (S4). The follower is competent and committed, so the leader hands over responsibility for decisions and monitors outcomes only. Delegating is earned autonomy, not absence.
Signals of strength
Consistently strong, independent results · Confident and self-correcting on the task · Finds close management irritating · Others come to this person for guidance
Directing
High directive, low supportive behaviour, for the enthusiastic beginner (S1, Hersey's Telling). Competence is low but commitment is high, so the leader defines the task, sets standards and supervises closely. Support is not withheld out of coldness; instruction is simply what develops a beginner fastest.
Signals of strength
New to the task, keen to prove themselves · Does not yet know what good looks like · Mistakes come from inexperience rather than attitude · Asks what to do rather than whether to do it
When it earns its keep
- You manage people whose capability varies sharply from task to task and you keep applying one style to all of them.
- You are developing first-time managers or newly promoted staff and need a shared language for how closely to direct them, and when to loosen.
- Delegation keeps failing and you suspect the problem is a mismatch between the follower's readiness and the freedom they were given, rather than the person.
- A capable, long-serving performer has gone flat and you need to distinguish a competence problem from a commitment problem before acting.
And when it doesn't
- You need to design organisational or systemic change. This is a one-to-one, task-level model; use Kotter, ADKAR or structural analysis for the wider system.
- The team's problem is interpersonal rather than developmental, for instance conflict or missing trust. Style-matching will not fix a relationship problem.
- You want an evidence-backed prescription. The model's empirical support is weak, so treat it as a diagnostic vocabulary, and do not bet a promotion decision on its quadrants.
- The work is genuinely novel for everyone, including you. Where nobody holds the competence, directing behaviour has nothing to direct with; joint problem-solving fits better.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A breakdown of the role into distinct tasks or goals, because development level is task-specific rather than a property of the person.
- An honest assessment of each follower's competence on each task: demonstrated skill and transferable experience, not tenure.
- An assessment of commitment: the follower's confidence and motivation for that task, which moves independently of skill.
- Enough contact time with each person to observe performance and adjust style as their development moves.
- 1
Break the role into tasks
List the specific goals or activities you are leading this person on. The model's central discipline is that development level attaches to a task, so a manager can be advanced on rotas and a beginner on commercial planning at the same time.
- 2
Diagnose development level per task
Rate competence and commitment for each task. In Blanchard's SLII language this runs from D1, the enthusiastic beginner, through D2, the disillusioned learner, and D3, the capable but cautious performer, to D4, the self-reliant achiever. Hersey's version rates readiness as ability and willingness.
- 3
Select the matching style
Pair the diagnosis with a style: Directing for D1, Coaching for D2, Supporting for D3, Delegating for D4. The pairing is the model's core prescription; the styles differ in how much directive behaviour and how much supportive behaviour the leader supplies.
- 4
Contract the approach openly
Tell the person what you are doing and why. Blanchard's later practice stresses agreeing the style with the follower, which turns a private judgement about their maturity into a shared development plan and removes the whiff of manipulation.
- 5
Review and shift as development moves
Re-diagnose at a set cadence. The point of the model is movement toward delegation; a leader still directing the same task a year on has either misdiagnosed or failed to develop anyone. Expect regression too, for instance after a role change.
Reading the result
A task-by-task map of each follower's development level, the leadership style you intend to use for each, and the shifts you expect to make as competence and commitment move.
- Read across tasks for one person before reading across people. If someone sits in the same quadrant for everything, the diagnosis is probably lazy.
- The map is a snapshot of a journey. The intended direction of travel is anticlockwise pressure toward Delegating; a static map means development has stalled.
- Mismatches diagnose your behaviour as much as theirs. Micromanaged D4s and abandoned D1s are leader errors, and the map makes them visible.
A worked example
A fashion retailer plans development for its store managers
A UK fashion retailer with about forty stores promotes its best supervisors into store-manager roles. The area manager for the North West has four managers of very different tenure and keeps defaulting to the same weekly call format for all of them. Before the autumn trading period she maps each manager against the model, taking commercial planning as the task that matters most this quarter.
- Directing
- The newly promoted Preston manager is a D1 on commercial planning: full of energy, never owned a markdown budget. The area manager sets the plan with her line by line, defines what a good week's trade report contains, and checks it weekly. On visual merchandising, her old specialism, the same manager is a D4 and is left alone.
- Coaching
- The Chester manager, eight months in, has hit the D2 dip: he can build a stock plan but two poor months have dented him and he has started asking to go back to the standard company template. He gets direction on this season's plan plus the reasoning behind each call, and visible credit when his sell-through improves.
- Supporting
- The Liverpool manager is technically excellent but cautious since a stock-loss investigation last year, a classic D3. The area manager stops issuing instructions, asks for his recommendation first on range decisions, and lets him present his own plan at the regional meeting.
- Delegating
- The Manchester flagship manager is a D4 on commercial planning and visibly bored by the weekly call. She gets the season's targets, freedom on how to hit them, and a monthly review only. Her freed capacity is pointed at mentoring the Preston manager, which also tests whether she is ready for the area-manager path.
The read. The exercise's real yield was not the style labels but the discovery that the area manager had been running a one-size weekly call that over-managed two people and under-supported the other two. The honest caveat: the model told her nothing about which diagnosis was right. Two months in, the Chester manager's dip turned out to be a stockroom staffing problem rather than a development stage, which no quadrant would have found. The map organised her attention; it did not replace judgement.
Pitfalls
- Labelling the person instead of the task. Development level is task-specific, and treating someone as 'a D2' flattens the model into a crude maturity ranking.
- Leading from your preferred style and calling it diagnosis. Most managers default to one quadrant; the model only earns its keep if the diagnosis can overrule the habit.
- Using Delegating as a polite word for neglect. S4 still gets goals, standards and reviews; it drops direction, not contact.
- Assuming development only moves forward. People regress under pressure, after restructures or on new variants of old tasks, and the style must move back with them.
- Treating the quadrants as science. The pairings are a heuristic with weak empirical support, so use them to structure a conversation, not to justify a decision about someone's career.
What the critics say
Graeff's critical review found the theory conceptually incoherent across its successive versions: the maturity construct is ambiguous, its ingredients and weightings changed between editions without theoretical justification, and the prescriptive curve linking follower development to style has no derivation.
Graeff, C. L. (1997) 'Evolution of situational leadership theory: a critical review', The Leadership Quarterly, 8(2), 153-170.
Thompson and Vecchio tested three versions of the theory, including the SLII revision, against data from over 350 banking employees and their supervisors, and found no clear empirical support for any version's matching prescriptions, with the strongest signal being a general benefit of supportiveness regardless of follower development.
Thompson, G. and Vecchio, R. P. (2009) 'Situational leadership theory: a test of three versions', The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848.
The model reduces follower readiness to two dimensions and ignores motivational, relational and contextual dynamics, while its enormous commercial training footprint has far outrun its evidence base, a gap repeatedly noted in the academic literature.
Work it through
Place each person, task by task, in the quadrant that matches their current competence and commitment, and note the style shift you intend to make next. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
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Sources and further reading
- Hersey, P. and Blanchard, K. H. (1969) 'Life cycle theory of leadership', Training and Development Journal, 23(5), 26-34. ↗
- Blanchard, K., Zigarmi, P. and Zigarmi, D. (1985) Leadership and the One Minute Manager. New York: William Morrow.
- Graeff, C. L. (1997) 'Evolution of situational leadership theory: a critical review', The Leadership Quarterly, 8(2), 153-170. ↗
- Thompson, G. and Vecchio, R. P. (2009) 'Situational leadership theory: a test of three versions', The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. ↗