Situational Leadership Model

A manager has just hired a senior specialist, ten years of experience, hired specifically for her expertise. Six weeks in, that manager is second-guessing how much direction to give her on a new internal tool nobody with her background has used before. Treating her like a beginner feels wrong given her seniority; treating her like an expert on a tool she has never touched feels like setting her up to struggle. The Situational Leadership Model exists for exactly that mismatch.

The Situational Leadership Model, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, argues that the right leadership style depends on a person's readiness for a specific task, not on their general seniority or personality. It describes four styles (Directing, Coaching, Supporting and Delegating) matched to four levels of task-specific readiness, from someone new to a task who needs clear direction, through to someone experienced and confident who needs the work simply handed over. The same person can sit at different readiness levels for different tasks at the same time. Hersey and Blanchard developed the model in the late 1960s, and its central claim was fairly radical for its time: there is no single "best" leadership style, only a style that fits the task and the person's readiness for it at that particular moment.

• Use it when deciding how much direction to give someone on a specific task, especially a new hire or someone taking on unfamiliar work.
• Use it to catch the trap of applying one leadership style to a person across everything they do, regardless of the task in front of them.
• Use it when a capable, senior person is underperforming on one particular piece of work: the readiness level for that task, not their overall competence, may be the real issue.
• Do not use it as a fixed label for a person ("she is a Delegating-level employee") since readiness is tied to the task, not the individual permanently.
• Do not use it as a substitute for actually asking someone how much support they want; it is a starting framework, not a replacement for the conversation.

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The mistake is matching the style to the person's general seniority instead of to their readiness for the specific task at hand. A senior specialist gets delegated a task she has never done before, purely because her job title suggests she should not need direction, and struggles quietly rather than admitting she needs more structure than her seniority implies.

The reverse mistake happens just as often: a junior team member who has done a particular task dozens of times still gets closely directed on it, because the manager has mentally filed them as "still needs guidance" in general, rather than checking their actual readiness task by task.

Both versions of the mistake tend to persist because nobody names the readiness level out loud. A manager who has never explicitly said "I am treating you as a beginner on this one task, not on your whole role" leaves the other person to guess at the reasoning, and a capable person left guessing usually assumes the worst about how they are being judged.

Illustrative example: a fictional company, not a customer case.

For the senior specialist and the new internal tool: on her core specialism, she needs almost no direction: a Delegating style, matched to high readiness built over years. On the new tool, she is genuinely at an early readiness level, not because she lacks capability, but because she has no experience with this specific system yet.

It is worth checking readiness on a third dimension too: how confident, not just how skilled, she feels about the new tool. Someone can have watched enough demonstrations to technically know the steps and still lack the confidence to act without checking in first, which calls for a different style again than pure lack of skill would.

Naming the gap out loud (high readiness on her specialism, low readiness on this one tool) changes the conversation from a judgement about her competence into a specific, temporary plan for how much guidance the tool rollout needs. The card takes you through the remaining steps to a decision.

• Front: what the Situational Leadership Model is for and why task, not personality, decides the style.
• Back: the numbered steps to apply the model, plus a short worked example of its own. The company in this guide is a separate illustration, not the example printed on the card.
• Digital: a Google Sheets template for mapping team members against tasks and readiness levels, with a video tutorial.

• Tuckman's Stages of Group Development looks at readiness at the team level rather than the individual task level.
• Belbin Team Roles adds a complementary view of how someone's natural role, not just their skill level, shapes how they work best.
• Herzberg's Two-Factor Theory is useful once the leadership style is right and motivation becomes the next question.

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