Situational Leadership Explained: Matching Your Style to the Person

A manager can give two people the same close instructions on the same afternoon and be exactly right with one and smothering with the other. Situational leadership is the model built on that observation: a leader should change how much direction and how much support they give, depending on how ready a person is for one specific task. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard introduced it in 1969, and it now sells as two rival trademarked models.¹

Both versions use four styles, running from close direction to hands-off delegation, matched to four levels of readiness or development. The model is famous and intuitive, and its research record is thin. In a test in Norwegian financial firms, Geir Thompson and Lars Glasø found the model’s predictions held up best when leader and employee agreed on how ready the employee was.² That points to the one habit worth taking from it: check your read of the person with them.

Used that way, the model comes down to three moves:

1. Name the task in front of the person, not the person in general.
2. Judge their skill and confidence on that task, and ask for their own view.
3. Pick the style that matches, and change it as they progress.

This page goes deeper on one model from the main leadership styles and the evidence behind each.

Prefer to watch? The video covers the same ground as this article.

VideoSituational Leadership Explained: Matching Your Style to the PersonWiserHours

Direction and support, set task by task

Situational leadership holds that effective leaders adapt their behavior to the readiness of the person or group they lead for the task at hand, so there is no single best style. Hersey and Blanchard first described it in 1969 as the “life cycle theory of leadership” while writing their textbook on organizational behavior, and renamed it in the 1970s.¹

The model rests on two kinds of behavior. Task behavior, which Blanchard’s version calls directive behavior, is how much the leader decides and tells the person what to do and how. Relationship behavior, or supportive behavior, is how much the leader listens, talks things through and lets the person take part in decisions.³

The key word is task. Readiness describes a person’s ability and willingness to do one specific piece of work, not their seniority or their personality.³ A skilled engineer can be fully ready to fix a production bug and a complete beginner at presenting a budget to the board, in the same week.

Before you decide how closely to manage someone, name the task. “How much should I supervise Sam?” has no good answer; “how much help does Sam need to run his first supplier negotiation?” does.

What are the four situational leadership styles?

The four styles are combinations of high or low direction with high or low support. In Hersey’s version they are often labelled telling, selling, participating and delegating; Blanchard’s version calls them directing, coaching, supporting and delegating.¹

Much directionLittle directionMuch supportLittle support

Much support, Much direction: S2 Coaching or sellingyou still decide, and explain why

Much support, Little direction: S3 Supporting or participatingthey decide, you listen and back them

Little support, Much direction: S1 Directing or tellingyou set the steps and check closely

Little support, Little direction: S4 Delegatingthey own it, you stay reachable

The styles move control from you to the other person in four steps. With the first, you decide what happens and supervise closely. With the second, you still decide but explain your reasons and invite questions. With the third, the person makes the decisions and you help them think it through. With the fourth, they own the task and you agree on when to check in. None of the four is good or bad on its own. The Center for Leadership Studies, the company Hersey founded, says each style works in some situations and fails in others.³

Close direction suits someone on their first attempt at a task. Give the same step-by-step control to someone who already knows the work and it turns into micromanagement. What changed is the person’s readiness.

How ready is the person? R1 to R4 and D1 to D4

The development levels D1 to D4 are Blanchard’s four stages of a person’s competence and commitment on a task; Hersey’s version uses four Performance Readiness levels, R1 to R4, built from ability and willingness. Each level points to one style: the least ready person gets style 1, the most ready gets style 4.¹

Blanchard’s licensees name the four development levels as the Enthusiastic Beginner, the Disillusioned Learner, the Capable but Cautious Contributor and the Self-Reliant Achiever.⁴ The story behind those names is that people often start a new task keen but unskilled, lose heart once they see how hard it is, regain skill with lingering doubts, and finally become both able and confident. Hersey’s levels describe the same climb differently. In his scheme the least ready person is unable and insecure or unwilling, the next is unable but willing, the third able but insecure or unwilling, and the fourth able, confident and willing.¹

Blanchard assumes a beginner usually arrives eager, so the dip in morale comes second; Hersey’s lowest level already includes people who are anxious or reluctant from the start. If you lead a new hire who is nervous rather than excited, the two versions read the same person differently.

Myth

Everyone starts at level 1 and climbs steadily to level 4.

Fact

Readiness belongs to a task, so people sit at different levels on different tasks, and Hersey held that development is not a straight line.

An example of situational leadership: one analyst, one forecast

The clearest way to see situational leadership is to follow one person through one task as their skill and confidence change, adjusting direction and support at each step. The example below is illustrative, built from the model’s own prescriptions rather than from a real case.

DirectionSupport

1. Directing: much direction, little support: you set the steps and check closely
2. Coaching: much direction, much support: you still decide, and explain why
3. Supporting: little direction, much support: they decide, you listen and back them
4. Delegating: little of either: they own the task, you stay reachable

Priya joins a finance team and is asked to build the monthly sales forecast, something she has never done. She is keen. Her manager uses style 1: he gives her last year’s file and a written list of steps, sits with her for the first run, and checks her numbers before anything goes out.

By month two she can do most of it, but her second forecast was badly off and she says she is not sure she is cut out for it. Her manager moves to style 2. He still sets the method, but now explains why each step matters, asks how she would handle the awkward accounts, and points out what she got right.

By month four the forecasts are sound, but Priya hesitates to present them to the finance director. Style 3: her manager stops giving instructions, asks her to propose how she will explain the variance, and backs her in the meeting.

By month six she runs the forecast alone. Style 4: they agree she will flag anything unusual, and he reads the summary rather than the spreadsheet. In the same month she starts on a pricing model she has never built, and on that task she is back at the first level. The model would have her manager directing her again, on that task only.

The example shows two things. Moving down the styles is earned by the person’s progress on the task. And you will often lead the same person in two styles in the same week.

Situational Leadership and SLII: two models from one idea

Situational Leadership and SLII are two separately owned versions of the same 1969 idea: the first belongs to the Center for Leadership Studies, founded by Hersey, and the second to Blanchard’s company. The authors went their own ways in the late 1970s, and Blanchard introduced SLII in a 1985 book, Leadership and the One Minute Manager.¹

The split hardened into a legal dispute. In a 2018 settlement, the Center kept the Situational Leadership trademark and Blanchard kept SLII, and in the joint announcement the Center’s chief executive said that while the models share roots there are key differences between them.⁵ The labels still blur: the Center’s own page now lists directing and coaching beside telling and selling, and names style 3 participating or collaborating, while SLII calls it supporting.³⁴

Read across a row and the styles line up almost exactly; read down the middle column against the right and the people do not. Hersey’s level 2 is willing but unable, while Blanchard’s level 2 has lost commitment. Both prescribe style 2 there, for different reasons.

So pick one version and keep to its words. Mixing labels from a training course with labels from a blog post is a common way to end up telling someone they are “disillusioned” when they simply lack skill.

How well situational leadership holds up in tests

Tests of situational leadership since the 1980s give it weak and partial support: its advice has held up for people new to a task and when leader and employee agree on readiness, but rarely across all four levels. The best recent evidence comes from Norwegian studies by Geir Thompson and colleagues.²

The study

Limited evidence

Ask both people: Thompson and Glasø's 2015 test in Norwegian finance

Supervisors rated each employee’s competence and commitment, and employees rated themselves. The model’s predictions were more likely to hold when the two ratings agreed than when the researchers used the leader’s rating alone, as earlier studies had done. The authors concluded that leader and follower should each judge readiness, then compare and try to agree.²

This is a survey in one country’s financial sector, read here only through its abstract, so it shows a pattern rather than proof that matching styles improves results. Its practical message is still useful: the model works better as a conversation than as a private judgment.

Earlier tests are less encouraging. Robert Vecchio’s 1987 study surveyed 303 teachers in 14 high schools about their principals’ style, their own readiness and their performance.⁶ His results suggested the theory may hold only for some employees: more recently hired teachers may need and appreciate more task structuring from their superior.⁶ A 2022 literature review in a US master’s thesis reads the study as support at low readiness but not at moderate and high levels, and reports that Thompson and Vecchio’s 2009 review of earlier tests found a similar pattern.⁷

A 1990 test by Warren Blank and colleagues found no support for the theory’s core assumption that a follower’s maturity changes which leader behavior works best.⁸ A 2009 analysis of therapy supervision sessions by Mark Papworth and colleagues found only partial support: supervisors did talk more with less experienced trainees, but most specific behaviors did not match the model.⁹

Blanchard’s later revisions have not fared better. In Thompson and Robert Vecchio’s 2009 test in Norwegian banks, the 2007 revision of SLII predicted employee outcomes worse than the original model.¹⁰ And in a 2018 follow-up by Thompson and Glasø, when leader and employee disagreed, the data favored the leader’s assessment as the better basis, not the employee’s self-rating that Blanchard had suggested relying on.¹¹

Put together, the record is clear enough to act on. The model’s advice for people new to a task, give them clear structure, is the part with the most support; its finer prescriptions for capable and experienced people have less support so far. A new starter learning your expense system is the case where the model’s advice is most likely to fit. A senior colleague taking over a client account she ran at another firm is the case where you should ask rather than assume.

Criticisms of situational leadership theory

The main criticism of situational leadership theory is that its central step, diagnosing a person’s readiness, is vague and hard to measure. In a 1983 critique, Claude Graeff argued that the concept of job-relevant maturity was ambiguous to apply and that the questionnaire used to score leaders’ style had problems.¹²

Graeff returned in a 1997 review and, as later researchers summarize it, argued that repeated revisions by the authors had confused both practitioners and researchers.⁷ The split into two branded versions with shifting labels is part of that confusion.

There is a design problem too. Most tests have been cross-sectionalcross-sectional: Describes a study that measures everyone in its sample at a single point in time. Because the possible cause and the outcome are recorded together, it can show that two things occur together but not which of them came first.Full entry in the glossary surveys, a single snapshot, partly because following people as they develop at work is hard to arrange, so no study has checked the full cycle the model describes. The most positive result the review reports came from a 2017 study by researchers working in Blanchard’s own consulting firm, using the firm’s own questionnaire, whose reliability figures come from unpublished company studies.⁷

In daily work, the weak point looks like this. A manager decides that a quiet new colleague is “unwilling” and starts directing every step, when the colleague is capable and simply new to the team’s habits. The style matched the diagnosis; the diagnosis was wrong.

The fix the evidence points to is cheap. Rate the person’s skill and confidence for the task yourself, ask them to rate their own, and talk about any gap, ideally in the one-on-one meetings you already hold, since a question about readiness sits easily there.²

Choosing a style for one task

• Name the specific task, not the person
• Rate their skill and their confidence on it
• Ask them to rate both too
• Talk about any gap before you decide
• Agree when you will check in and change style

The bottom line

Situational leadership is a useful reminder that a new task needs more direction and a mastered one needs less, and that one person can need both in a single week. Its exact prescriptions have weak support, and its two versions disagree on how beginners feel. Before choosing a style, ask the person how ready they think they are, and treat the four styles as a menu to adjust as they learn.