Situational Flex
Most owners have one leadership style. It is the one that matches their temperament, they have used it for fifteen years, and they describe it as "how I am" rather than as a choice. It works well with roughly a quarter of the people they employ.
Situational leadership, developed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, says the style is not supposed to be a fixed property of the leader. It is supposed to change with the person and, more importantly, with the specific task in front of them. The skill is not having a style. It is being able to move.
The two dials
There are only two things you are adjusting. How much direction you give, meaning instructions, structure, specifics and checking. And how much support you give, meaning listening, encouragement, involvement in the decision and time spent.
Turn both up and you get Coaching. Direction high, support low and you get Directing. Support high, direction low and you get Supporting. Both low and you get Delegating, which is the goal for most tasks and the one most easily faked.
The critical point, and the one that gets lost every time this model is taught badly: the setting depends on the task, not on the person. Your operations manager may be a confident, competent S4 on scheduling and a nervous S1 on a disciplinary conversation. Leading her as "an S4" because that is what she generally is will produce a disciplinary conversation that goes badly and a manager who is quietly humiliated by it.
The place it goes wrong is S2
Look at the dashed route on the diagram. Someone new to a task starts at S1, needing direction and not much hand-holding, because they know they do not know. Everyone manages that stage reasonably well. It is obvious, and new starters expect it.
Then they move to S2, and this is where things fall over. Competence has started to rise, which is why the direction is still needed but feels less welcome. Confidence has fallen, because they now know enough to see how much they are getting wrong. This is the disillusioned stage, and it is when people go quiet, start covering, or hand in their notice.
The owner's instinct at exactly this point is to back off. They have had the training, they seem to have got it, let them get on with it. So support drops precisely when support is the thing that is needed most, and direction drops before capability is there to replace it. A promising person then either fails visibly or retreats to the parts of the job they were already good at.
A promotion, month by month
Take a building services firm that promotes its best fitter to supervisor of a six-man team. Illustrative, but this is the single most common failed promotion in owner-managed businesses.
Weeks one to four, S1. He does not know what the job is. He needs to be told what a supervisor actually does on a Monday, what he decides and what he escalates, and he needs it in writing. A weekly hour with the owner, structured. Nobody minds this stage.
Weeks five to twelve, S2, and this is where it is won or lost. He has had his first difficult conversation with a fitter who used to be his mate, and it went badly. He is working sixty hours because he is still doing his old job as well as the new one. Productivity across the team has dipped. He is privately wondering whether he has made a mistake. What he needs is both dials turned up: still specific direction on how to run the conversation, plus real time from the owner explaining why the job is done this way and telling him the dip is normal. What he usually gets is silence and a comment about the numbers.
Months four to nine, S3. He can do it. He does not yet believe he can. Direction now becomes counterproductive, because he mostly knows the answer and being told it undermines him. The move here is to ask rather than tell, and to hold the weekly slot even when there is nothing wrong, because that slot is the support.
From month ten, S4. Agree the measures, agree what he brings you and when, and get out of the way. This is delegating. It has a defined output and a check-in. It is not the same as leaving him alone, which is abdication with better manners.
Run through that whole sequence and note the owner's effort. Highest at S1 and S2, then falling. Most owners front-load nothing, coast through S2, and then spend a year firefighting a supervisor who never got established.
The mistake most owners make
Calling their default style a philosophy. "I'm a hands-off leader, I hire good people and let them run" is a perfectly respectable sentence that, applied to somebody in week three of a new role, is simply neglect. Equally, "I like to be involved in everything" applied to a competent manager of eight years is not commitment, it is interference, and it is why she is looking.
The second mistake is fake delegating. No measure, no agreed check-in, no definition of what good looks like, and then surprise when it is not done the way you would have done it. Delegating is the low-direction, low-support quadrant, but it is only safe once you have earned the right to be there by doing the other three properly.
How to apply it this week
- List your direct reports down one side and their three main tasks across the top. Score each cell S1 to S4. You will find people who are S4 on one task and S1 on another, which is the whole point.
- Find anyone currently sitting in S2 on something that matters. New role, new responsibility, first three months. They are the priority this week.
- For each S2, put a weekly thirty minutes in the diary for the next eight weeks. Both dials up. Direction on the specifics and time on the why.
- Ask one person how much direction they actually want on a named task. Their answer will differ from your assumption at least half the time.
- Audit one thing you think you have delegated. Is there a measure, a deadline and an agreed check-in? If not, you have not delegated it, you have dropped it.
- Pick one task where you are over-directing and stop. Say so out loud, agree what they will bring you instead, and then leave it alone for a month.
The questions to sit with
- Out of 10, how different is your leadership style with your longest-serving manager compared with your newest starter? If the answer is low, that is the finding.
- Who in your business is in the disillusioned stage right now, and when did you last give them an unhurried half hour?
- Which of the four styles do you avoid entirely, and what has that cost you?
- What have you "delegated" that has no measure attached to it?
This is core material in The Leader Programme. Leadership style is not a personality trait to be discovered and defended. It is a set of four gears, and most owners drive everywhere in third.
