Situational Leadership
Situational Leadership
What Is Situational Leadership?
- Adjust your style to each member's level
- Choosing among directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating
- There is no single right leadership style
When you adopt situational leadership, what a leader has to change is not their personality but the unit of diagnosis. Instead of asking 'What kind of person is Assistant Manager A?', you ask 'Where is Assistant Manager A right now on this task?' The same person often needs hands-on guidance when prospecting new accounts, yet needs even less reporting when managing existing ones. That is why, in practice, leaders start not from a list of team members but from a table split into person-by-task cells.
Two axes separate the styles: directive behavior, which tells people what to do, by when, and how, and supportive behavior, which listens, encourages, and hands decisions over. High direction with low support is directing; both high is coaching; low direction with high support is supporting; both low is delegating. What is easy to miss is that motivation does not rise in a straight line. Right after joining, motivation is high even without skills. Then, three to six months in, as the work comes into focus and people wonder 'Can I actually do this?', comes the stretch where motivation sinks lowest. What helps then is not stronger direction but coaching, which raises direction and support together.
The boundaries with similar-looking concepts are also clear. Coaching leadership hones one approach, 'letting people find answers through questions', while in situational leadership coaching is just one of four quadrants. Empowerment is closer to an organization-wide system that pushes authority down, whereas delegation here is conditional authority given only when that person is ready for that task.
The most common failure in practice is a diagnosis that hardens into a label. Once 'he’s a directing type by nature' starts circulating in the team, the approval chain stays in place even after his skills improve six months later, and he loses chances to grow. The opposite is also common: using delegation as neglect. If a leader steps back because they are busy and calls it 'trusting them with it,' the problem only surfaces two days before the deadline. There is one more trap. If a leader uses different approaches with different people without explaining why, the team reads it as favoritism. Telling each person why you use this approach with them matters as much as the diagnosis itself.
Sungmin JooExpert in diagnostic-based coaching leadership, entrepreneurship education, and design thinking
John KimInstructor John Kim, author of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum ConsultingDeveloped by Paul Hersey & Ken Blanchard in 1969, the theory takes a situational approach: leadership style should change according to team members' maturity (readiness).
Consider a hypothetical case: Sales Team 2 at Company A, an industrial materials distributor (180 employees, KRW 32 billion (≈ US$23,941,300) in annual revenue). Two of its seven members have been with the company for less than six months. Over the past three months, quote errors rose to 11 a month, and one second-year associate mentioned quitting in a one-on-one. Team Leader Kim, four months into the role, had until then required all seven members to use the same weekly report template.
- Team Lead Kim split the team's work into three areas (new business development, existing account management, and quote preparation) and rated competence and motivation as high, medium, or low for each task area, not for each person. The same assistant manager came out with a different rating in each area.
- For Ms. Lee, four months into the job, he set the quote format and discount approval limits on a one-page criteria sheet and added a deadline: "This week, show me three quotes before you send them."
- When Mr. Park, a second-year associate whose results had slipped, said, "I’m not sure this job is right for me," his team leader stopped piling on instructions. Instead, he started a 30-minute ride-along once a week, followed by a joint review of the client meeting.
- To Manager Choi, a seven-year veteran, he handed over approval authority for quotes under KRW 30 million (≈ US$22,400) and cut weekly reports to once a month, drawing the line: "Call me when you're stuck. If you don't, I won't look over your shoulder."
- At the monthly meeting, Team Lead Kim explained openly why people are managed differently and stated the standard that skill levels by task are reassessed every three months, settling the favoritism concern before it spread.
- Six months later, quote errors fell from 11 a month to 3, the team leader’s weekly report review time dropped from 6 hours a week to 2, and Mr. Park, who had talked about quitting, ranked first in quarterly orders.