The week I was trained on Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership 2 approach, was a week I knew my management style would forever change. It’s been 10 years since I was first trained on SL2 and it’s been a very eye opening to getting to know the theories behind the concepts of SL2 in more detail. Though the situational leadership style is not perfect, it is the easiest style to teach basic concepts to and is the most consistent with helping to provide a leadership “road map” of to-do’s that I have found in my career, and has been a large part of my success as a leader to date. I have done my best to train some of my direct reports on this style of an approach and anticipate after this class being able to do so even more effectively. Northouse states that the foundation of the situational leadership theory lies in the concept that every different situation requires a potentially different leadership approach (Northouse, 2016). He goes on to state that in order for a leader to be truly effective, that he or she needs to be able to adapt their styles to various demands of different situations (Northouse, 2016). In my 20 years or so of being a manager, there is only one true constant that I’ve found, and that is that there is NO constant situation a manager will face. And this is why embracing the approach of Situational Leadership has worked so well for me.
Situational Leadership is essentially composed of supportive and directive behavior dimensions (PSUWC2016). Situational leadership focuses on creating prescribed behaviors for leaders as they are immersed into different scenarios. Supportive behaviors are relationship behaviors that include such actions as listening, encouraging and giving emotional support, whereas directive behaviors are task related behaviors that include specific task directions like who, what, when and how (PSUWC, 2017). In the SL2 approach, a managers leadership style can be broken down into four key categories of supportive and directive behaviors. The first style of leadership in this model is directing, which is a high directive and low supportive model. This is used for new employees with limited or no proven skills in the arena they are working in that just need to become effective as quickly as possible. The next style is Coaching which is still highly directive but now also highly supportive. This style is still very much about becoming effective and achieving results, but is much more hands on with the helping the follower to achieve their needs. Then comes the supporting style which is high supportive behaviors with low directive behaviors. This is the style where empowering another employee can really start to pay off as they employee starts to get more confidence and capabilities to act on their own. The fourth and final style approach is the delegating approach. This approach should be used when you’re follower is highly competent and also highly engaged and wants to be given tasks or projects with the freedom to make their own choices when getting them done.
The crux of the Situational Leadership 2 approach is that employees will evolve through four distinct stages of leadership need that match up nicely to the styles listed above. The model states that those four stages of evolution will start at a High-Direction-Low-Support need (D1), then move to a High-Direction-High-Support (D2) need, then move to a Low-Direction-Low-Support (D3) need before finally evolving into a Low-Direction-Low Support (D4) area of leadership need (PSUWC, 2017). As a manager it’s important to recognize these developmental areas and then adapt the appropriate leadership approach for that employee in that specific need. And a key component of a situational leadership approach is also communication, as professed by Ken and Scott Blanchard (PSUWC, 2017). They also espouse that in order for managers to have more effective leadership they must offer more qualitative, and useful conversations with their followers. And in the limited amount of time most managers have to interact with their direct reports it’s important to make sure those followers understand the SL2 concepts and why you might be spending more, or less, but ultimately “different” time with them than you did before.
Another key aspect to remember about this approach is that someone who might be at one developmental level for one task might be completely at a different level for another task. One example that hits home and can sum most of this up and how I’ve been able to help make changes in a market that had a lot of Sr Sales people who had 15+ years tenure with the company, and most of it successful. What I found when I came on board is that most of these sales people had learned their craft on their own, and had very little tutelage before I came into the picture. I also found out that each one of them had some very distinct strengths and weaknesses and no two of them were the same. One of my most successful sales people was an amazing relationship builder, and getting really strong meetings with key people was never a challenge for her. She was always a top producer, so some of the things I’ve worked with her on the last three years were blind spots for her and at first she didn’t want or think she had to improve on. But I spent a lot of time with her and let her know for tasks around contract negotiation or pricing, she was leaving a lot on the table and how some small tweaks could help her improve her overall commissions drastically. I also let her know that for any interactions around contracts and pricing I needed to be heavily involved until she felt she had it under control, but for things like creating territory targets and such, I would be much more hands off and would leave her to create her list when I needed her and other reps to do the same. And she has now made more money in her last two years than she did in any of the previous fifteen to me being there. And from what I could tell, her previous managers simply ignored her on all regards, and left her in the D4 space for all tasks related to her job, and as such, some key skills she needed to develop never did.
Prior to receiving the training and awareness about the SL2 approach I’m not sure how I would have handled that situation, yet that tends to be the most consistent kind of situations I see in my experience as a leader; that most employees or followers are not as well rounded as they can be and it’s all too often that we pigeon hole them into a space that’s either created because of the perception of their greatest weakness or their greatest strength. As the Wily Manager clip spoke about, it’s important to check your diagnosis often of your followers and make sure you’re applying the proper leadership style as they have evolved (PSUWC, 2017). And ultimately, I think most leaders are hoping to help their followers grow in the skills and their career, so that’s why I believe the SL2 approach has been so successful for me personally, as well as throughout the world, because at its core it recognizes that those followers that the approach is being applied to will evolve as a direct result of that leadership effort.
References
Penn State World Campus. (2017). Lesson 7: Power and Influence. Retrieved from https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/canvas/sp17/21711–17327/content/07_lesson/printlesson.html (Links to an external site.)
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice (7th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage Publications.