So Leadership has always been apart of my life, from the Football field to my everyday battles with my wife. What I realized early on is that I can’t lead my football team like I lead my love life. Every situation required a different approach in order to reach some form of success. What I didn’t know was I had caught on to the concepts of the Situational Approach Which was developed by Hersey and Blanchard (1969). The Situational Approach also known as Situational Leadership is an approach that focuses on leadership in different situations. The theory says “that different situations require different kinds of leadership. To be effective, a leader must change his/her style to fit the demands of different situations” (Williams 2018). This is the reason I treat my wide receivers differently than I treat my daughter or wife. If I had treated either the same I would lose efficiency because each situation requires a different demand in order to find success. Hersey and Blanchard (1969) elaborate on this by describing the situational approach as PRESCRIPTIVE, meaning you treat leadership like a medicine, depending on the symptoms, you change the type of medicine you use. Leaders have to take an active role in deciding the type of behaviors they need for specific sets of followers in particular situations (Williams 2018). In this case a leaders medicine is his behavior. Now something I wish I had known more information about would have been the specifics associated with the categories that make up directive and supportive behaviors that change depending on the situations. Blanchard in our lesson 5 commentaries describes four categories of directive and supportive behaviors :
“Directing: This style is a high directive-low supportive style. The leader focuses on achieving goals and doesn’t really spend much time on supportive behaviors. Directing leaders give specific instructions on how goals are to be achieved.
Coaching: This style is a high directive-high supportive style. Coaching leaders focus on goal achievement as well as the needs of followers. These leaders still make the final decisions about how goals are to be accomplished.
Supporting: This style is a high supportive-low directive style. Supporting leaders do not focus only on goals. They listen to followers and ask for their input. These leaders allow followers to make decisions.
Delegating: This style is low supportive-low directive. These leaders do not offer much task input or social support. Delegating leaders are not overly involved in goal achievement. Followers are in charge of accomplishing goals.” (Williams 2018).
Now when I was playing football I always took a more Directing style to leading my team. I always focused on the goal of winning and what we needed to do in order to accomplish it. I told my linemen to block certain people, instructed the wide receivers to run certain routes and rarely cared about using any kind of supportive behavior. This wouldn’t work with my wife because our goals as a couple are more complicated than the need to win. Relationships require a different type of communication and understanding among the ability for my wife to make her own decisions in order to reach our goals. So between the two situations I needed the ability to be Directing and Supporting because my followers have different needs.
All in all it was awesome to see our class concepts explain why I hadn’t failed in my leadership and it made me wonder if I could improve on my Leadership style in order to succeed in other adventures I come across. Northouse describes four different levels of development, each development level gauges a followers competency and commitment to a task (Northouse, 2016). If I as a leader can discern where my followers fall on the development index , I can apply my knowledge to affect the situation each follower is in (Williams, 2018). So I’ve decided keep the Situational approach as a Tool for my leadership toolbox and hope to apply my learning’s to new situations and see if I can knowingly alter things from a conscious behavior rather than a subconscious one. Ill be sure to keep you updated on my proress.
references:
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership theory and practice (7th ed.). Los Angeles, CA: SAGE.
Williams, J. (2018). Lesson 5: Style and situational approaches. Pennsylvania State University, PSYCH 485. Retrieved from https://psu.instructure.com/courses/1923777/modules
bac5496 says
I enjoyed reading about the comparison you make between your professional life and personal life in regards to the Situational Leadership Approach. I tend to gravitate towards this approach because of the ease of use and understanding. Northouse describes strengths of this approach as “easy to understand, intuitively sensible and easily applied in a variety of settings” (Northouse, 2016). Those varieties of settings encompass personal and professional settings that you outline in your blog. However, they also include various setting that you would encounter in your day-to-day professional life.
I became aware of how the different styles are received by employees several years ago when I took on a role of managing a new branch for my organization. I was moved from Washington DC to Philadelphia to transform a satellite office into a fully operational and independent branch. The staff in that office had been there for several years operating under the radar of corporate and creating their own working environment that deviated from the corporate structure and culture. I had decided early on that I was going to have to make significant changes in order to quickly get the branch aligned with the entire organization.
Utilizing the directive style of the Situational approach, I set out outlining not only what needed to be accomplished but how we were going to do it (Northouse, 2016, p. 94). My instructions were detailed and methodical in the attempt to remove any ambiguity or uncertainty. In a short period of time, I found my team not following my instructions and it seemed they were going out of their way to avoid following any direction I gave them. Not only was this frustrating, but I was holding the team responsible for our failures.
Over coffee one day with a colleague, I outlined the challenges I was having with my team following my instructions. Very simply he stated, “maybe they are acting like defiant children, the more you tell them what to do the more they don’t want to do it. Maybe you should try some reverse psychology.” This was an eye opened for me. Maybe my directive approach is not applicable in this situation. Maybe I need to rely on the experience and knowledge of my team and get their help in deciding the path that we need to take to achieve our goals.
I had limited time to make significant improvements in the branch and get them fully operational as a stand-alone branch. I had some options. I could choose the supporting style and handover decision-making control to the team (Northouse, 2016). However, utilizing the supporting style might give too much control to a team that still wants to operate in the environment that they have created over the years and shun the corporate structure that we needed to conform with.
I decided to use the coaching approach. In this approach I still had control over the goals that needed to be accomplished along with how we were going to accomplish them, but I started to include my team in the discussions regarding our goals. By soliciting their feedback, I gave the team an opportunity to be a part of the decision-making process and met their “socioemotional needs” (Northouse, 2016, p. 94). This leadership style proved to be just what the team needed. I was able to get my needs met for accomplishing our goals in the most efficient means necessary and it met the team’s need to have their voices heard and be included in the decisions.
Similar to the different situations between personal and professional that you outline, the Situational approach works in a variety of situations within the professional environment as well. Like you I steer clear of the directive style at home where more supporting and coaching styles are most effective in navigating complex interpersonal relationship situations.
References
Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice. Seventh Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.
ack14 says
William, I thought this was an excellent post comparing sports to your love life. I coached high school varsity lacrosse as an assistant when I lived in Maryland, don’t have time for it right now because of my hectic work and school schedule but could relate to it none the less. I, on the other hand, used the Coaching leadership style with my players kinda like John Harbaugh does. Lots of high fives and told them that I appreciated them, and they really fed off it well. Never yelled at them in front of the team would always pull them aside and talk to them one on one and asked them if I could do anything to help them out. There’s not one right way to coach so I enjoyed reading about how you handle players compared to how I would.
As far as the relationship end I fully agreed with you about having to be a Supporting leadership role in your relationship. Getting caught up in winning and losing only creates more problems in the long run.
Great Job,
Austin