Situational leadership in projects

There’s an interesting post worth a read over at ProjectSteps: Communicating with Discretion and Tact - which talks about the need to tailor your approach to communication in line with the audience and the situation.

This is at least partly based on one of the (many) theories of leadership that have been developed over the years - known as situational leadership. The basic premise of this theory is that leadership (and therefore communication) styles have to change to match the situation, and the style is contingent on the ‘readiness’ of the team.

The key to understanding this theory is to realise that it’s not the leader that makes things happen, it’s the team. So a leader that doesn’t inspire their troops is doomed to failure, because no amount of shouting or cajoling is going to lead to full potential. Readiness in this situation refers to the extent to which people are willing and able to carry out a task or instructions. The ability to perform is a function of the team’s capabilities - do they have the necessary skills and equipment to do what it is you need them to do.

So deciding which approach to use is a case of assessing where your team is on two dimensions - ability to carry out the task, and willingness to do so. Having worked that out, there’s a handy 2×2 matrix which indicates which might be the most appropriate style to use in that situation.

If you’re in the ideal scenario of an able and willing team, then you can afford to be fairly laissez-faire about things. The team are capable of undertaking the task, and are prepared to do so - so your role as a leader is a relatively easy one.

If on the other hand you’re dealing with a team that are both unwilling and unable to perform, you’ve got bigger problems. The theory suggests that you need to take a more directive approach - issuing clear and specific instructions. That doesn’t deal with the dilemma of the inability to perform the task so much as it does the unwillingness, but the overall approach is a less-friendly and more-instructive one.

In a case where you’ve got an able but unwilling team, it’s time for a more supportive and participative approach - powers of persuasion to the max. The key here is to understand what the root cause of the unwillingness is, and deal with that - on the basis that it’s not lack of technical abilities that is going to stymie progress.

And in a case where the team is willing but unable, the theory suggests that you will need to be highly task-focussed to compensate for the team’s inabilities, but at the same time work hard on the relationships within the team to ensure that they continue to “buy-in” to your vision in the face of their technical shortfalls.

There’s an intuitive appeal about situational leadership theory, because it acknowledges the fact that leaders can compensate to an extent for the limitations in their team, and considers the importance of the team in the first place. As such, it’s a mainstay of management and leadership training the world over. But intriguingly there have been relatively few studies that provide wholehearted and overwhelming proof that it works.

So while it’s useful as a set of guidelines for approaching a given situation, it’s probably best not to put all your eggs in one basket and use this as the only approach. As the old cliche goes, if the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.

Further reading:

The two main references for situational leadership are “So You Want To Know Your Leadership Style?” by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, which appeared in the Feb 1974 edition of Training and Development Journal; and their later book called Management of Organizational Behaviour: Utilizing Human Resources (Prentice Hall, 1993). Being a popular theory however, explanations in varying degrees of detail tend to appear in most organisational behaviour and human resource textbooks.

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