Situational Leadership

What situational leadership is

Situational leadership (القيادة الموقفية) is an approach to supervision built on the view that no single style suits every case, and that a manager chooses a style according to where the employee stands in relation to the particular task: how much ability they have for it, and how willing they are to carry it out.

The condition that can be lost in application is that the unit of analysis is the task, not the person. One employee may be fully capable of preparing a monthly report without needing a word of guidance, and in the same week be at the very start with a new procedure that they need to be taken through step by step. A manager who classifies the person rather than the task has left the approach, even while still using its name.

The two dimensions of situational leadership, and why they move separately

A style is described by two independent quantities:

• Directive behaviour: how much the manager says about how the work is to be done, when it is due and in what form. It rises where knowledge of the task is missing.
• Supportive behaviour: how much the manager says about why, how much they listen, and how far they involve the employee in the decision. It rises where what is missing is confidence or willingness rather than knowledge.

The independence of the two is the substance of the whole approach. A manager who takes them for the two ends of a single ruler will see high direction as strictness and high support as leniency, and will switch between them as if switching between two temperaments. They are in fact two quantities, and either can be raised or lowered, together or on its own.

The four states and four styles of situational leadership

• Not yet able, and willing. The employee is new to the task, keen and not yet capable. The style is high direction with low support: they are told what to do, how and when, and they are not consulted on matters they have no basis to judge. The error here is to involve them in a decision for which they lack the material, which looks like inclusion but leaves them stranded halfway.
• Not yet able, and no longer willing. Some time has passed, the difficulty of the task has become clear to them, and their enthusiasm has faded. The style is high direction and high support together: what to do is explained, why it is done is explained, and what has held them back is heard. This state is demanding on a manager’s time, and it can be overlooked, because the employee now appears less keen than before and the change can be mistaken for a fall in effort.
• Able, but not yet confident. The employee has become capable and is not yet settled in the belief that they are. The style is high support with low direction: they take part in the decision and are asked for their view, and they are not told how to do the work. More direction at this point keeps them where they are, because it confirms to them that their judgement is not enough.
• Able and confident. The style is low direction and low support: the task is handed over with an agreed result and a deadline, and the method is left to them. More direction here is what workplaces call micromanagement, and it can drive a capable employee away.

The definition supplies no instrument for measuring an employee’s state. The state is estimated by observation and by asking directly, and the estimate can be wrong.

A limit that does not move with the situational leadership style

Leaving the method to the employee in the fourth state distributes how the work is done. It does not transfer responsibility for what follows from that work.

The word “delegating” needs care in this setting. In situational leadership it names a supervision style in which direction and support are both lowered on a particular task. It does not mean moving the right to decide from one level of the organisation to another: where that right is written into a standing rule attached to a position, the arrangement is decentralized management. The same word covers two different processes in the two settings, and what is meant here is the style, not a transfer of authority.

What situational leadership costs in a manager’s time

Choosing the style to fit the state means that supervision time differs from one person to the next, and the difference can be calculated. Take a manager with 8 people reporting to them, and estimate how many minutes of supervision each state needs in a week. The figures are assumed, to show the structure of the calculation:

• The first state: 120 minutes a week.
• The second state: 75 minutes.
• The third state: 45 minutes.
• The fourth state: 20 minutes.

If the team is spread evenly, with two people in each state, the total is 2 multiplied by the sum of the four figures, which is 260, giving 520 minutes, or about 8.7 hours a week.

If all eight are in the first state, as happens when a whole team is hired at once or when all of its work changes, the total becomes 8 multiplied by 120, which is 960 minutes. That is 16 hours a week, or 40% of a working week of forty hours.

The minutes in the calculation are assumptions made to show how the composition of a team bears on a manager’s time. They are neither a benchmark nor a recommendation.

Two practical points follow. The span of control cannot be set by a bare headcount; it depends on the number and on the mix, and eight capable people are not eight new ones. And hiring four people in a single month commits the manager to eight hours a week before any of their own work is done, which is a reason to stagger hiring, where that is possible, rather than bring people in all at once.

Movement between the situational leadership states runs both ways

The order of the states can be taken as a rising ladder: the employee starts in the first, ends in the fourth and stays there. That describes half of the movement.

Movement downward also happens, and it can go unnoticed. A procedure changes, a tool the employee works with is replaced, the role widens to take in tasks it did not have before, or the employee moves to another team and the signals by which they judged their own work change with them. In each of these cases the capable employee returns to the start in part of their work, and remains capable in the rest of it.

The practical fault is that the manager diagnoses the state once, when the employee joins and is going through employee onboarding, and does not do so again. They go on treating an employee who, on a new task, is now closer to the second state as though they were in the fourth, and leave them without direction or support at the very moment they need both. That is why the diagnosis is repeated at every change in the task or in the tool, not at every change in the person.

Where situational leadership does not fit

• Where the work is uniform and bound by procedure. Work that admits only one method leaves no room for the fourth style, and the choice is reduced to how much support to give. The degree to which work is run by written procedure is the subject of formalization.
• Where the team is very large. The calculation above shows that matching the style to the state costs time. A manager with twenty people reporting to them cannot diagnose and follow up in this way, and ends up applying one style to everyone because of the numbers, not by choice.
• Where the work is far from the manager. Judging someone’s ability on a task requires knowing what the task demands. Removed from the detail of the work, a manager judges from outputs alone, and outputs are a late signal.
• Where the cause lies in the circumstances, not in the person. An employee who is not delivering because of conflicting priorities, or because a tool or a permission is missing, is not in any of the four states. Raising direction or support for them loads them with a burden whose source is the organisation.

Errors that undermine situational leadership in practice

• Turning the style into a temperament. A manager who describes themselves as “a supportive manager” has not applied the approach, because the approach requires their style to change from one employee to another, and from one task to another for the same employee.
• Moving to the fourth style too soon. The manager steps back because the employee said they could manage. Saying so is not evidence; the evidence is that they have done the same task before with a known result. A hasty step back is seen as trust when it works and as neglect when it fails, and what separates the two views is the outcome, not the decision.
• Stepping back in without saying so. When the employee stumbles on a task they used to handle alone, the manager returns to high direction with no explanation. The employee sees a sudden intervention and takes it as a withdrawal of trust. The better course is to say it plainly: this task has changed, and we will work on it differently until it settles.

How situational leadership differs from coaching, job autonomy and mentoring

• Coaching is an engagement for a set period in which the coach works through questions rather than prescriptions. Situational leadership is a daily supervision style whose holder keeps the appraisal and the decision. A manager who uses a questioning style with the team does not thereby become the team’s coach.
• Job autonomy is a property of the job: how much choice its design leaves to the person holding it. Situational leadership is a property of supervision: how much the manager leaves on this task today. A job can carry wide autonomy while the supervision of it is directive, because the person holding it is new.
• Mentoring is a longer relationship in which someone experienced passes on what they know about a career path and professional judgement. It is not a way of managing work in progress, and the mentor need not be a manager.

What evidence supports situational leadership?

We have found no published measurement showing that matching the style to the state in situational leadership produces higher performance. Its four states remain a useful way of ordering a manager’s thinking.

In what we have read of the Saudi Labor Law (نظام العمل), its Implementing Regulation (اللائحة التنفيذية) and the model work regulation (النموذج الموحّد), we found no reference to supervision styles. The definition of situational leadership therefore supports no ruling on any matter for which those documents have a written provision.

Before situational leadership is applied

The most useful thing in situational leadership is that it changes the manager’s question from “what kind of manager am I?” to “where does this person stand on this task today?”. That second question can be answered, while the first changes nothing, whatever the answer.

A modest place to start is for the manager to write down the names of the team, put two or three tasks beside each name, and then record the state for each task. They may find that someone they treat in one way stands in two different states, and that someone they think needs constant follow up needs it on one task, not across all of their work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.

Related terms

• Employee Onboarding
• Decentralized Management
• Peter Principle
• Performance Standards
• Formalization