John Adair's action-centred leadership: task, team, individual

John Adair developed action-centred leadership in the 1960s and 70s, drawing on his time teaching at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. It was a deliberate break from the "great man" tradition: Adair argued that leadership is a set of functions somebody has to perform, and that those functions can be taught to anyone. For vocational qualifications this is an unusually good fit, because functions can be evidenced.

The three circles

The model is usually drawn as three overlapping circles.

1. Achieve the task. The team exists for a purpose. Define it, plan it, resource it, monitor it, deliver it. Neglect this and the team loses confidence in the leader no matter how pleasant the atmosphere is.

2. Build and maintain the team. Standards, communication, cohesion, dealing with conflict, protecting the group from outside interference. Neglect this and delivery becomes a series of heroic individual efforts that eventually stop.

3. Develop the individual. Each person's needs, capability, recognition, growth and workload. Neglect this and your best people leave — usually the ones you least wanted to lose.

The circles overlap because the areas trade against each other constantly. Pushing hard for the task this week borrows from the team's goodwill; developing an individual takes time away from delivery today and repays it later. Adair's point is not that the circles are equal at every moment — it is that a leader who systematically starves one of them will eventually fail in the other two.

The eight functions

Adair also set out what leaders actually do, which is the part most summaries skip:

1. Defining the task — a clear, specific objective people can repeat back.
2. Planning — options, contingency, sequencing.
3. Briefing — communicating the plan and generating commitment.
4. Controlling — maintaining standards and progress without micromanaging.
5. Evaluating — assessing consequences, appraising performance, reviewing outcomes.
6. Motivating — the extrinsic and intrinsic drivers, per person.
7. Organising — structures, systems, self-management.
8. Setting an example — the function that quietly authorises or undermines all the others.

Applied in a UK workplace

A practice manager in a five-partner GP surgery is asked to cut the telephone waiting time for appointments.

• Task — define it precisely (average wait under three minutes at peak, measured weekly), plan the change to the phone system and rota, brief the reception team, and review the data every Friday.
• Team — reception has absorbed abuse from patients for months and is fragile. Building the team means setting an explicit standard for how the practice responds to abuse, running a short weekly huddle, and shielding the team from partners bypassing the process.
• Individual — one receptionist is anxious about the new triage script, another wants to progress towards a senior role, a third has a caring commitment that constrains her shifts. Three different conversations, none of which is about waiting times.

If the practice manager only works the task circle, waiting times fall for six weeks and then two receptionists resign. That is the model's central warning, and it is a genuinely common failure.

Criticisms and limitations

• It describes, it does not prioritise. "Keep three things in balance" is true but does not tell you what to do when they conflict this afternoon. The model is a checklist, not a decision rule.
• No account of context or power. It says nothing about organisational politics, resource constraints, or the very real situation of a team leader with responsibility and no authority.
• Weak empirical base. It emerged from military training practice and observation rather than controlled research, and it has not been extensively tested.
• It sidelines the follower. Adair's leader acts on the three circles; there is little on followership, distributed leadership or self-managing teams.
• Task bias in practice. In most workplaces the task circle has metrics attached and the other two do not, so "balance" quietly becomes task-first. The model does not defend against that.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

Adair is arguably the most portfolio-friendly model of the lot, because the eight functions read almost like assessment criteria.

Level 3 — Unit 301 Developing effective leadership skills, Unit 315 Developing a high performing team for the team circle, and Unit 302 Managing personal and professional development or Unit 303 Managing the performance of others for the individual circle. Suitable evidence:

• A reflective account of one project, analysed circle by circle, including where the balance slipped and what it cost.
• Workplace documents — a team development plan, a project plan, one-to-one records (suitably redacted) — as proof rather than description.
• Witness testimony from a team member about how you handled the team and individual circles, which is exactly where self-report is least convincing.
• Assessment observation of you briefing the team, which evidences functions 1–3 directly.

Level 5 — Unit 501 Assessing own leadership performance, Unit 503 Managing people and, where you are developing others, Unit 505 Coaching and mentoring in a leadership role. At Level 5 you should critique the model: show a real conflict between two circles, explain how you resolved it, and say what Adair does not help you with.

Do not forget the workplace rule: skills evidence must be generated in your workplace or a realistic working environment and be attributable to you. Witness testimony examples shows how to get third-party confirmation right.

Where to go next

• Goleman's six leadership styles — the "how" to Adair's "what".
• Team leader responsibilities — the same territory in plain job terms.
• ILM Level 3 and ILM Level 5.