Situational leadership: matching your style to the person

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard published their "life cycle theory of leadership" in 1969 and renamed it situational leadership shortly after. It has since been taught to millions of managers, which makes the state of its evidence base awkward: this is the most popular leadership model with the weakest empirical support in mainstream use.

That is not a reason to discard it. It is an excellent heuristic — it stops managers applying one style to everybody — and a poor theory. Knowing the difference is what a Level 5 portfolio needs to show.

The four styles

The model varies two behaviours: directive behaviour (telling people what, how, when) and supportive behaviour (listening, encouraging, involving).

The four development levels

Crucially, development level is task-specific, not a rating of the person. A twenty-year veteran is D4 on their core job and D1 on the new finance system.

The two classic errors the model is good at exposing:

• Delegating to a D1 and calling it empowerment. The person drowns quietly, then the manager concludes they were not up to it.
• Directing a D4 and calling it thoroughness. The person is insulted, disengages, and eventually leaves — often citing micromanagement in the exit interview.

Applied in a UK workplace

A practice manager in a GP surgery is introducing online triage. Four staff, one task, four different styles.

Reception team member, three weeks in the job (D1 → S1 Directing). Enthusiastic, no context. She gets a written process, a demonstration, and a check-in after the first ten triage submissions. Asking her to "use her judgement" on clinical urgency would be unfair and unsafe.

Experienced receptionist, eight years, struggling with the new system (D2 → S2 Coaching). Fully competent at the old job and now visibly frustrated — the hardest case, and the one where managers most often get it wrong by withdrawing support because "she's experienced". She needs both: continued direction on the system and explicit acknowledgement that this is a genuine step change. The manager sits with her twice, explains the clinical reasoning behind the triage categories, and asks her to identify the three cases the process handles badly.

Senior administrator, capable but hesitant about the reporting side (D3 → S3 Supporting). She can build the weekly triage report; she does not trust her interpretation. The manager stops giving instructions and starts asking questions: "What does that spike on Mondays tell you?" Direction here would erode the confidence that is the actual gap.

Deputy practice manager (D4 → S4 Delegating). Given the whole patient-communication workstream, with a fortnightly update and no supervision of method.

And the regression nobody plans for. Three months in, the deputy is asked to take on the same work for a second, newly merged site with different clinical staff and a different appointment system. On that task she is D2, not D4 — and the manager who keeps delegating because "she's a D4" has misread the model, which is task-specific by design.

Criticisms and limitations

• The evidence does not match the popularity. Vecchio's tests in the 1980s and later replications found partial support at best, mostly for using a directive style with genuinely new staff. The prescriptive style-matching claim has not been robustly demonstrated.
• D2 is theoretically awkward. Competence rising while commitment falls is plausible as a story but has been difficult to validate, and the prescribed response — increasing both direction and support — is not obviously a distinct style so much as more of everything.
• Definitions are loose. "Readiness", "development level", "competence" and "commitment" are not precisely operationalised, which makes the model hard to test and easy to apply post hoc to justify whatever you did.
• Assessment is the manager's, unilaterally. Diagnosing someone as D2 is a judgement made about a person, usually without their input, and it can encode bias. Blanchard's later SLII work recommends agreeing the diagnosis with the individual — good practice that is widely skipped.
• It ignores the system. Poor performance frequently reflects unclear priorities, broken processes, insufficient resource or conflicting instructions. The model directs the manager's attention entirely to the individual's readiness, which can turn an organisational failure into a personal deficiency.
• It is silent on style range. Some managers genuinely cannot do S3 — they are constitutionally directive. Fiedler's contingency model at least confronts this by suggesting you change the situation instead of the leader.
• Two commercial versions exist. Hersey's Situational Leadership and Blanchard's SLII diverged after the authors parted ways, with different labels and slightly different claims. Cite whichever you use, and do not be surprised when a colleague's version differs.

How to evidence this in your ILM portfolio

Situational leadership is one of the easiest models to evidence well, because it produces individual-level actions that leave a trail.

Level 3 — Unit 303 Managing the performance of others and Unit 301 Developing effective leadership skills. Evidence that works:

• A worked analysis of two or three team members on the same task, the level you judged each to be at, the style you used and why — anonymised.
• Products of work: the written process you gave the D1, the one-to-one notes with the D2, the delegated brief for the D4.
• A reflective account of getting it wrong — delegating too early, or directing someone who did not need it — and what you changed. Assessors trust this more than a clean success story.
• Observation of you supervising or coaching, with a professional discussion afterwards about your style choice.
• Unit 302 Managing personal and professional development where adapting your style was itself your development objective.

Level 5 — Unit 503 Managing people and Unit 504 Leading people and organisational culture, which require leadership approaches applied across teams, and Unit 505 Coaching and mentoring in a leadership role where the S2 and S3 styles are close to coaching practice. At Level 5 you must evaluate: name the weak evidence base, say why you still used it, and identify what it missed — most usefully, whether the performance gap you were managing was really about individual readiness or about the system the person was working in.

Remember that skills evidence must be generated in your workplace or a realistic working environment and be attributable to you, and that anything about a named colleague's competence needs anonymising before it goes in a portfolio.

Where to go next

• Goleman's six leadership styles — style flexibility at team-climate level.
• Delegation: a manager's guide — S4 in practice, and when not to use it.
• Coaching vs mentoring — what the S2 and S3 styles turn into.
• Transformational leadership — the contrasting, vision-led account.
• Ready to qualify? Compare ILM Level 3 and ILM Level 5.