Modifying Your Style to Reach Your People

One of the most useful leadership models that I’ve come across in my lengthy career is Situational Leadership Theory. The fundamental premise is that, since every individual is different, and has a different level of capability and maturity, you should adapt your own leadership style to optimize results.

This means you have to ‘read the play’, to know when it’s appropriate to push harder, when it’s appropriate to work more closely with someone, and when it’s appropriate to stand back and let them get on with it.

The four different styles that the model suggests are: telling, selling, participating, and delegating. As you might imagine, you would use the very directive style of telling for someone with a very low level of maturity and capability… and, at the top of the food chain, you would only use delegating with someone who was extremely mature, and whom you could rely upon to deliver high quality outcomes with little intervention.

Of course, the world isn’t really as clear cut as that… there’s 1,000 shades of grey when it comes to capability and maturity, and every individual is different. Your style will never be as definitive as the model might suggest. But it’s a really good mental frame to remind us to adapt our style for the individual, rather than pursuing a one-size-fits-all strategy.

Many leaders arrogantly assume that it’s up to the individual to work out how to adapt to their leadership style. But this ignores one really critical piece of information. When you strip everything else away, your fundamental job as a leader is to get the most value you possibly can from the resources the organization has entrusted to you… and this includes the people on your team.

You have an obligation to do everything you can to bring out their best… and sometimes this means adapting your style to support, motivate, and drive someone.

It’s also not a static grid… performance management can often push you to adapt your style in a backwards fashion. 

What I mean by that, is that you might start with a new direct report by using a delegating style. This bestows your trust upon them, and assumes they can do what they’re paid to do in a professional, high-quality fashion. And for many people who work for you, this will absolutely be the case.

But other times, you’ll notice that someone whom you’ve given a lot of freedom to isn’t delivering to the standard you expect. So you might need to get a little closer to them… to help them to work out what they need to change in order to be successful.

This might push you back down the curve from delegating to participating…. Or even from participating to selling. But that’s heading in the wrong direction, and isn’t sustainable. Trend is your friend, and anyone who isn’t doing the job to the required standard needs to demonstrate a trend of improvement.

Everyone on your team ultimately needs to be able to perform to the minimum acceptable standard without your constant intervention.

So you need to learn how to read the play… how to modify your style to give your people the very best chance of being successful. But also to know when to step on the gas and demand more.

This is the hard work of leadership!