If doctors prescribed medicine before understanding the symptoms, they would lose their right to practice. Similar malpractice occurs when Learning & Development reacts to training requests without first completely understanding the needs of both your employees and the business itself.
“I suppose leadership at one time meant muscles, but today it means getting along with people.” Mahatma Gandhi
L&D must diagnose before it prescribes. GBS Corporate Training's approach is to ask “critical questions” in the first phase of discovery so that we build the content in order to meet organisational outcomes which can then be measured. This is particularly true of our Situational Leadership® training, where it is important to understand and follow the needs of ‘followers’ in your organisation or business unit before you can prescribe the appropriate and most effective leadership styles to use.
In this blog, you will learn about:
Situational Leadership® is an adaptive leadership style. This strategy encourages leaders to take stock of their team members, weigh the many variables in their workplace and choose the leadership style that best fits their goals and circumstances.
“A situational leader is anybody anywhere who recognizes that influencing behavior is not an event but a process” Dr. Paul Hersey
Situational Leadership® is the model of choice for organisations around the world that want to do the following:
Situational Leadership® is flexible. It adapts to the existing work environment and the needs of the organisation. Situational Leadership® is not based on a specific skill of the leader; instead, you can modify the style of management to suit the requirements of the organisation.
One of the keys to Situational Leadership® is adaptability. Leaders must be able to move from one leadership style to another to meet the changing needs of an organisation and its employees. These leaders must have the insight to understand when to change their management style and what leadership strategy fits each new paradigm.
Developed by Dr. Paul Hersey in the late 1960s, the Situational Leadership® model is a powerful, yet flexible tool that enables leaders of all kinds ( Managers, Salespeople, Peer Leaders, Teachers or Parents) to more effectively influence others.
Dr. Hersey’s Situational Leadership® model is based on the relationship between leaders and followers and serves as a framework to analyse each situation based on:
The Situational Leadership® model provides leaders with an understanding of the relationship between an effective style of leadership and the level of readiness followers exhibit for a specific task.
Along with leadership qualities, Hersey defined four types of development for followers or employees:
According to the needs of followers, a Situational Leader adapts their leadership type. The Situational Leadership® model is based around four specific styles of leaders:
Situational Leadership® means “choosing the right leadership style for the right people,” according to Blanchard and Hersey. It also depends on the competence and maturity of the followers.
“Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes” Margaret Wheatley
The Situational Leadership® model ensures effective leadership practice is followed. By mapping specific leadership styles of the needs and types of followers, leaders will get their prescription right!
Hersey suggests that each of the four leadership approaches should be paired with different “maturity levels” among team members. For example, the lowest maturity level (M1) should work best with the “telling” style (S1), while the highest maturity level (M4) should be most responsive to the “delegating” approach (S4).
To get the prescription right, a Situational Leader must employ the following behaviours:
At its core, Situational Leadership® provides leaders with an understanding of the relationship between an effective style of leadership and the level of readiness that followers exhibit for a specific task. But, it does much more than that …
Enabling others to act is what being a Situational Leader is all about. Depending upon the task at hand, the process of enabling could translate to a number of different leadership approaches. Recognition of that reality entails coming to grips with the notion that leadership isn’t necessarily about what followers want; it is much more about what they need.
GBS Corporate Training is the sole UK provider of Situational Leadership® training. GBS provides a series of Situational Leadership® training courses related to different applications of the model. We help leaders to learn to appropriately balance their task direction with proper use of their power bases with their staff, which helps to maintain high levels of consistent performance across team members.
We also run Situational Leadership® Accreditation which is designed to equip trainers with the necessary skills and knowledge to deliver licensed Situational Leadership® within their own organisation.
Situational Leadership® will equip leaders in your organisation with the tools necessary to skillfully navigate the demands of an increasingly diverse workforce and evolving global marketplace. Infinitely adaptable to any circumstance, the model prepares leaders to address the most pressing challenges pervasive in today’s work environment.