Situational Leadership Planner

Judge one person's competence and commitment on one specific task, pick a starting amount of direction and support, clear one obstacle out of their way, and set check-ins where you find out whether your read was right.

Situational Leadership (Hersey & Blanchard, 1969) is weak or contested: tests have been mixed and its inputs are hard to measure (Thompson & Glasø, 2018). Path-goal theory has mixed evidence (House, 1996; Wofford & Liska, 1993), and so does Fiedler's contingency model (Fiedler, 1967; Schriesheim, Tepper & Tetrault, 1994). The page uses them as prompts, not rules. The labels R1 to R4 and the style names come from later versions of Hersey and Blanchard's model.

Use it when:

• You are handing a task to someone and are unsure how closely to be involved.
• Someone who is strong in their job is struggling with a new kind of task.
• The working relationship feels off and you suspect you are giving too much or too little direction.

Skip it when:

• You want to see your general leadership habits across situations: use 3.4 Leadership Style Snapshot.
• The question is how much to involve people in a decision: use 3.16 Decision Style Matrix.

The models on this page share an appealing claim: there is no single best leadership style, so match your behavior to the person and the situation. None of them has strong evidence, and the page says so. Hersey and Blanchard's (1969) model, which pairs a follower's readiness with a style, has been tested repeatedly across its versions without clear support, so read its tidy table as a hypothesis. Path-goal theory (House, 1971; House, 1996) does somewhat better, but the support for its fit rules is mixed, and Fiedler's (1967) contingency model is mixed as well.

What holds up is the more modest point underneath all three. Competence and commitment vary from task to task, leaders drift into a habitual style, and asking whether your default fits this person on this task beats running on autopilot. So the page asks for a judgment per task rather than per person, treats the style table as a starting guess, adds the obstacle question from path-goal theory and ends in check-ins, which is where you learn whether the guess was right.

Be specific about the task. Readiness belongs to a task, not to a person.

Strong answer: "Experienced nurse on our ward. Task: lead the roll-out of the new medication-scanning routine to the evening staff by March. She has never led a roll-out."

Who (role):

The task, and what done looks like:

Context and deadline:

Illustrative example: the hospital, the roles and the details are made up.

A ward manager at a hospital in western Sweden asks an experienced nurse to lead the roll-out of a new medication-scanning routine to the evening staff.

Step 2: clinically the nurse is R4; for leading a roll-out she is R2: eager, but her first plan has no training slots for the evening shift.

Step 3: coaching. The manager shows her how two earlier roll-outs were planned and reviews her plan weekly, without rewriting it.

Step 4: directive on the plan, supportive on her nerves about presenting to senior colleagues. Obstacle: no training time on evening shifts. The manager gets two slots approved by the department head.

Step 5: relations good, task moderately clear, power strong: favorable. Weekly 20-minute check-ins until the first session. When asked, the nurse says the plan is fine but she wants help with one skeptical charge nurse. The manager adds a joint meeting with him to the plan.