Situational Leadership: Hersey and Blanchard's Four Styles Put to the Test

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In 1969 Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard introduced what they first called the Life Cycle Theory of Leadership, arguing there is no single best way to lead. Their model combines two levers, task behavior and relationship behavior, into four styles: S1 telling or directing, S2 selling or coaching, S3 participating or supporting, and S4 delegating. Blanchard's later Situational Leadership II matched those styles to four development levels: the enthusiastic beginner, the disillusioned learner, the capable but cautious performer and the self-reliant achiever. The episode illustrates the sequence with a teenager learning to drive and a new guitar player whose fingers bleed three weeks in.

Hersey and Blanchard parted ways in 1977 and ran separate companies, with Hersey keeping the Situational Leadership trademark and Blanchard launching SLII in 1985. The two settled the trademark question legally in 2018. Blanchard tied his model to Malcolm Knowles's adult learning theory and to Bruce Tuckman's forming, storming, norming and performing stages. Empirical tests by Fernandez and Vecchio in the 1980s and 1990s found the directing style helped low-maturity employees, but results for experienced workers were mixed, since some felt abandoned under pure delegation.

• The model treats micromanagement as a mismatch of style and situation rather than a behavior that is bad in itself.
• Tuckman's storming phase maps onto the disillusioned learner stage, scaled from an individual to a whole team.
• Hersey argued that development is not linear, and a skilled worker can drop back to beginner status on a new task.
• Hersey also stressed that a leader's realistic high expectations generate high performance, while low expectations can lock people in place.
• The episode ends by asking whether an authentic leadership style can exist if the best leaders constantly change shape for their teams.