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Situational Leadership applied to training

It seems a long time ago when I learnt about 'Situational Leadership’ by Hershey and Blanchard; in fact it was during the 1980s. What they did was to study management style in situations where there was a leader and a follower and they concluded that the most successful leaders altered their style of management to suit the relationship that they had with their followers. This was described as being dependent upon the maturity of the follower in the task being done. To simplify these concepts into a few simple sentences is not easy, but they could be described as follows:

When the follower lacks maturity in the task at hand the leader should give clear and unambiguous orders. When the follower has attained more maturity in the task at hand then the leader's style should move towards that of a coach. During the next phase, when the maturity level has increased again, the style should be one of participation. The last phase, when the follower has attained mastery of the task, (i.e. full maturity) the style should change to delegation. It was noted that some managers seemed to think that delegation and abdication was the same thing. This is not so! It should be remembered that delegation involves verifying that the task is being done properly and according to plan.

The four styles became known as Tell, Sell, Participate and Delegate and where used correctly greatly improved the effectiveness of the leader /follower relationship. This is a very useful model that can be applied to many other situations, as long as there is a leader/follower relationship. For example in a therapist/client situation the therapist could explain a technique, coach the client in its use, participate with the client in how the technique would be applied to the client’s problem and delegate the use of the technique to the client. In sales, the seller can tell the buyer about a product, explain how the product can be used, participate with the buyer in using the product, delegate the use to the buyer by letting them use the product (‘test drive’ it). The challenge in more general situations is assessing the level of maturity in the subject. The rule of thumb is if the follower is experiencing problems – go back to the previous style and raise the level of maturity.

And what if the situation is training? The leader is the trainer and the followers are the students. All these principles can be usefully applied to the structure of the course, down to the design and structure of a course module. When I was designing courses I found it useful to divide the course into four sections, where the maturity of the students would start low and, as learning progressed, move to higher levels of maturity, then the style of the course could be planned accordingly. So for the first part of the course the style of the trainer would be mainly that of telling or explaining the details of the topic. The next part of the course would be more coaching, practicing and encouraging. The third part of the course would become more participative and the final part the course would involve more delegation.

This pattern can be repeated in each part of the course, even down to a module. At the module level the styles could become:

1 Explain the topic (tell)

2 the trainer sets an exercise that applies the topic to a specific case and coaches the students through the exercise (sell)

3 The trainer set another exercise and participates in it, using language like " how can we apply what we have just done to..." (Participate)

4 the trainer delegates by asking how else the topic could applied by the students to other problems. I have even taken follow up letters with participants and checked progress a week after the class had finished. Or let the students plan the last part of course, so that they decide what revision topics, private study, group work etc., is most appropriate to their needs.

Situational Leadership has no doubt been further developed since I first learnt about it and, even at the simple level I have described, it can explain why a relationship, in a situational leadership context, has broken down and what to do to repair it.

And so, I hope you can find many new ways to use these ideas and find them as useful as I did.