At its core, this theory is about having the versatility to adapt the style and nature of your leadership to a situational approach so that you can meet ever-shifting workplace dynamics.
Here at Cloverleaf, we use the situational leadership style of learning so we can help our clients be the best leaders they can be. That doesn’t mean being domineering or controlling because leading is no longer about the amount of positional power you have over others.
Our leadership style is about putting people in the best place possible so they can do their best work. We use a situational leadership model to accomplish this. Our organization is about elevating others, and we give you the tools and resources you need to excel and deliver exceptional quality work.
WHAT IS SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP THEORY?
Situational Leadership Theory is a style of learning that relates to how good leaders manage their teams in the workplace. Essentially, it’s about having the skill to provide a flexible and effective leadership strategy. That way, you can adjust according to each task and situation and the needs of the people you lead every day.
In 1969, Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey developed this theory in their groundbreaking book, Management of Organizational Behavior. The book sold millions, and its ideas and practices are still in use today across the world, and for a good reason: because it works.
The Four Leadership Styles
According to Hersey and Blanchard, their theory depends on the particular style of leadership and the maturity level of the team members.
They claim that the situational leader should adopt these four traits when adjusting and implementing different leadership styles in the workplace.
Selling: Also called persuading, leaders use this style for unmotivated employees or those who have low competence and a low commitment level. The leadership approach for this style involves being open to communication, collaboration, and feedback, so the employee feels valued and wants to participate.
Telling: Telling (direction) is for leadership situations that require supportive behavior and reliable guidance for all employees who could benefit from close supervision. This management style requires you to be a strong type of leader and take charge.
Participating: Participating and sharing skills are most effective for a team member with high job proficiency who can help with decision-making or critical planning. Every skilled team member gets to make decisions and communicate effectively.
Delegating: This model is ideal for teams of self-motivators with well-developed emotional intelligence. As a leader, you must have an understated management style yet be crystal clear with the outcomes you expect and your directions.
Read more about leadership and coaching styles here.
Develop the Situational Leaders You Need for Effective Leadership Styles with Cloverleaf
Here at Cloverleaf, we implement all four leadership styles to help our clients develop the situational leadership model that fits their organization best. Right now, we offer five different packages modeled around this practical theory of leadership, so our clients can employ an effective decision-making process as a leader and foster positive employee development.
No matter what kind of leadership style your organization needs, one of the following comprehensive support packages should be right for you:
Individual: Increase your self-awareness, realize your potential, and leverage your strengths to become a leader in your own right.
Small Teams: Our leadership studies have helped us provide top-notch coaching for team members so that you can gain critical insights into your team’s performance.
Coaches: We have the expertise and skill to help you deliver value as a head coach. We’ll help you foster performance readiness so you can keep your team consistently producing their best work.
Enterprises: Develop an effective coaching style and integrate technology to implement our leadership styles on a large scale.
Non-Profits: We can help your non-profit build a stronger community organization so your team can collaborate seamlessly to help those who need it most.
HOW TO PRACTICE SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP
If you want to practice situational leadership, you’ve got to have a range of different management styles. Good leaders have the ability to shift these styles at a moment’s notice to accommodate any situation, whether you’re the Editor-in-Chief, the director of human resources, or the COO of the whole shebang.
These situational leadership styles are only effective when you practice them in accordance with the four development levels:
Low Competence and High Commitment: This first development level is also called the “enthusiastic beginner” level. Such employees have a very high commitment level to the task behavior required for their work but don’t have the maturity levels or expertise they need to accomplish the job with any level of skill.
Mild Competence and Low Commitment: This level of worker possesses a moderate amount of skills but may be a “disillusioned learner” with only a low level of commitment to the team structure. Such contexts require a leadership style with lots of coaching and positive affirmation.
High Competence and Variable Commitment: A member of this level, also known as a “cautious performer,” exhibits high levels of maturity and skills but may not have the commitment level required to excel at his or her job. This situation requires an approach that supports every member of the team and fosters willing participation. Your role needs to present the correct task behavior as a shining example.
High Commitment and High Competence: This level of worker, also called a “self-reliant achiever,” has developed skills and expertise to a high level and usually has more mature emotional intelligence. He or she will be ready to help whenever necessary and is typically focused on the tasks at hand throughout each day.
This development level also involves learning effective delegation, so you can empower your team to make the right decisions without close supervision.
HOW TO APPLY SITUATIONAL LEADERSHIP
If you want to change your leadership style to meet the basic principles of Situational Leadership Theory, there are a few skills you need to master first.
Once you have the tools, you need the knowledge to apply them to your specific work environment. Here are the critical skills you need as a leader to keep your team functioning at its absolute best.
Versatility: Regularly examine the needs of your job, the team, and the business itself and adjust your leadership style as necessary.
Comprehensive and Clear Directions: Give your employees clear direction and guidance for them to succeed, regardless of their maturity level or relationship behavior with others in the workplace.
Listening and Communication: Use active listening skills and promote positive relationship behavior among teammates, so everybody collaborates to ensure a desirable outcome.
Reward Dedication and Participation: Be sure to reward members of the team who participate and encourage everyone to share their opinions, expertise, knowledge, and skills.
Effective Skill Implementation: Have the skill range and tools to be an effective leader while coaching teammates with varying maturity levels to bring out their best work.
Read more about leadership styles and Cloverleaf here.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is Situational Leadership Theory?
This theory of leadership focuses on the ability of a leader to be flexible, versatile, and adaptable when it comes to their specific leadership style. Leaders need to be flexible so they can better meet the needs of their team and adjust their style to find practical solutions to the task at hand.
There’s another theory by Daniel Goleman (author of Emotional Intelligence) that includes six leadership styles:
Coaching Leader
Democratic Leader
Affiliative Leader
Authoritative Leader
Coercive Leader
Pacesetting Leaders
What are the four leadership styles of situational leadership?
In this theory of leadership, the four styles of leadership include:
Selling and persuading
Telling and showing
Participating and sharing
Delegating and directing
What is the main principle of situational leadership theory?
The key is to have the flexibility to adapt your leadership skills and style to fit the many variables in your workspace to lead your team more effectively.
It’s about being a mentor, a coach, a leader, and a delegator and learning how to shift between those leadership styles and skills to best tackle the situation at hand.
What are some examples of Situational Leadership Theory?
One great example of situational leadership theory would be a team leader working on a video game release for a client. Halfway to completion, there’s a major crisis and the client asks for a complete reinvention of all the progress so far. Naturally, the employees of the team feel upset and don’t know where to begin.
The leader of this team would adopt a “Telling” style of leadership, giving team members direct supervision and close guidance to get everything done efficiently.
Another real-life example would be Abraham Lincoln, who led the country not only through the Civil War but also its aftermath, helping repair the war-torn country. Had he been unable to deploy ever-shifting leadership styles, he would not have been able to achieve the great things he was able to accomplish, including the Emancipation Proclamation.
Partner with Cloverleaf and Grow Your Leadership Approach
For innovative leadership strategies, you need to keep your team excelling, contact the professionals at Cloverleaf today and learn how Situational Leadership Theory can elevate your team to the next level.
When you receive disappointing feedback, does it feel like a personal attack or an opportunity to grow?
Carol Dweck has spent decades researching fixed mindset vs growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, we view our abilities as innate, (aka, “just the way I am,”), making failure and constructive feedback feel personal and insurmountable. On the flip side, in a growth mindset, we are comfortable with improving over time, not fearing being wrong, and making failure or difficult feedback an opportunity to be curious about how to do better next time.
The good news is, we can learn to choose a growth mindset. So the next time you get a Cloverleaf coaching tip about an area for growth, know that that is truly what it is: an area for growth.
Or, the next time you realize you made a mistake or didn’t perform up to your own standards, take it as an opportunity. Ask others for feedback, or dig into your Cloverleaf profile to learn more about how you can do your best work.
What about your Teammates?
Just as we can have a growth or fixed mindset about ourselves, we can view others through the same lens.
When a teammate makes a mistake or doesn’t meet your expectations, do you start to question their abilities, or even their character? Or do you feel the freedom to have an open conversation, knowing that your teammate is innately valuable, and can grow from this experience?
The next time a teammate drops the ball, watch your internal reaction. If you find yourself questioning their abilities, head to that teammate’s profile and look through their work style insights to see where their strengths truly are. You may be surprised.
We’re all in this together!
Commonly overlooked, evidence-based recommendations for virtual leaders.
For managers now working from home, leading a team virtually presents new challenges. And because the pandemic changed the work environment so drastically and so quickly, our advice for managers is yet to catch up.
The virtual leadership reminders currently floating around the infosphere are straightforward. Leaders should touch-up on their technical skills, focus on building trust, and encourage social cohesion through regular team check-ins.
These are accurate and helpful, but virtual work is here to stay and moving quickly. It’s time to go deeper.
Below are five overlooked, evidence-based recommendations for leading in today’s virtual work environment.
1. Pay Attention to Emergent Leadership
Ideally, everyone on the team steps up as a leader when their knowledge or skills are needed. However, this tendency to emerge as a leader changes in virtual work environments.
Communication apprehension—anxiety due to anticipated communication with others—is more common in real-time virtual communication.
This isn’t the same thing as introversion. In fact, it’s more strongly associated with neuroticism, which means that some of the most critical, perfection-oriented employees aren’t speaking up.
Leaders should nudge these employees to contribute, clear the floor to give them the spotlight, or consider alternative outlets for them to voice their suggestions and concerns.
2. Establish Virtual Communication Norms
Moving to virtual-only work disrupts preexisting face-to-face or hybrid communication norms. Embrace the change by thinking through four questions: What medium? How often? What tone? What level of detail?
In new or uncertain environments, employees mimic the behaviors of their leader. Choose wisely.
3. Stop Overloading Your Employees With Information
We’re getting comfortable with communication in a remote work environment. Too comfortable. We post or send messages about everything.
Just because it’s easier to communicate electronically doesn’t mean it needs to be communicated. Employees are overwhelmed. Be judicious.
4. Use Asynchronous Video
Employees log more overall hours when working remotely compared to face-to-face. Partly because the days are filled with Zoom meetings that disrupt employees’ flow and deep thinking.
Help your employees be more productive by recording videos with key information that they can watch whenever is convenient for them. They’ll likely watch them during the transition time between meetings or when their energy is low and they need a break.
5. Practice Balanced Monitoring
Over-monitoring employees is common when leading virtually. Leaders tend to overcompensate when they can no longer pick up on subtle signals during face-to-face interaction.
Although some degree of monitoring ensures stability in productivity, too much will annoy subordinates and degrade trust.
An Eye Towards The Future
Just like preexisting virtual leadership listicles, these recommendations will soon become outdated and overly straightforward. The foundations of leadership don’t change in virtual environments, they just make the need for high-quality leadership more pronounced. What will change, however, is the nature of the virtual work environment.
History clearly illustrates that technology changes quickly. The best virtual leaders will continue to think deeply about what’s new or different as virtual work environments evolve, and how they can go deeper to meet the needs of their team members.
A version of this article is also published at Business Insider.
Visit www.scottdust.com for more free resources for human capital enthusiasts, including a free e-book titled “A Field Guide to Human Capital Assessments.”
You’re probably already well aware that your staff is the lifeblood of your business. They work diligently and consistently toward your collective success, they’re there to help you brainstorm new ideas, and get you through those dreaded creative slumps.
Unfortunately, the global pandemic has put a major strain on nearly every company’s staff force, and yours is likely included in the list. Your team members might still be feeling demotivated and burnt out after many months of working in isolation and being anxious about the future.
Your job as a business owner, team manager, or personal relations specialist is to provide the motivation your remote team needs to get through these dire times. You need to inspire them to stay productive while looking after themselves and prioritizing their own health and well-being.
Need a place to start? Here are our 3 essential tips for encouraging, motivating, and engaging your team to boost employee motivation and employee engagement.
1. Develop a Cross-Company Rewards System
Everyone loves rewards. They’re a fantastic source of motivation, along with an effective incentive to keep your team’s spirits high.
There are two main types of rewards you can use to motivate your team: intrinsic and extrinsic.
An intrinsic reward is an offering or gift with no tangible, physical presence, like a compliment or recognition for excellent contributions. Extrinsic rewards, on the other hand, are tangible items such as bonuses, trophies, plaques, or ‘Employee of the Month’ badges.
Both types of rewards can help to boost office morale and keep your staff motivated—but the true magic happens when you combine them. If you’re trying to figure out which type of reward would best suit your team, you need to take a closer look at the kinds of goals they’re aiming to achieve.
The Right Time for Intrinsic Rewards
Intrinsic rewards are best suited for acknowledging ‘immeasurable’ or subjective goals. They have a more powerful and longer-lived effect on your team’s attitude than extrinsic rewards do. If you plan on making a long-term positive impact on your team and encouraging certain actions or beliefs, intrinsic perks are your bet best.
There are so many ways to use this reward type to motivate your staff force. Recognizing their strengths, efforts, and achievements is quick, simple, cost-effective, and one of the best possible ways you can go about ensuring your staff remains loyal to your organization.
Intrinsic rewards can include employee of the month accolades, regular shout-outs, or even one-on-one meetings between employees and supervisors. In these meetings, contributions are praised and encouraged.
Regardless of how you reward your employees, remember to make sure your approach is inclusive and sensitive to their needs, expectations, and personal beliefs. Take time to figure out what inspires each of your workers so you can reward them in a way that engages and makes them feel appreciated and respected.
The Right Time for Extrinsic Rewards
You should ideally offer extrinsic rewards when there’s an obvious and measurable goal your team is trying to reach. You can use close monitoring and reporting to determine whether or not the team has hit its goal, and then reward them as you see fit.
It’s also recommended that you add a time frame to your extrinsic reward goals. This gives your team the incentives they need to work harder and quicker towards the objective at hand.
Moreover, it’s useful to create a hierarchy of company rewards. This allows you to offer predetermined rewards that match the amount of work your team puts in within a given time frame. If you give your staff force a major goal to achieve, make sure the prize is tempting enough to incentivize them to work towards it in good time.
You can offer smaller rewards, such as advanced paychecks, for workers achieving more minor goals. Even the simplest of offerings can motivate workers to accomplish easy feats like accurately reporting their hours, or submitting documents by specific deadlines.
Reserve larger, juicier rewards like gift cards and annual bonuses for notable achievements like boosting sales by a certain figure, or significantly improving production rates to a preset level. We recommend breaking down major goals into smaller objectives, each with its own small reward, for motivating employees and adding employee engagement throughout the process to keep team members on track.
2. Introduce Workplace Gamification
‘Gamification’ has become a huge buzzword in recent years. This movement has the power to motivate employees, students, online learners, and virtually everyone in between.
But what exactly IS gamification, and how does it fit into working from home?
Simply put, gamification is a method of motivation companies use to boost employee satisfaction, productivity, and employee efficiency. The method involves implementing game-based features into daily tasks to make work more fun and more immersive for all involved.
When you incorporate this element of competition into your company’s day-to-day operations, you can encourage your team to learn new skills rapidly, and apply them creatively in a fun work environment.
You can start adopting this approach by developing a training program packed with badges, rewards, leaderboards, and measured achievements for completing individual learning modules. You can even allow your staff members to compete with one another, or with different departments within your business. You can also use gamification and competition to motivate your departments individually, even when they’re working from home.
3. Offer Regular and Honest Feedback
It’s essential to give your employees regular and transparent feedback if you want to keep them motivated. Clear communication helps to build an awesome work-from-home culture that strengthens the team. Regardless of whether your feedback is positive, negative, or constructive, being honest will allow each of your workers to grow, both personally and professionally.
If you don’t provide enough feedback, your team members will never be sure of which aspects of their work ethic need attention, and which areas they’re performing exceptionally in.
Positive feedback is obviously the easiest type to offer. However, you need to make your compliments specific for them to really hit home. If you don’t, they may seem generic or insincere. Chat to your workers about specific actions and behaviors you appreciate, and explain exactly why they were the right choices to make.
It’s helpful to focus on how their actions benefit your company and align with its ethos. Once you explain your positive feedback at length to your team members, they’ll understand why it’s important for them to continue those actions in the future.
It can, of course, be harder to deliver negative feedback. As difficult as it is to accept, poor feedback can often be a more powerful motivator than upbeat praise. Using the ‘sandwich approach’ is the trick to turning negative feedback into a motivating force.
This approach involves offering a compliment, then criticism, then another compliment in that order. When you do broach your criticism, offer it in a neutral way, and use facts and a few specific incidents to back up your claims.
At the end of the day, you should keep your focus on your team member’s performance and the steps they can take to improve it. Give them time to offer their own feedback on your criticisms too. Doing so will allow your staff members a chance to voice their own thoughts and opinions and have them heard and validated.
The Bottom Line
It takes empathy and creativity in equal measures to motivate your team when they’re working from home. While remote work comes with some pros, it has its cons too. Your team could be battling with personal issues, anxious about the future, or suffering from workload-related stress. Remember to be kind and willing to listen to their concerns.
Thankfully, there are so many ways to increase employee motivation, even during trying times. Try using gamification, rewards systems, and honest feedback to engage your employees and boost their job satisfaction, every day of the week.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
In this blog post, Cloverleaf’s Chief Research Officer, Dr. Scott Dust, discusses cognitive diversity. He explains research findings from his published work in Personnel Psychology, offers key take-aways for maximizing cognitive diversity, and then explains how Cloverleaf can help facilitate the process of cognitive diversity.
In leadership and team building settings we’ve all been taught to embrace cognitive diversity. But how does cognitive diversity help? And how do we pinpoint and leverage cognitive diversity? My co-authors and I recently published a paper in Personnel Psychology that addresses these questions.
Across two studies, using a total of 520 manager-employee dyads, we found that manager-employee cognitive diversity improves employee creativity. As diverse teams become more divergent on risk orientation, employees’ intellectual stimulation increased, which in turn increased their creativity.
Risk orientation—the tendency to take or avoid risks when making decisions or problem-solving —is commonly thought to be a precursor to creativity. Importantly, it didn’t matter as much whether managers or employees were high or low on risk orientation. What did matter was that the manager and employee were different on risk orientation.
Also interesting is that employees’ perceptions of their managers determined whether the intellectual stimulation stemming from cognitive diversity was realized.
When employees’ perceived that their managers were genuinely interested in and open to their perspectives and ideas, the beneficial impact of cognitive diversity was enhanced. Alternatively, when employees’ perceived that their manager was uninterested in their perspectives and ideas, the benefits of cognitive diversity disappeared.
The take-aways of this research are three-fold:
(1) When two people work together that have a diversity of thought it facilitates intellectual stimulation, which entails rethinking assumptions and considering problems in new ways.
(2) When people experience intellectual stimulation it facilitates the generation of novel yet useful ideas and initiatives (i.e., creativity).
(3) The benefits of cognitive diversity in the work environment will only be realized when we perceive that the other party is genuinely open to our ideas and perspectives.
A key objective of the Cloverleaf platform is to enhance the likelihood that colleagues can capitalize on the benefits of cognitive diversity. To facilitate this process, we developed what is called the “Thinking Styles Comparison.”
On Cloverleaf’s team dashboard the user can select an assessment (e.g., DiSC, Instinctive Drives) and a team member comparison target. The user is then given a succinct report that helps them see how they can capitalize on their thinking style differences.
Cognitive diversity is important in work environments. At Cloverleaf, our goal is to help users make the most of these diverse viewpoints. Our hope is that this will lead to amazing teams that are not only more productive and make better decisions, but appreciate and respect each other’s different perspectives.
Liu, H., Dust, S. B., Xu, M., & Ji, Y. (forthcoming). Leader–follower risk orientation incongruence, intellectual stimulation, and creativity: A configurational approach. Personnel Psychology.
Reorganizations come in many forms, but the common element is that the change management required takes a toll on everyone. Whether it is flattening the organization for faster decision making, or a merger and acquisition that necessitates the integration of a common change management structure, the impact is real and can distract your people from daily operations. People are creatures of habit and disrupting the comfortable nature of their reporting and peer relationships with big organizational change can create anxiety and frustration for your teams.
It is natural for employees to be concerned about the impact these changes may have on career opportunities, the ability to contribute in a meaningful way, and job satisfaction.
And while most change management models are crafted with a lot of careful consideration, they tend to go wrong more often than not. According to McKinsey research, only 16% of merger reorgs fully deliver their objectives in the planned time, 41% take longer than expected, and in 10% of cases the reorg actually harms the newly-formed organization. Common pitfalls include a lack of cultural understanding between the integrating parties, poor integration leadership, and a focus on the wrong activity set or the wrong targets.
One study conducted by Bain & Company not only found that less than a third of reorg’s resulted in significant performance increases, but that some actually did just the opposite — the organizational change destroyed value.
Some of the more common reasons cited for these change management failures include:
Failure to think through what the critical initiatives are for the business, who should be responsible for them, and how the new structure will help people make and execute them better.
Misunderstanding the true strengths and weaknesses of the organization.
Missing key details of how the new organization will actually function.
Sticking to a flawed solution for too long.
While all of these and many more are key problems, I think there is another key aspect that impacts all of the above: the lack of tools available to really understand the impacts on key stakeholders while implementing change. As mentioned earlier, there is no lack of planning regarding these larger reorganizations. However, there is often not enough metrics available to help forecast the impact on people while leading change, and there are very few tools that give managers enough scenarios to manage successful change.
Team scenario planning tools
According to the authors of this recent Harvard Business Review article on merger reorganizations, “In developing organizational solutions, explicitly choosing from a number of options is the best approach. No solution will perfectly fit all future possibilities and every solution will have its downsides: only by weighing alternatives will you see what you might gain and what you might lose.”
But how do you choose from a host of alternatives if it is difficult or impossible to truly identify the potential options during a change management process?
This is where Cloverleaf comes in. Not only are you able to visualize the strengths and cultural dimensions of each organization but you can actually scenario plan the impact of combining, consolidating or re-shuffling the people inside organizations and teams.
Now – at least for culture, strengths and personality – you can know that you will go into the changes with eyes wide open.
Managing change is tough, and we may not be able to solve all of the detailed integration questions, but with Cloverleaf, you now have a powerful people planning tool to help you navigate organizational change management well. Contact us to find out more about our enterprise solutions or create a free account for your team.
HUMAN SKILL PROGRAMS ARE HITTING LIMITATIONS...
- Close the widening gap between learning and on-the-job application
- Overcome the tension of pausing productivity for development opportunities
- Integrate learning so it is actually in the flow of work
- The evolution of human skill development
- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.