Three months into managing my first team, I had two direct reports who confused me. One was a sharp, eager hire who asked good questions, volunteered for everything, and produced work that needed constant rework. The other had five years more experience than me, delivered cleanly, and bristled every time I checked in. I managed them the same way, because that felt fair, and I was getting it wrong with both. The eager one needed far more structure than I was giving. The experienced one needed far less. “Fair” was the exact thing breaking it. I was treating a development problem as if it were an equality problem, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other.
That is the gap situational leadership closes. The core claim of the model is uncomfortable for new managers because it contradicts the instinct that got most of us the job: be consistent, treat everyone the same, do not play favorites. Situational leadership says the opposite. The right amount of direction and support is different for every person, on every task, at every stage of their growth on that task. Consistency of style is not fairness. It is a failure to read what is actually in front of you.
This article is one cluster under the Leadership Skills hub. The complete operating manual for the ten leadership skills that compound on a small team lives in the leadership skills for new managers pillar guide, and the broader version of this idea is skill four, style flexibility, in that guide. This cluster goes deep on the most practical model for that skill: the Hersey-Blanchard situational leadership framework, translated out of consulting language and into the decisions you actually make on a Tuesday.
Situational leadership is not the same as having “a range of styles”
There is a sibling article in this hub on the six leadership styles every new manager should know, built on Goleman’s research. It is easy to assume situational leadership is just a smaller version of the same idea. It is not, and the difference matters.
Goleman’s six styles answer the question “what does this situation need?” A crisis needs commanding. A team that has lost its way needs visionary. A burned-out group needs affiliative. The variable being read is the moment and its emotional climate.
Situational leadership answers a narrower and more frequent question: “what does this person need on this specific task, given how developed they are at it right now?” The variable being read is one human’s competence and commitment on one piece of work. You will make this decision dozens of times a week, often inside a single 1-on-1. The two frameworks stack rather than compete. Goleman tells you the mode the room needs. Hersey-Blanchard tells you how much to direct and support the individual once you are in it.
The model in one diagram you can hold in your head
Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed situational leadership in 1969, originally calling it the life cycle theory of leadership. Blanchard later refined his version into what is now taught as SLII. Strip away the trademarks and the model is two questions and a grid.
The first question is about you: how much directive behavior are you providing? Directive behavior is telling and showing. Setting the goal, defining the steps, specifying how good looks, setting the deadline, checking the work closely.
The second question is also about you: how much supportive behavior are you providing? Supportive behavior is listening, encouraging, asking instead of telling, involving the person in the decision, building their confidence.
Cross those two and you get four leadership styles:
- S1, Directing. High direction, low support. You decide and you tell. Short, specific, frequent check-ins.
- S2, Coaching. High direction, high support. You still decide most of the how, but you explain the why, invite questions, and rebuild morale while you do it.
- S3, Supporting. Low direction, high support. They know how. Your job is to listen, draw out their own thinking, and back their judgment.
- S4, Delegating. Low direction, low support. You hand over the goal and the authority, and you get out of the way.
The whole skill is knowing which of the four a given person needs on a given task right now. And that is decided by the other half of the model.
Development level is the part new managers get wrong
The matching variable is what Blanchard called development level: the person’s competence and commitment on a specific task. There are four.
- D1, the enthusiastic beginner. Low competence, high commitment. New to the task, does not yet know what they do not know, but motivated and willing. Needs S1, Directing.
- D2, the disillusioned learner. Some competence, low commitment. They have done it enough to discover it is harder than it looked, and motivation has cratered. This is the danger zone. Needs S2, Coaching.
- D3, the capable but cautious contributor. High competence, variable commitment. They can do it, but they second-guess themselves or lack confidence to own it fully. Needs S3, Supporting.
- D4, the self-reliant achiever. High competence, high commitment. Skilled, motivated, reliable on this task. Needs S4, Delegating.
The match is one-to-one: D1 to S1, D2 to S2, D3 to S3, D4 to S4. That part is simple. Three things about it are not, and they are where new managers go wrong.
First: development level is about the task, not the person. This is the single most important sentence in the model. Your most senior engineer is D4 on shipping code and might be D1 the first time they run a hiring loop. The label is never “she is a D4.” It is “she is D4 on delivery and D1 on interviewing.” Same person, two tasks, two different versions of you required in the same week. New managers who collapse this into a personality rating (“he’s high-maintenance,” “she’s low-maintenance”) have stopped using the model and started using a stereotype.
Second: enthusiasm is not competence. The eager new hire I mismanaged was D1, not D4. I read the eagerness, the smart questions, the volunteering, and I delegated to him as if he were already skilled. He was committed and incompetent at the task, which is exactly what D1 means and exactly what needs the most direction. Misreading high commitment as high competence is the most common D1 error, and it is how you set up your most motivated people to fail.
Third: the D2 valley is where people quit. D2 is counterintuitive. The person now knows more than they did as a D1, so the instinct is to back off and give them room. That is precisely backwards. Competence ticked up, but commitment fell off a cliff, because they have just discovered the task is hard and they are not good at it yet. Back off here and you confirm their fear that they are sinking alone. D2 needs more of you, not less: high direction to get them unstuck, plus high support to rebuild the morale. The manager who pulls away at D2 is the manager whose promising hires resign at the six-month mark, confused about why.
Running the model in real situations
The model earns its keep in the moment, so here is what each match looks like in practice on a small team.
S1 with a D1. A new hire takes over the weekly metrics report for the first time. Do not say “you’ve got this, let me know if you need anything.” That is delegating to someone who does not yet know the steps, and it reads as abandonment dressed up as trust. Instead: walk them through it once, give them a written checklist, set a check-in for Thursday before it goes out, and review the first three closely. High direction. You are not micromanaging. You are teaching a task that has a right way to be done. The related failure mode, doing the work yourself because teaching feels slower, is its own trap, covered in the I’ll just do it myself cost calculator.
S2 with a D2. Six weeks in, the same hire is deflated. The report keeps having errors, they have started apologizing pre-emptively, and the spark is gone. The wrong move is to take it back or to leave them to “figure it out.” The S2 move is to sit down, diagnose the specific errors together, show the fix, and at the same time name the progress out loud: “this is the part everyone finds hard at week six, you are actually ahead of where I was.” Direction on the work, support on the morale, both at full volume.
S3 with a D3. Your experienced report is fully capable of running a client conversation but keeps looping you in for approval on calls they are qualified to make. Directing here insults them and trains dependence. The S3 move is to stop answering the question and start returning it: “what’s your read? what would you do?” Then back their answer in public even when it is not identical to yours, a discipline covered in the servant leadership behaviors cluster. You are not adding skill. You are adding the confidence to own skill they already have.
S4 with a D4. Your senior contributor owns the deployment process cleanly and has for a year. The S4 move is to define the outcome, hand over the authority, and genuinely leave it alone. The failure here is the manager who cannot stop touching things, the one who “just wants a quick update” on work that does not need them. Over-directing a D4 is not harmless. It is the fastest way to push your best person toward the exit, because nothing reads as “I am not trusted here” louder than being managed on a task you have mastered.
The two ways the model breaks: over-managing and under-managing
Almost every situational leadership error collapses into one of two shapes.
Over-managing is providing more direction than the development level needs. It is S1 on a D3, S2 on a D4. It feels productive, which is why new managers default to it under stress. It is the most common new-manager pattern because directing looks like leading and feels like adding value. The cost is invisible until your good people get quietly resentful and your capable people stay dependent. If your instinct under pressure is to grab the wheel, the real number behind that habit is laid out in the micromanagement cost calculator.
Under-managing is providing less direction than the development level needs. It is S4 on a D1, S3 on a D2. It is usually well-intentioned: you are trying to show trust, avoid micromanaging, respect their autonomy. But trust given to someone who does not yet have the competence is not a gift, it is a setup. The D1 flounders. The D2 quits. Under-managing tends to come from a manager who is conflict-avoidant or worried about seeming controlling, a pattern the Am I Too Soft as a Manager? self-assessment is built to surface.
The diagnostic question that prevents both: before you decide how to handle a task, ask “how competent and how committed is this person, on this task, right now?” Answer honestly and the style picks itself.
”But isn’t this just playing favorites?”
This is the objection that stops new managers from using the model, and it deserves a direct answer.
When you give one person tight direction and frequent check-ins while you hand another person full autonomy, an observer, and your own anxious inner voice, can read it as favoritism. The person on a short leash can feel singled out. The person you leave alone can look anointed. The instinct to flatten that, to treat everyone identically so no one can accuse you of bias, is strong and well-meaning, and it is the exact instinct situational leadership asks you to override.
The distinction is this. Favoritism is differential treatment based on how much you like someone, or how similar they are to you, or who you would rather grab lunch with. Situational leadership is differential treatment based on a defensible reading of competence and commitment on a task. The first is bias. The second is the job. One is about your feelings. The other is about their development. You can and should be able to explain the second out loud: “I’m checking in more closely on this because it’s new for you, and I’ll back off as you get reps. With the client work you’ve owned for a year, I’m staying out of it.” That sentence is impossible to say honestly about favoritism.
The catch is that the two can be hard to tell apart from the inside, because unconscious favoritism disguises itself as good judgment with remarkable ease. If you want to pressure-test whether your differential treatment is actually development-based or quietly preference-based, the Am I Playing Favorites? free self-assessment walks through 15 scenarios across the five dimensions where favoritism usually hides (access, opportunity, benefit of the doubt, feedback, and recognition). Run it before you conclude your situational read is clean. The managers most confident they treat everyone equally are usually the ones with the most to find.
An honest note on the research
The brand voice on this site is to be straight about evidence, so here is the straight version. Situational leadership is one of the most taught leadership models in the world and one of the least empirically validated. Academic reviews, including work by Robert Vecchio and a 2009 study by Thompson and Vecchio, have found weak and inconsistent support for the precise D-to-S matching, with the strongest evidence showing up for newer, lower-development employees and much patchier results higher up the scale.
That does not make the model useless. It makes it a heuristic rather than a law. Treat it as a structured way to ask better questions, not as a formula that guarantees outcomes. The genuinely durable insight underneath the trademarks survives the weak validation intact: the amount of direction and support a person needs is not fixed, it changes as they grow on a task, and your job is to keep recalibrating instead of locking into one style. You do not need the model to be proven to use that idea well. You need it to be a better default than “treat everyone the same,” and at that bar it clears easily.
How to start using it this week
Do not try to classify your whole team at once. That produces a spreadsheet, not a behavior change.
Instead, pick one direct report and one specific task they are working on right now. Ask the two questions: how competent are they at this task, and how committed do they seem to it right now? Land on a development level. Then check it against how you are actually managing them on it. Most new managers find at least one mismatch immediately, usually over-managing a D3 or D4 they could trust more, or under-managing a D1 or D2 they assumed had it handled.
Adjust that one thing. Watch what happens over two weeks. Then add a second task, a second person. The model becomes useful not when you can recite the grid but when “what development level is this, on this task?” becomes the automatic question you ask before deciding how involved to be.
The deeper version of this skill, and where it sits among the other nine that compound for new managers, is in the leadership skills pillar guide under skill four. If the larger question for you is less about matching style to person and more about when to operate as a manager versus a leader at all, the manager vs leader cluster covers that calibration across your first eighteen months.
The line worth keeping is the one I learned the hard way with two direct reports I was failing in opposite directions: treating people the same is not the same as treating people fairly. Fair is giving each person what they need to do the work well. Sometimes that is a checklist and a Thursday check-in. Sometimes it is your phone number and your silence. Reading which is which, on this task, this week, is most of what leading a small team actually is.