Introduction
Ask any HR professional what moves the needle on engagement. The answer usually comes back to one person: the manager.
Managers account for at least 70% of the variance in a team’s engagement scores, according to Gallup.
Good pay and company perks drive employee satisfaction, but the most important factor in employee engagement often comes down to an effective manager.
From employee to employee, the management style required will differ: a new starter may need close guidance, whereas an experienced team member may need more independence.
Approach these scenarios as distinct situations that separate a good manager from a great one.
This is where situational leadership comes into play. This guide walks you through the model’s origins and its four leadership styles in practice, so your HR leadership is as effective as possible for your team members’ needs.
The Model: Four Styles, One Sliding Scale
Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed situational leadership in the late 1960s, with Hersey establishing the model in his book, The Situational Leader.
The framework rests on a simple argument: no single leadership style is best.
In HR practice, this means leaders should manage the person in front of them, not approach leadership with a fixed script.
The situational leadership model calls for adaptability, where an effective leader adjusts their approach based on the person and the task at hand.
Just which leadership approach should be taken depends on a couple of factors:
- How much direction an individual needs.
- How much support an individual needs.
Both factors can vary by career stage, and together they create four distinct situational leadership styles.
Depending on the situation and the employee’s commitment and competence, a good manager will move between all four quadrants. The quadrants are explained, with examples, in the table below:
Some sources call these four styles Telling, Selling, Participating, and Delegating instead. Blanchard later refined his own version independently, known as Situational Leadership II, which uses slightly different labels again.
For most HR professionals, the underlying idea matters more than the label your training provider uses. For how this sits alongside other frameworks, see our guide to HR models every CIPD learner should know.
Situational Leadership Examples in Practice
In this section of our helpful guide, we’ll walk you through a couple of examples of situational leadership in HR practice.
Example 1: The HR Advisor over their first year in a new role
Month 1 – Directing: New to case management, unfamiliar with systems and company terminology. Their manager uses a Directing style, walking them through each type of case step by step.
Month 4 – Coaching: Handles straightforward cases alone (such as routine absence queries, standard grievances that crop up frequently) but hesitates on anything unusual like a safeguarding angle or conflicting witness accounts. The manager shifts to Coaching, talking through the reasoning behind trickier decisions rather than just supplying the answer.
Month 8 – Supporting: Handles most cases alone. They only want a second opinion before anything high-risk goes out.
Month 12 – Delegating: Handling the full caseload alone, and the manager has stepped back almost entirely.
Why was it effective situational leadership?
- Nothing about the advisor changed overnight. The manager’s style moved because the advisor’s readiness moved.
- That readiness shifted at a different pace for different types of cases.
- Knowing when to use situational leadership matters as much as knowing the four styles themselves.
How to Read Where Someone Actually Is
It’s less about remembering the four leadership styles and more about knowing how to put them into practice successfully to help your team members perform and engage at the highest levels.
It’s a skill that takes time and patience, and it ultimately comes down to good judgment about where someone sits before you pick a particular style.
Seniority does not equal readiness
It’s important to identify that readiness is not the same as seniority. For example, a senior employee can still need a Directing approach on something new to them. On the other hand, a junior one might already be ready for Delegating on a task they have already mastered.
In this case, judge the task, not the job title.
Readiness moves around, even within one individual
It can be very tempting to label someone as a ‘Delegator’ or a ‘Coach’, but readiness is not a trait; it’s a state that can shift task by task.
The same team member might be confident and independent running a client presentation, yet need close guidance on budget forecasting. Treating someone as uniformly senior or junior across everything they do misses this entirely. One good presentation does not mean someone is ready to run payroll unsupervised.
Let people tell you what they need
A rough way to spot which style fits:
- Someone unsure where to even start = Directing
- Someone with some ability but shaky confidence = Coaching
- Someone who just wants a second opinion = Supporting
- Someone fully capable and asking for more ownership = Delegating
Listen for any of these, and the style mostly picks itself.
A quick way to check your own judgement is simple: ask the person how confident they feel about the task, then compare that against what you have observed. The two do not always match, and the gap itself tells you something useful.
Move people along the scale and learn to say no
Move people along that scale as they grow.
Someone who started under Coaching should shift toward Supporting, then eventually Delegating, as their confidence and ability increase – and say so out loud. Telling someone you are stepping back builds trust. Silently pulling away reads as neglect.
The Trade-offs Worth Knowing
In HR practice, Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model has many strengths, but also limits.
Any honest look at situational leadership advantages and disadvantages has to cover both.
What the model gets right:
- It adapts to the individual, rather than forcing one style on everyone.
- It pushes managers to assess their team, rather than run on autopilot.
- It holds up across departments, seniority levels, and industries.
Where the model struggles:
- It demands managers judge readiness accurately, which takes skill most people are not born with.
- Applied inconsistently across a team, it can feel like favouritism rather than good management.
- Academically, the model has drawn real criticism for a thin evidence base.
That is the quick version of situational leadership pros and cons, but two of these points are worth unpacking. Researchers examining the theory have flagged a thin evidence base. The model reflects sound judgement more than hard proof. None of that makes it useless. It makes it a practical tool worth pairing with your own judgement, not a formula to apply blindly.
For more on where the model came from, businessballs.com has a thorough breakdown worth reading.
Situational Leadership vs Transformational Leadership
Situational leadership often gets compared with transformational leadership. The two solve different problems entirely, but can also complement each other massively.
Situational Leadership | Transformational Leadership |
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You can be a transformational leader setting the long-term direction. You will still need situational leadership to manage the day-to-day mix of confidence and ability on your team.
They are not competing models: one sets where the team is headed, the other decides how you get each person there. Most HR managers end up using both, just for different jobs.
Example in Practice:
A regional retail chain rolls out a new customer service standard.
- Transformational leadership sets the vision and rallies store managers behind it.
- Individual store managers then use situational leadership for the rest.
Using the styles together gets each team member from where they are now to where the standard needs them.
Key Takeaways
- Situational leadership adapts your management style to the person and the task, not a single fixed approach for everyone.
- The four styles, Directing, Coaching, Supporting, and Delegating, map to how much direction and support someone needs right now.
- Readiness is task-specific. The same person can need different styles for different pieces of work.
- The model has genuine limits, including a thin research base, so pair it with judgement rather than applying it mechanically.
- It works alongside other leadership approaches like transformational leadership, not instead of them.
Get in Touch
Reading a room well as an HR professional in a leadership role is a skill you build over time, not one you either have or don’t.
With management quality riding on engagement levels, investing in that skill pays for itself many times over and will separate you from other senior practitioners.
The Leadership and Management Development unit (5OS06), which covers the varying styles of managing individuals in more depth, is included in HRC’s CIPD Level 5 Associate Diploma and is built around developing the knowledge, skills, and behaviours effective leadership requires.
For HR professionals further on in their career, the CIPD Level 7 Advanced Diploma builds on this understanding, covering leadership and management development at a more strategic level.
Whether you’re at the beginning of your HR career, or advancing to a senior level, and want to start building leadership skills that go beyond theory, HRC can help you find the right course to suit your needs.
Get in touch today to explore our courses and find the best one for you.
