Cameron Herold breaks down four leadership styles from situational leadership theory: directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating. The key is matching your style to each person's skill and confidence level on each specific task, not using the same approach with everyone.
Chapters
So one of the most important skills of a leader is called situational leadership. And situational leadership was developed back in the 1960s by Dr. Paul Hersey. And then Dr. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard popularized the concepts of situational leadership in the best selling book the One Minute Manager. The One Minute Manager is still probably the most important read that everyone in leadership needs to read and understand and really embrace those concepts. Now that we have all this technology, situational leadership is still the same as it ever was. You can't replace the leading of people with technology. And it's critical to understand the four leadership styles that exist. So what happens is the leader's job is to adapt their leadership style on a situation by situation basis or a project by project basis, regardless of the person that's working on the project. So let me give you an example for a second. Let's say that I was coaching someone named Andrew, a CEO of a company. Well, if Andrew ran a YouTube marketing company, I would spend no time teaching him about YouTube, but. And I wouldn't even praise him about YouTube, it would come off as a little bit patronizing. But if I was teaching Andrew a new skill, let's say one on one coaching, I might use a very different directing kind of a style with him. So the four styles that you're going to adapt to. The first is called S1, which is a directing or telling style. What this style is is almost micromanaging. Do this, do exactly this, follow these step by step instructions which at times, regardless of how high powered or high skilled the person is, might be exactly what they need. They might need that very directing, very telling, very kind of micromanaging style like a two year old pouring orange juice. You're going to direct them in a very different way from the same child when they become 20 years old. Right. I'm not going to praise my 20 year old, oh, good job pouring the orange juice. But I would definitely do that with the two year old. Right. So you change the amount of direction and you change the amount of praise based on the situation and based on the skill and confidence of the person that you're leading. So style one is that directing or telling style. Style number two is more of a coaching style. So you're going to show them what to do, you're going to tell them why they're doing it. That way you're going to explain it and you're going to coach them and develop them. Right. That means the person has a little bit more skill or a little more confidence. They don't need the exact step by step instructions, but they need you to be kind of coaching them and talking them through it so they can start learning why we do it this way and how we do it this way. The third style that we really have is the supporting style. It's kind of the open book management. You can come and ask me questions, you can come and show me what you're struggling with. Maybe I'll praise you a little bit on the work that you're doing because you're going to feed off of that praise. And a leader has to adapt to this style when, when a person that they're leading has more skill and more confidence in that specific area. So your style adapts from telling to coaching to really more of the supportive style. The last style of S4 is really delegating. It's when you actually hand them the project, you hand them the initiative and you back away and you don't even have to give them any praise. Right. I'm not going to praise my 20 year old on cleaning the kitchen, but when he was five, I used to praise him and show him exactly what to do on cleaning the kitchen. So the four styles of leadership and I cover these in my book or sorry, in my course, invest in your leaders. It's actually the first module in the invest in your leaders course is truly to understand and embrace these styles of leadership and work on them and practice them every single day. One of the things that I do when I'm using situational leadership, let's say that I looked at the 12 different projects that my team were working on this week. I look at project one that Bob might be working on and I say, what's Bob's confidence related to this project? What's his skill related to this project? And based on his skill and confidence, which of those four styles should I use? Then I look at Project 2, Project 3 in exactly the same way. That's a bit of a crash course, but there's definitely four different styles. You have to adapt them based on the situation at hand. Now, if you like this content, check out the advanced leadership lessons below. You'll love the content I'm sharing here as well.
