Delegating Leader: you adapt your leadership style to each person

You adapt how you lead based on who’s in front of you: more autonomy for whoever already masters the task, more support for whoever is just starting out.

You don’t apply the same style to the whole team: you adjust how much guidance you give based on each person’s experience and confidence with a given task.

Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership

Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard developed the situational leadership model in 1969, starting from one central idea: there’s no single leadership style that works for every person and situation. Depending on their level of competence and confidence with the task, each person needs a different degree of direction and support: from very explicit instructions for someone just starting out, to full autonomy for someone who already masters the ground. This profile’s delegating leadership applies exactly that principle of constant adjustment.

How this style plays out

• More follow-up is offered to whoever is learning a new task, and more room to whoever already has it mastered.
• Decisions about how much to intervene get revisited often, not fixed once and for all.
• It’s explicitly acknowledged when someone no longer needs as much guidance, handing over autonomy gradually.
• The team feels treated according to where it actually is, not by a single formula applied equally to everyone.

Calibrating each person’s autonomy correctly

The risk with this style is miscalibrating how much real autonomy each person has: giving too much freedom to someone who still needs support creates insecurity, and giving too much oversight to someone who already masters the task can feel like distrust. Asking directly, instead of assuming, is an approach some consider more reliable for adjusting the level of support in each case, though this depends on the person and the context.

If you’d rather keep a minimal level of intervention with the whole team, regardless of experience level, check out the hands-off leader profile.

Leading like a gardener, according to Stanley McChrystal

General Stanley McChrystal, in his book Team of Teams, describes how he had to transform a rigid, hierarchical military command structure into a decentralized network of small teams capable of deciding on their own, in order to respond with the speed demanded by an increasingly complex and unpredictable environment. One of the book’s chapters is literally titled “Leading Like a Gardener”: instead of controlling every detail from the top, the leader’s job becomes creating the right conditions (trust, a clearly shared purpose, access to the same information) so the teams themselves can make good decisions, closer to where the relevant information actually is.

This idea lines up very directly with the delegating profile: it isn’t about disengaging, a garden nobody tends doesn’t thrive either, but about putting your leadership effort into preparing the ground (giving each person the level of context, trust, and room they need) instead of trying to direct every step. McChrystal insists this demands more discipline, not less: you have to keep the whole team aligned around the same purpose and information so that everyone’s autonomy doesn’t turn into disarray.

You can go back to your full result in the What’s My Leadership Style? test.