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

In 1969, Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard introduced their “life cycle theory of leadership,” which they later renamed situational leadership. It starts from one central idea: there’s no single leadership style that works for every person and situation.

The model crosses two kinds of leader behavior, directive (saying what, how and when) and supportive (listening, encouraging, involving), and four styles come out of it:

• S1, telling: lots of direction and little support, for someone starting a task.
• S2, selling: lots of direction and lots of support, for someone who’s eager but hasn’t mastered the task yet.
• S3, participating: little direction and lots of support, for someone who knows how to do it but has doubts.
• S4, delegating: little direction and little support, for someone who masters the task and takes it on with confidence.

One naming detail matters here: in the original model, “delegating” is only the fourth style. The delegating profile in our test refers to the whole idea, adjusting the style to the person and the task, which is what Hersey and Blanchard proposed.

What the evidence says

Situational leadership is one of the most widely taught models in management training and, at the same time, one of the least supported by data. Thompson and Vecchio (2009) tested three versions of the model with bank employees and their supervisors, and support for its predictions was limited and partial.

The underlying intuition (that a newcomer needs more structure than an expert) is reasonable; what hasn’t been shown is that the model’s exact combinations predict performance better than other ways of adjusting leadership.

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 a simple way to calibrate: the same person may need S4 on the task they master and S2 on one they’ve just taken on.

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 fits 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.

Sources

• Hersey, P. & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training and Development Journal, 23(5), 26-34.
• McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D., & Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.
• Thompson, G. & Vecchio, R. P. (2009). Situational leadership theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837-848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014