Key Takeaways
- ✓ Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership model proposes adapting style - from directing to coaching to supporting to delegating - based on each follower's competence and commitment for a specific task.
- ✓ Fiedler's contingency model argues effectiveness depends on the match between the leader's natural orientation (task or relationship, measured by the LPC questionnaire) and the degree of situational control available.
- ✓ Goleman identified six leadership styles - visionary, coaching, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and commanding - finding that leaders who deploy multiple styles flexibly achieve consistently better results.
- ✓ Compassionate leadership, developed through Michael West's King's Fund research, involves attending to, understanding, empathising with and helping people, and is associated with lower staff stress and stronger outcomes.
- ✓ All situational models share a core principle: effective leaders diagnose each situation and individual rather than applying a fixed preferred style, requiring self-awareness, flexibility and emotional intelligence.
Full Transcript
What is situational leadership?
Alex: Welcome back to the Leadership and Management podcast. I'm Alex, joined by Sam. The last episode was all about transformational, transactional and charismatic leadership theories. Today we're asking a different kind of question: what if the best leadership approach depends on the situation? Sam, this feels like it challenges the idea that great leaders just have a fixed set of traits.
Sam: It does challenge it directly. Situational leadership theories argue there is no universally best way to lead. A brilliant military commander might be a poor university vice-chancellor. An inspirational startup founder might struggle once the business needs disciplined process management. The right approach depends on the task, the team, the environment, and crucially the readiness and capability of the followers. Different contexts demand different leadership.
How does a situational leader adapt their style?
Alex: Fred Fiedler's contingency model is one of the earliest and most influential in this space. What does it say?
Sam: Fiedler argued that leadership effectiveness depends on the match between a leader's natural orientation and the degree of situational control they have. He identified two orientations using a questionnaire called the Least Preferred Co-worker scale. Task-oriented leaders focus on getting the job done. Relationship-oriented leaders focus on people and group dynamics. His finding was that task-oriented leaders perform best in either very favourable or very unfavourable situations. Relationship-oriented leaders perform best in moderately favourable situations where some trust exists but the task isn't entirely clear.
Alex: Hersey and Blanchard's model is perhaps the most widely taught in management development contexts. How does that work?
What is emotional intelligence in leadership?
Alex: Compassionate leadership is a more recent concept. Is that something emerging in UK contexts specifically?
Sam: It's been particularly prominent in the NHS. Michael West's research at King's Fund has shown that compassionate leadership, which means attending to people, understanding their situations, empathising and taking purposeful action to help, is associated with better patient outcomes and lower staff turnover. The argument is that in high-pressure public service environments, compassion isn't a soft luxury. It's what enables sustainable performance. The NHS Leadership Academy has incorporated compassionate leadership into its development frameworks as a direct result of this evidence.
How does emotional leadership affect team performance?
Alex: Virtual leadership for remote and hybrid teams seems like a genuinely new challenge. Does the situational approach apply there?
Sam: It applies, but with additional complexity. When you can't observe your team directly, you have to be more intentional about building trust, more deliberate in your communication, and more proactive in checking in. The cues you'd normally pick up in a physical environment, body language, energy levels, who's struggling, are largely absent. Leaders of remote teams tend to need stronger coaching and affiliative styles to compensate for the reduced informal connection. Getting that right is one of the defining management challenges of the current era.
Alex: Here's a question to sit with: think about a leader you've observed managing a team through a significant change. Did their style adapt to the different readiness levels of individual team members, or did they apply a uniform approach? What was the impact of that?