Leadership is not just about sticking to one’s own style. You have to adapt to suit the people you manage.
One of the organisational constructs Henry and I use most effectively in Leon is ’Situational Leadership’. We picked it up from Bain, but Bain I’m sure were inspired by someone else (so if you are the creator of it, write me a postcard). It is a construct that determines what style of leadership you should adopt, given someone’s confidence and competence in a certain task.
When someone is new to a team, or maybe new to being Prime Minister, they will probably be on a bit of a high. New pencil case. New car. New set of staff that stand up straight when you walk into Downing Street and brief you as you march down the corridor (please tell me that’s what it’s like). But the trouble is, you have probably not done that exact job before. You may be fresh from your MBA and starting out in banking. Or a sales director who is now sales director in a slightly new company with a different culture and products and selling cycles to your previous company. Or you may not have actually been Prime Minister before, so you may at first be a bit rubbish at it. Now if you have someone in your team who has high confidence but low competence you have to be DIRECTIVE. “Go and see Janet from accounts and ask for the South Region’s sales figures, and ask her to format it the way she did for last year’s national conference”. “Take this knife and chop these onions like you see in the picture – into cubes. And use the knife with the yellow handle”. This is stage 1.
Stage 2 is where your report realises they may not know as much as they thought. Confidence plummets and the whole thing can get a bit sticky. The MBA hire who has been turned into a demi-god during recruitment realises they have a lot to learn about the reality of the job. The trainee chef realises he or she takes an hour to chop the same amount of onions the head chef can chop in five minutes. This is stage 2, and it’s where the leader needs to change his or her style to COACHING. It’s time to explain how it’s done, demonstrate it, let them have a go, and then review how they have done. Repeat this cycle until cooked.
Stage 3 is when the team member is starting to get a little better at the job and maybe has moderate capability but fluctuating confidence. One minute you think you have mastered driving, then you drive up the wrong side of the dual carriageway by mistake. This is when as a leader you need to be SUPPORTIVE. Take them out for a cup of coffee. A beer. A cake (cf my previous advice on this very important technique).
Eventually, things improve all round, and your team member is both confident and competent in that particular task. Every organisation has some of these people – people who are actually very good at what they do, and very confident with it. In armies, they may be the Sergeant Majors who have to initially carry the new officers. In Government, maybe the Permanent Private Secretaries. Either way, these people can be DELEGATED to. They are in stage four. You can merely say “chop me twenty onions” or “I need you to open the restaurant in Soho next month. Come and tell me when it’s done”.
The key thing is to realise that situational leadership is task-specific. One person will be in stage four for some tasks (maybe financial modelling) but stage one for others (maybe launching a marketing campaign).
