Applying Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership Theories

Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theories has a strong correlation to the program I completed. As the leader of my group I often thought about which leadership style would allow me to achieve our goals while maintaining effective, amicable communication with other group members. Both I and my mentor Joe took the responsibility of leading the group. Throughout the program, we took turns exercising the leadership styles of delegating, directing, coaching, and supporting. In the beginning days of the project, Joe outlined our overall goal and checkpoints that would need to be completed over the course of five weeks. With this, he utilized directive behavior with an enthusiastic attitude that sparked our excitement for the project. As time went on his approach turned into an increasing coach like style that supported our progress and gave specific direction as to where the project needed to go. I found this helpful as our group often strayed away from the main idea of the paper. A large topic like student loan debt can have countless approaches. We often got caught up in the small details of articles that countered our initial argument. Joe’s advice enabled us to further narrow our search to find the content that supported our claims.

As the student group leader, I was responsible for checking in with the group to ensure that each student was completing their section of the content. This proved to be difficult because we each worked on our sections at different times given that person work was remote and did not have a scheduled timeframe. While I attempted to give loose deadlines for others to complete their work, with COVID-19 we all had other obligations whether it be a daily nannying job or online classes. Unlike college courses, we did not have set times to complete the research or submit individual work. After the first two weeks, I found that much of our individual research had overlap. While this allowed us to become familiar with our findings, certain parts of our paper seemed incomplete while others were too similar. To fix this I took it upon myself to combine student’s paragraphs and request additional content for weak areas of the paper. I did not want to come across as overly controlling so I attempted to make clear suggestions. Thankfully the group understood our shortfalls and altered their course accordingly.