Week 6 at ASTHO – Analyzing Leadership via Situational Leadership

It’s been a while since I’ve looked at the specific theories of leadership we studied in Theories and Models, so I had to go back to Wikipedia and other sources to do a brief refresher. Based on my review of it, the leader tweaks their behavior in relation to the followers’ readiness and capabilities. In general, I would say that the other intern in my department and I are very willing to do the work, but we might be confident in those abilities than full-time employees since we’re new to this field. My boss is not super relationship-oriented (although I suspect this is a function of how busy she is), so classifying her as “highly supportive” feels a bit too emphatic a description of her relationship-oriented-ness. That being said, when I encounter a situation in which I feel like I don’t have as high a level of performance readiness because I’m not as capable, I reach out to her for support. There have been instances where I’ve been working on projects and hit a roadblock in either my writing or in the way I’m thinking about something, and those are the times where she will make certain she’s there to support me. However, if I display more of a degree of performance readiness or am farther along into a project, she can afford to be more hands off and just makes sure that I’m able to get my work done/know my responsibilities (so, in this case, lower relationship and higher task orientation).  That’s not to say that she just completely leaves us without any clue as to what we’re doing; we’re still more than welcome to reach out to her during the day with questions. Still, she frequently encourages us to contact the other team members when we have questions or need a second opinion, since she’s so busy and needs to delegate some of her responsibilities. I appreciate her willingness to be more or less supportive if needed, since I don’t think I would enjoy being micromanaged. I like the ability to do things for myself, and being allowed to work independently without too much hand-holding assures me that my leaders are confident in my abilities and think I’m competent enough to handle it.

On an unrelated noted, now that things are more “back to normal” than they were this time last year, I can imagine there is more focus on relationships at the organization now than there would’ve been last year, when the organization was on the frontlines of the public policy response to COVID and was incredibly busy. However, since I wasn’t part of the organization at that point in time, saying that the organization was more task-focused than relationship-focused last year is merely an educated guess.