Situational Leadership Theory CSRHub pt. 2

I plan to take a deeper dive into my analysis of CSRHub using Hersey and Blanchard’s Situational Leadership theory. In this post, I will take a closer look at the theory itself as well and pull in more examples from my direct supervisor, Ruth. The theory essentially comes down to the idea that a successful leader must adopt different leadership styles for different followers. This requires that a leader evaluates the situation and applies a style that will be efficient and helpful.

A leader must have certain characteristics to successfully practice situational leadership. There are five identified characteristics laid out by Hersey and Blanchard: insight, flexibility, trust, problem-solving, and coaching. A leader must be insightful enough to understand the needs of the follower, and flexible enough to adapt to those needs through a shift in leadership style. A leader must be able to gain the trust of their followers, and problem solve along the way for the team and changing dynamic. Lastly, a successful leader in those model must be able to evaluate the competence of a follower and enhance the follower’s confidence through their leadership.

In my experience, my direct supervisor Ruth, the Head of Marketing, User Interface, and Communications, is a successful situational leadership for me as an intern and our situation. Ruth assigned me to sort through, reorganize, and recreate an excel sheet full of website pages that were in the old CSRHub.com format. From past experience, she knows that I need ample instructions to be clear on what she expects from me, and she also knows I am not afraid of asking questions when I am confused. She gave me the week to work on this project in my own time, which is how we normally do projects. After a few days, I was running into lots of issues, including hyperlink complications, website form development confusion, and other needs that I had not been trained on. When I reached out with an abundance of questions she realized our normal setup for work would not work here. She pivoted her week to do daily training with me to give me the confidence and knowledge I needed for the pages and website. This experience demonstrated to me that she was investing in me as an employee, rather than her doing it herself. She recognized the situation, identified a new leadership style that would work, and coached me through, applying the core idea of the situational leadership theory, adopting a different leadership style dependent on the situation and follower.

One possible pitfall of the theory is that situational leadership model does not touch on gender or gender dynamics. Ruth and I are both females (and both from the United States), I believe that Ruth’s situational insight and problem-solving may have been aided by the fact that she understands a female viewpoint in the workplace. I believe that gender does play a role in management abilities and styles when it comes to being situationally flexible, and take that into account here.