If I told you ‘leadership is situational’, what comes to your mind?
For those who’ve been leading for a while, maybe you think about Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s Situational Leadership model. First introduced in 1996, this simple framework helps leaders assess what type of approach is best suited for their team members based on their capability. I love the model, but when we talk about situational leadership at The Roundtable, we’re looking at situational leadership at a much broader level.
Every day, leaders find themselves facing a variety of leadership situations:
- The onboarding of a new team member;
- A sudden crisis in the business;
- A team member who needs to go on leave;
- The announcement of a merger, or a downsizing or an acquisition.
The list goes on, and on, and on.
In some ways, being a leader is a little like the famous quote from Forrest Gump: life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.
Or in the case of leadership, you never know what situation you’re going to find yourself in.
And that’s what makes leadership so tricky.
For most of us who find ourselves in leadership roles, somewhere along the way, someone saw the potential in us to take on more. And this is where the challenges begin.
Marshall Goldsmith smartly titled his game changing book What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There for a reason. The challenge for all of us is that, at some point in our careers, we will face a leadership situation where our strengths aren’t going to help us.
I’ve seen many successful leaders find themselves in untested leadership situations relying on what’s always worked and finding themselves unequipped to handle the curve balls that are coming their way.
These moments in people’s careers often provide harsh lessons, avoidable setbacks and, when things really go sideways, a destruction of confidence and (in the worst cases) the loss of a promising career.
The reality of leadership is that we need to continuously work towards roles where we can use our strengths BUT, and it’s a big BUT, we also need to be able to navigate the situations that don’t play to our strengths in ways that don’t torpedo our career prospects.
So, how can we do that?
From my experience of over 30 years of leading teams and coaching senior leaders, I will say this: the greatest investment you can make in yourself as a leader is to deepen your self insight.
That means doing some uncomfortable things like:
- Behavioural 360-degree feedback exercises
- Proactively asking your team for feedback
- Listening to people’s input (I mean REALLY listening ) and then actioning those inputs
- Broadening your leadership capabilities as it relates to your behaviour.
Most of us will never change our behaviour all that much. The best we can do is work hard to add different leadership approaches to our ‘toolkit’ so that we can face different leadership situations with more confidence and capability.
If you’re interested in learning how we help ambitious leaders increase their impact by broadening their range of leadership behaviours, reach out. Our group, team and individual coaching programs are designed to increase self-insight and broaden the capabilities of high performing leaders. Read about some of our results here, here, and here.
