There are different approaches to defining a leadership style, depending on the defining characteristics. The Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory examines the context, competence, and motivation of followers that are critical for a leader to adapt and adjust his management style (Fuller, 2019). In this paper, I will analyze my example of a leadership situation with the Hersey-Blanchard theory to identify its elements and learn to apply them.
My leadership situation was organizing a school project in which students had to present their business ideas. There were four people on my team, including me, and although I was the leader, we made most of the decisions together, since I had their trust but not authority. After defining a business idea by a team, I distributed the tasks according to the skills and desires of the other three participants and supervised their implementation. I also had to remind and ask them about the progress of work and suggested adjustments. I was also responsible for part of the assignment and calculated an approximate budget for implementing the idea. Other tasks for the participants were to visually design a presentation, find information and check facts, and present the project to the class. As a result, we got a high-quality project and got high scores.
I can note that I have applied to management participating (S-3) and delegating (S-4) leadership styles. Participating style is defined by the fact that a leader shares decision-making with the team, and delegating means that a leader controls the fulfillment of tasks (Halaychik, 2016). Although I assigned tasks to the team members and monitored their implementation, we selected them jointly based on members’ skills and wishes. In addition, we also chose the main idea of the project together. At the same time, the participants displayed different followership styles. One student wanted to make a visual presentation, although he did not have much experience, which refers to the average maturity (M-2) (Halaychik, 2016). Another participant had advanced searching and fact-checking skills, but she did not think that she would cope with this particular task, which is a manifestation of medium maturity (M-3). However, I managed to convince her to take on this responsibility. Another participant immediately determined that he wants to present the project because he has good oratory skills, which corresponds to high maturity (M-4) (Halaychik, 2016). Thus, each participant received his or her task according to their abilities.
I can see now that the situation in which I was a leader fits into the framework of the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory, but this approach does not fully explain my leadership style. The peculiarity of that situation was that I had practically no authority over other team members, so I combined the two leadership styles. I could not only control the participants or choose a business idea myself, since my classmates and I were equal in the project. For example, I didn’t want to complete my task because I had no budgeting experience, but I had to take my part. I believe that if I had more authority, then my leadership style would be more related to delegating. However, on the other hand, this feature can be a manifestation of the leader’s adjusting to which the theory of Hersey-Blanchard is built (Schermerhorn & Bachrach, 2018). In general, this task was useful for me as I analyzed and understood the factors that influenced the situation.
Therefore, analysis of the case by using the Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership Theory helped me define my leadership style and followership style of my classmates. This approach is useful for understanding a particular situation and the context in which a person must show leadership or be a follower. However, the disadvantage of this theory is that it probably does not take into account the level of authority of a leader and participants and the hierarchy in a team.
References
Fuller, M. B. (2019). Leadership of higher education assessment: A guide to theory for practitioners. Routledge.
Halaychik, C. S. (2016). Lessons in library leadership: A primer for library managers and unit leaders Chandos Publishing.
Schermerhorn, J. R., & Bachrach, D. G. (2018). Exploring management: With leadership cases (6th ed.). Wiley.