Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership: A Coach’s Diagnostic

The Coaching Session That Changed How I Teach This Model

A senior leader I worked with - a division president, about eighteen months into the role - booked the engagement to fix a team that was, in his framing, underperforming. Three sessions in, the pattern was visible. With every direct report, regardless of tenure or capability, he was running S1. Directing. Telling them what to do, how to do it, on what timeline.

If you handed him the situational leadership theory matrix, he would have explained, fluently, that his team was operating at mixed development levels and that his leadership style should have been ranging across S2, S3, and sometimes S4. He had been trained on the model. He could draw it from memory.

What the model was actually surfacing wasn't his team's readiness. It was his.

The S1 default was protecting him from a specific discomfort: not being the answer. Every time he ran S3 or S4, he had to sit with the gap between his answer and theirs - and tolerate that the gap might be small, or zero, or that theirs might be better.

The recognition wasn't dramatic. It was a sentence. He said: "I'm not running S1 because they need directing. I'm running S1 because if I don't, I have to find out what I'm actually adding."

That sentence was the coaching material. The four-quadrant model wasn't going to give it to him. The model gave us the shared vocabulary to notice the gap between his stated style ("I adjust based on the person") and his actual default. The coaching happened in the gap.

That's the move I want anyone reading this article to leave with. The model is not a prescription. It is a diagnostic instrument that surfaces the leader's default. The default is the coaching material. The four styles are the lighting that makes the default visible.

What Hersey and Blanchard Actually Built - and What Popularization Lost

The conflation most popularization makes is between Situational Leadership and SLII. They are treated as the same thing. They are not, and the difference matters.

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard co-developed the original model in 1969. They called it the Life Cycle Theory of Leadership at first, then Situational Leadership. The Y-axis - what determines which style a leader should use - was labeled "maturity." Maturity in the original model was a composite of ability plus willingness, described descriptively, not normatively. The hersey-blanchard model was a way of describing what effective leaders appear to be doing, not a prescription for how to be one. The work grew out of the same intellectual lineage as the Ohio State Leadership Studies and the Michigan Leadership Studies in the 1950s, which had decomposed leader behavior into the now-familiar task and relationship dimensions.

In the early 1980s, hersey and blanchard split, and each took the model in a different direction. Hersey kept the original framing through his Center for Leadership Studies. Blanchard, working through The Ken Blanchard Companies, developed slii - Situational Leadership II. He renamed "maturity" to "development level" (because the maturity language was offensive to adult learners and culturally fraught) and the model became more explicitly prescriptive: identify the development level, deliver the matching leadership style. He trademarked it. The whole training apparatus - certification, licensing, train-the-trainer - grew up around the SLII variant.

Here is where the popularization fails. When an academic critique appears - Bass and Avolio's empirical work in the early 90s, Vecchio's studies, the more recent meta-analyses - the critique is almost always of the original model. It looks at the maturity construct, finds it has weak empirical support, and concludes the model does not hold up. But much of what is now being practiced is SLII, where Blanchard explicitly addressed several of those issues (better definition of development level, better differentiation between D2 and D3, more guidance on the readiness levels transitions). The critique is real, but it does not always land where popularizers say it lands.

The reverse mistake is also common. Practitioners cite "Situational Leadership" while teaching SLII verbatim. The four leadership styles labels they use (Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating) are the SLII labels. The original used different terms: Telling, Selling, Participating, Delegating. When you read a blog post that talks about "Situational Leadership's four styles" and lists Directing/Coaching/Supporting/Delegating, you are reading about SLII without being told.

Why this matters in coaching practice: if I tell a client we are going to use Hersey-Blanchard, I need to be specific about which variant. The original, with maturity, is closer to a diagnostic frame. SLII, with development level, is closer to a prescriptive frame. As a coach I almost always use the diagnostic frame - even though the language I borrow (Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating) is the SLII vocabulary because it is more recognizable to leaders. The honest position to hold in front of a sophisticated client is: the model is useful because it gives us a structured way to notice what is happening, the trademark fight is irrelevant to that usefulness, and the academic critique should make us humble about claiming the model is doing more than it actually is. That position requires being clear which variant you are working with. It does not require picking a side in the split. Other executive coaching models have their own intellectual history; the Hersey-Blanchard story is the messiest. For broader context on how coaching models compare across the field, the same family of caveats applies. The model belongs in the conversation about leadership development frameworks precisely because of, not in spite of, this history.

Within the broader family of leadership models, situational leadership sits alongside other contingency theory work of the same period - Fiedler's contingency model, House's path-goal theory, the transactional leadership and transformational leadership distinction that came later through Bass and others. Read in that lineage, the effectiveness of the situational leadership framework looks less like a unique discovery and more like a focused implementation of the same insight: leader behavior must adapt to context. The model's contribution to training and development was packaging that insight into a teachable four-by-four matrix, which is also why the academic research on leader effectiveness has had a harder time validating it as a discrete construct.

The Four Styles, Four Readiness Levels - Read as a Coach, Not a Trainer

In a training-room application, the four leadership styles tell you what to do. In a coaching engagement, they tell you about the leader. The model decomposes leader behavior into task behavior (telling the follower what, how, and when) and relationship behavior (supporting, listening, dialoguing). Each S-style mixes the two dimensions differently. Each D-level describes the follower's readiness on a given task. The four S/D pairings are the model's combinatorial output. Here is what each pairing surfaces in the room, framed as coaching strategies for leaders rather than training prescriptions.

S1 with D1. The textbook says: novice with high commitment, low competence, give clear direction. What it surfaces is the leader's relationship with directive authority. The most common pattern is leaders who run S1 with everyone, regardless of follower readiness, because S1 is fast and predictable. That pattern is rarely about a misread of the follower. It is about the leader's relationship to outcome certainty.

S2 with D2. Textbook: novice whose initial enthusiasm has worn off; the work is harder than they expected; competence is still low but commitment has dropped. High direction with high support - the leader directs while explaining the why. What it surfaces is the leader's tolerance for follower discomfort. D2 is uncomfortable for everyone. The follower is in the dip. The leader has to stay directive while explaining, repeatedly, why this work matters. Leaders who cannot tolerate the discomfort either skip ahead to S3 (giving the follower freedom they are not ready for, hoping enthusiasm returns) or retreat to S1 (becoming colder, dropping the support). The S2/D2 pairing is the most failed pairing in real practice - and the failure is almost always about the leader.

S3 with D3. Textbook: the follower has the competence but lacks confidence or commitment; the leader steps back on direction and increases support. What it surfaces is the leader's ability to step back. This is where ego shows up. Many leaders give what they think is S3 - "what do you think you should do?" - but they are already telegraphing the answer. The follower learns the question is performative and adjusts. S3 done well requires the leader to actually not know what the follower should do, or to know but not say. The discipline is remaining present without filling the silence. The pattern often shows up in structured leadership feedback conversations where the leader cannot resist closing the loop.

S4 with D4. Textbook: the follower has both competence and commitment; the leader delegates fully and provides minimal direction. What it surfaces is the leader's trust threshold. The common failure is not underdelegating. It is confusing delegation as a leadership skill with abdication. A leader running real S4 stays in the loop on outcomes while staying out of the work. They establish what success looks like, what the check-in cadence is, what triggers an escalation. A leader running abdication says "you've got this" and disappears. Followers report this back as "I have no idea what they want." S4 done well is more communicative, not less. The follower has autonomy on the path; the leader has clarity on the destination.

What the model gives a coach is a structured set of moments to notice. When a leader describes a difficult conversation with a direct report, we can ask: what was the actual D-level on this specific task, what style did you use, where did the mismatch occur? The same diagnostic move applies when setting leadership development goals - the goal-setting conversation itself reveals where the leader's S-default is misfiring. The team member's readiness levels become the entry point. The leader's pattern becomes the coaching material. The framework is useful because it structures attention, not because the model is true.

Across the four core S-styles, the model expects each pairing to track different leadership behaviors and follower work motivation. The four distinct leadership styles map to employee development levels that range from needing close supervision to handling complex tasks with autonomy, with the more participative situational leadership styles sitting in the middle of that arc. What the diagnostic surfaces is the leader's range across that arc, not their performance on any single complete tasks scenario - and the motivation pattern often reveals more than the readiness assessment does.

Where the Model Breaks in Modern Senior Leadership Work

The assumption that breaks first, hardest, and most consistently in senior leadership work is "the task." The whole situational leadership apparatus is built on a discrete identifiable task with a clear measure of follower readiness for that task. That premise holds at the individual contributor level. It holds reasonably well at the first-line management level. It does not hold for the senior leader I am usually working with.

Take a case. A VP I coached was matrixed across three business units. She reported solid-line to one EVP and dotted-line to two others. Her direct team - eight senior managers - each had their own matrix, with overlapping accountabilities to other VPs. The work in front of her, in any given week, was: prioritization conflicts between her three stakeholders, alignment work across her peer VPs, coaching her senior managers through their own matrix conflicts, plus actual delivery on the few things that were exclusively hers.

If you tried to apply the model to that, you immediately ran into the question: which task? Which follower? Her senior managers each had four to six concurrent work threads with different D-levels. The matrix peer VPs were not her followers - but she had to lead through them constantly. Her own EVP wanted strategic direction (a peer-like relationship); the dotted-line EVPs wanted execution updates (a more directive relationship from their side). She was simultaneously leading and being led, in multiple registers, all the time.

The model's assumption - pick the right style based on the task and the follower's readiness for it - required a level of clarity about "the task" that no senior leader at her level actually has. She had a portfolio of partially-formed work threads, most of them not cleanly assignable, most of them moving in parallel. The failure was not at the application level. It was not that she misjudged readiness. The failure was at the assumption level: the model assumed something that did not exist.

So what did we do instead? We used the model as a diagnostic for her default - that part still worked - and then we worked on a different framing for the structure of her week. We mapped her work into three buckets: things only she could do, things she should delegate fully, things she should be coaching her senior managers through. The situational leadership vocabulary was useful for the third bucket. When she was coaching her senior managers, the four leadership styles helped her notice which of them she was reflexively running S1 with when they were actually D3 or D4. For the rest of the work, we used different instruments.

The same pattern shows up with AI augmentation, which is the next-generation version of this. A direct report using Claude or Copilot effectively has skills they did not have six months ago. Their D-level on the technical execution dimension has jumped. But their D-level on judgment - when to trust the AI's output, when to push back, when to escalate - is much harder to read and changes weekly. The model wants a stable readiness assessment. AI-augmented work does not give you one.

The same pattern shows up in peer-to-peer senior work. The model's vocabulary assumes a leader-follower asymmetry. When two senior leaders are collaborating on something neither owns, the "follower" frame is patronizing - and unusable. Hybrid teams introduce a related failure: the readiness signals leaders depend on (body language, hallway questions, the moment someone hesitates before answering) are partially or fully absent in distributed work, which means even the diagnostic move requires deliberate construction of substitutes.

The honest practitioner position is: the model is excellent at what it was designed for, which is structured-task leadership in a hierarchy. Most of what a senior leader does in 2026 is not that. Use the diagnostic, set the prescription aside, and do not pretend the model covers more than it does. This is also why executive coaching for leaders at the senior level rarely teaches the model. It uses the model to surface, then works with what surfaced. The organizational complexity of contemporary senior work is the reason a single framework cannot carry the weight that 1969-era management theory expected it to.

The potential limitations show up most sharply in environments where adaptability and adapting leadership styles is no longer a leader-driven choice - remote work distributes the cues, organizational behavior research on hybrid teams documents the missed signals, and change management initiatives that depended on shared physical context now require deliberate substitutes. The literature on organizational resilience and psychological resilience treats this as a feature of contemporary workforce culture rather than a deficit, but the model's prescriptive frame was not built for that.

How ICF-Credentialed Coaches Use Situational Leadership as a Diagnostic

The two questions look almost identical on the page. They are completely different in the room.

The textbook question is: "What is your team's development level on this task, and which leadership style should you be using?" That is the SLII application. It is a planning question. A leader can answer it in a session, walk out, and immediately have nothing different to do. The question is about the team, not about them.

The coaching question is: "When you read your team's development level on this task, what becomes available to you that was not available before? What does the reading itself surface - about your default, about your discomfort, about what you have been avoiding?"

That second question reorients the leader from "what should I do about my team" to "what is happening in me when I look at my team." The reorientation is the coaching material. The first question can be answered by reading a book. The second question can only be answered by someone with permission to notice and name what they see - which is what an MCC coach is paying attention to in every session.

Concretely, what does this look like in the room?

A leader is describing a senior manager. Says: "She is competent at the work but she keeps checking in with me on small decisions. I think she is D3 - capable but cautious. So I should be running S3 - supporting, asking questions, not directing." Textbook-perfect application.

The coaching move is to stay quiet for a moment. Then: "When you decided she was D3, what did you notice in yourself?"

Almost always, what comes back is something like: "I noticed I felt relieved. I did not have to be the one with the answer." That is the coaching material. The relief is data about the leader. We can now look at the relief - at what running S1 with this manager would have cost the leader emotionally, at what running S3 with her makes available to the leader emotionally. The four-quadrant model gave us the entry point. The diagnostic question opened it.

Another scene. Leader describes a direct report who is "definitely D2 - disillusioned, in the dip." Says he has been running S2 but it is not working. Wants to talk about what to try next.

Coaching move: "Tell me about the moment in your last conversation with him where you noticed the S2 was not working. What were you aware of?"

What usually comes back: the leader noticed they were getting frustrated. They started running S1 partway through the conversation - directing more, supporting less. The frustration is the data. We can look at what happens for this leader when the S2 work - staying directive while explaining the why, repeatedly, patiently - does not produce the response they want. The leader's frustration is not a problem to be solved. It is an instrument that shows us something about their tolerance for follower discomfort.

The performative version of this - "what does the model say" - produces analysis. The coaching version - "what does the reading surface about you" - produces movement. The first ends the session smarter. The second ends the session different.

This move does not transfer to a training room. It requires real-time observation, the credentialing to call out patterns without the leader feeling diagnosed-at, and a sustained relationship where the leader trusts that the noticing is in service of their growth and not the coach's performance. That work sits in the ICF Core Competency cluster around Evokes Awareness and Facilitates Client Growth, applied to a specific framework as the surfacing instrument. ICF credentialing standards describe the competency set explicitly; what they cannot describe is the patience required to wait for the surfaced material to emerge.

This is also why credentialed coaches reach for situational leadership more often than newer models. Situational leadership is well-known to leaders. They have seen it before, they have a vocabulary for it, they do not need it explained. That familiarity is an advantage: the leader can get to the surfacing question fast, without the cognitive load of learning a new framework. Newer models can offer better theoretical precision, but they cost the leader more attention to learn. Situational leadership trades theoretical precision for accessibility, and in coaching practice the trade is usually worth it. The Tandem ASPIRE framework treats SL this way - as one diagnostic instrument among several, deployed when it fits the engagement. We integrate it within the broader practice described in leadership coaching and development, where individual coaching sits next to cohort-level development work.

The pattern recognition itself takes years of credentialed practice. An MCC coach has typically sat in several thousand coaching hours and watched the same default patterns surface across hundreds of leaders. That accumulated pattern library is what makes the diagnostic question productive. Without it, the same question is just curiosity. With it, the question routes toward what the leader is most likely defending against - and that routing is what an experienced coach earns the right to do.

In real-world application, the diagnostic move sits inside the ICF leadership competencies framework as one of several instruments a coach uses to help a leader reassess their leadership approach. The question of what an effective leadership style looks like for this specific person - rather than what the textbook prescribes - is what lets the leader adapt their leadership in ways that show up in team performance metrics over time. Decision-making patterns, employee engagement signals, and the leader's own felt sense of fit are the data, not the four-quadrant assignment itself.

Blanchard's Official Program vs. an Independent Coaching Engagement

The structural difference is what you are buying.

When someone calls about coaching and what they actually want is a framework licensed and rolled out across an organization - fifty managers in cohorts, a shared vocabulary, certified facilitators, train-the-trainer pipeline - they want Blanchard's official SLII materials. That is what SLII is designed for, that is what The Ken Blanchard Companies built the apparatus around, and they do it well. An independent coaching engagement is not a substitute. We can use situational leadership diagnostically with one of those fifty managers, but we cannot replace the organizational rollout. Different product entirely.

When someone calls about coaching and what they want is behavior change in a specific senior leader - their VP, their EVP, their CEO - and they want the diagnostic applied to that person's actual context, an independent coaching engagement is the right call. The framework is an instrument; the work is the leader's. We are not licensing SLII; we are using situational leadership as one of several diagnostic frames in a structured coaching relationship.

The signals that point to Blanchard's program:

• "We want everyone to be using the same model."
• "We need a curriculum, not a coaching relationship."
• "We are building a leadership development pipeline at scale."
• "We want our managers certified in a recognized framework."
• "We need a vocabulary that everyone can use in performance conversations."

The signals that point to an independent coaching engagement:

• "This specific person needs to shift how they are leading."
• "Our leadership team cannot read each other's defaults."
• "Our VP has been promoted past where her current leadership style works."
• "The team works, but the leader is the bottleneck."
• "We need someone who can notice patterns in real time, not deliver curriculum."

The signals that point to both: large rollouts of SLII almost always benefit from a layer of individual coaching on top, particularly for the leaders running the rollout themselves. The two products complement; they do not compete. Selecting between them - or combining them - is one of the recurring decisions described in different types of coaching for leaders, where the rollout-vs-engagement question is the recurring source of buyer confusion.

I tell prospects this honestly. Tandem is not certified to deliver SLII. We do not have a curriculum, we do not run train-the-trainer programs, and if that is what the organization needs, they should call Blanchard. We use situational leadership diagnostically inside coaching engagements when it fits the client. That is a different product, with a different price point, a different time horizon, and a different deliverable. For organizations weighing what consulting support looks like at the program-design level, working with a leadership development consultant is a different conversation again - upstream of both program selection and individual coaching.

The mistake is buying coaching when you need a program, or buying a program when you need coaching. Both purchases are real and defensible. The conversation we have with prospects upfront is: which one of these is the problem you are actually trying to solve? When the answer is the rollout, we route them. When the answer is the leader, we work. The full sequence of options - from program licensing to individual coaching - is laid out in our guide to executive coaching for organizations that need the broader frame before deciding.

Common Questions About Hersey-Blanchard Situational Leadership