Where did Situational Leadership ®
Come From?
by Don Brown
Where did Situational Leadership®, come from? Dr. Hersey provides the genesis of the approach in an interview with John Schermerhorn1 from Ohio University, first published in 1979: "I spent ten years in a variety of different types of business settings, the last in a huge technical laboratory"1. Dr. Hersey was responsible for the management development of a group of 7,000 personnel with stellar technical skills, but perhaps lacking in supervisory skills and experience. "We began following the lead of Carl Rogers. We used nondirective interviewing to isolate various skills that were essential to managerial work. These included people skills like questioning, active listening responses, mirroring, encouraging, all the things that we associate with Carl Rogers’ work"1. Dr. Hersey’s group designed and developed training that taught these skills, and he personally played an observer role in the follow-up goal setting sessions involving participants and their followers. "I quickly learned that when people were above average in readiness, the people skills worked beautifully for the managers, but when the interchange was between a manager and followers with performance problems, the skills derived from Rogers’ work didn’t work well at all. We began to see that these high relationship behaviors work only in certain situations. That was basically the beginning of Situational Leadership®"1.
Dr. Hersey continued his research, also acknowledging the Ohio State studies and the University of Michigan studies of the middle 1960’s as relevant to his developing what was then called "Life Cycle Theory of Leadership" while on the faculty of Ohio University. You can also find support for the situational, or contingency, approach to effective influence in the classic works of Douglas McGregor and Rensis Likert. The Situational Leadership® model was "pretty well set"1 by the early 1970’s, and ever since, literally millions of practicing managers are living testament to its power and proven utility.
References
1Schermerhorn, John R. Jr. (2001). Situational Leadership®: Conversations with Paul Hersey. Retrieved May 31, 2008 from http://situational.com.
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