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19 March 2026

Leadership and Management Development

Situational Leadership: The Hersey-Blanchard Model Explained

Ask a room of managers to name a leadership theory and, once someone's said "carrot and stick", Situational Leadership is usually next. It's one of the most taught, most used and most quietly influential leadership models ever created. But where did it actually come from, what does it really say, and does the research stack up?

This one's a deep dive rather than a how-to. Pour a coffee and let's give a 55-year-old idea the proper introduction it deserves.

The short version:

Situational Leadership, developed by Dr Paul Hersey and Dr Ken Blanchard in 1969, says there is no single best style of leadership. Effective leaders flex between four styles (Telling, Selling, Participating and Delegating) depending on the readiness of the person in front of them for a specific task.

Where it came from

The model first appeared in 1969 under a different name: the Life Cycle Theory of Leadership, published in the Training and Development Journal and laid out fully in Hersey and Blanchard's textbook Management of Organisational Behaviour. That book went on to become the best-selling organisational behaviour text of all time, used in business courses for over four decades.

The thinking didn't come from nowhere. It built on the famous Ohio State leadership studies of the 1950s, which identified two fundamental dimensions of leader behaviour: task focus (structuring the work) and relationship focus (supporting the person). Most theories of the day argued about which mattered more. Hersey and Blanchard's breakthrough was to say: wrong question. The right blend of task and relationship behaviour depends on who you're leading and what you're asking them to do. It was one of the first "contingency models" of leadership, and by the mid-1970s it had been renamed Situational Leadership.

Then comes the bit of history almost nobody knows. Like all great double acts, Hersey and Blanchard eventually went their separate ways. Hersey continued developing the model through The Center for Leadership Studies, while Blanchard left around the end of the 1970s to build what became The Ken Blanchard Companies, refining his own version known as Situational Leadership II (SLII), popularised alongside his 1982 mega-seller The One Minute Manager. The two versions co-existed, slightly awkwardly, for decades, until 2018 when it was formally agreed that Blanchard's version would be trademarked as SLII and Hersey's would keep the Situational Leadership name. The Lennon and McCartney of leadership theory, both still touring.

The four leadership styles.

The original model describes four styles, each a different blend of directive (task) and supportive (relationship) behaviour:

1. Telling (S1):
High direction, low relationship focus. The leader defines the what, how and when through largely one-way communication. Think of a brand-new starter on safety-critical work: clarity first, autonomy later.

2. Selling (S2):
High direction and high support. The leader still sets the course but explains the why, invites questions and works to win genuine buy-in through two-way conversation.

3. Participating (S3):
Low direction, high support. The leader and the team member share decision-making; the leader's main job is encouraging, facilitating and building confidence rather than instructing.

4. Delegating (S4):
Low direction, low day-to-day support. The leader hands over responsibility, stays available and monitors outcomes, but lets capable, motivated people run their own show.

The other half of the model: readiness

The styles are only half the story. The model's real engine is follower readiness (called development level in Blanchard's SLII): a combination of someone's competence for a specific task and their confidence and motivation to do it. Readiness runs from R1 (low skill, low confidence) up to R4 (high skill, high commitment), and each level maps to a style: R1 needs Telling, R2 needs Selling, R3 needs Participating, R4 thrives on Delegating.

Two details people often miss. Readiness is task-specific, so the same person can be R4 on client presentations and R1 on budget forecasting, and a good leader treats them differently on each. And readiness moves in both directions: a promotion, a restructure or a knock in confidence can shift someone's level, which means the leader's style has to move too.

“

There is no best style of leadership. The best style is the one the moment requires.

- The core principle of Hersey and Blanchard's model

What the research says

Honesty corner, because an informative blog should be informative. Situational Leadership's empirical record is lighter than its fame suggests. Academic reviews, including work published in Leadership Quarterly, have noted that the theory has undergone limited formal validation, and researchers such as Robert Vecchio found mixed support when testing its predictions. What it has in abundance is what academics call intuitive appeal: it describes something experienced managers recognise as true, it's teachable in an afternoon, and it gives leaders a shared language for conversations about autonomy and support.

That trade-off, modest lab evidence but massive practical traction, is worth knowing about, and it hasn't stopped the model becoming arguably the most deployed leadership framework on the planet.

Who actually uses it

The adoption numbers are remarkable. According to The Center for Leadership Studies, the Situational Leadership model has been used to train more than 14 million managers worldwide and is deployed in around 70% of Fortune 500 companies. Even back in the 1990s, academic reviews noted it had been incorporated into leadership training at over 400 of the Fortune 500, with over a million managers a year learning its basics. Blanchard's SLII arm reports a similar global footprint across corporates, governments and militaries.

The success stories tend to share a pattern rather than a single famous case study: organisations adopt it because it gives every manager, from supervisor to director, one common vocabulary. "I think I've been Delegating to someone who needs Selling" is a sentence that fixes problems in seconds, and that shared shorthand is why the model survives every wave of leadership fashion.

Why it endures

Fifty-five years on, the model's central insight has aged beautifully: leadership is something you adjust, not something you are. It anticipated today's thinking on coaching, personalisation and meeting people where they are, and it pairs naturally with behavioural tools like Insights Discovery, because knowing someone's readiness tells you what they need, and knowing their colour energies tells you how to deliver it. But that practical side is a blog for another day; consider this the history lesson before the field trip.

At Unify, Situational Leadership thinking runs through our leadership and management development programmes, helping leaders diagnose before they act. 

For more information, please get in touch with us. 

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James Hampton (He/Him)

James Hampton (He/Him)

Director

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