Situational Leadership: Match Your Style to the Person, the Task, and the Moment

Situational Leadership: Matching Your Style to the Person in Front of You

Managing a finance or treasury team means you are rarely dealing with one type of person on one type of task. The Hersey and Blanchard situational leadership model gives you a practical way to read that variation and adjust accordingly. If you prefer to start with the video walkthrough, it covers the full model in around 25 minutes with examples built for finance and treasury contexts.

For the practitioner detail, the caveats, and a practical exercise you can run this week, read on.

For background on the distinction between leading and managing in finance roles, the post on leadership versus management from day one gives useful grounding before you go further here.

Why a Single Style Fails Finance Teams

Most finance teams are not homogeneous. On a typical treasury or ALM team you might have a graduate analyst six months into their first role, a mid-level specialist who knows FTP inside out but has never touched a regulatory return, and a senior person who could run IRRBB modelling in their sleep. They all sit in the same team meeting. They all need something from you. And they all need something different.

A manager who defaults to one style regardless of who is in front of them creates problems at both ends. Over-direct a capable specialist and you signal that you do not trust them. Under-direct someone who is genuinely new to a task and you leave them exposed, which hurts the output and, more importantly, hurts their confidence.

The fix is not to develop a better default style. It is to develop the habit of reading the situation and adjusting.

The Hersey and Blanchard Situational Leadership Model: What It Says

The core idea is simple: your style for a given person on a given task should be driven by their readiness for that specific task, not their overall seniority or how long they have been in the team.

Readiness in this model has two components. The first is competence: do they have the knowledge, skills, and experience to do this task? The second is commitment: do they have the motivation and confidence to do it? Both matter. Someone can be technically capable but disengaged, or highly motivated but genuinely underprepared. The combination of these two dimensions tells you where they sit on the readiness scale, from low readiness through to high readiness.

That readiness level maps to one of four leadership styles. As readiness increases, the amount of direct task guidance you provide should fall, while the relationship behaviour you offer shifts in a different pattern depending on the quadrant.

The Four Styles and When to Use Each

Directing

High task guidance, low relationship behaviour. You tell the person what to do, how to do it, and when. You check progress frequently.

Use this when someone is new to a task and motivation is not yet the issue. A graduate analyst running their first PRA110 submission needs clear instructions, a checklist, and regular check-ins. Leaving them to figure it out independently does not build capability. It builds anxiety and errors.

Coaching

High task guidance, high relationship behaviour. You still provide structure and direction, but you also explain the reasoning, involve the person in decisions, and encourage their input.

This fits someone who has some grasp of the task but is still developing confidence or making inconsistent judgements. Think of a junior analyst who understands the mechanics of an LCR report but still struggles with edge cases around HQLA classification. They need both the technical steer and the encouragement to develop their own judgement.

Supporting

Low task guidance, high relationship behaviour. You step back on the task direction and focus instead on listening, facilitating, and removing obstacles.

Use this when someone has the competence to do the work but their commitment has dipped. This happens more than managers acknowledge. A capable person handed a tedious, repetitive task, or one who has lost visibility of why their work matters, can quietly disengage. The answer is not more instruction. It is a conversation about context, contribution, and what they need from you.

Delegating

Low task guidance, low relationship behaviour. You hand over the task and trust the person to manage it. You stay available but you do not hover.

This is the right style when someone is both capable and motivated. Micromanaging a senior specialist who understands the task better than you do is a waste of their time and yours. Delegate clearly, agree on outputs and timelines, and get out of the way.

How to Assess Where Someone Actually Sits

This is where the model succeeds or fails in practice. Readiness is not reported by the person themselves, and gut feel is unreliable, particularly for managers who are under pressure themselves.

Look for concrete signals:

• Questions they ask. Clarifying questions about process or scope suggest developing competence. Absence of questions on a genuinely complex task can mean either high competence or, equally, that they are not engaged enough to have thought it through yet.
• How they handle an unfamiliar edge case. Do they flag it, make a reasonable call and document it, or quietly proceed without escalating? Each response tells you something different about where they are.
• Energy and pace. A capable person who has gone noticeably quieter on a task they normally take ownership of may have shifted from Delegating territory into Supporting territory without anything formally changing.
• Output quality over time. Sustained strong output on a task is the clearest signal of high readiness. A sudden drop in quality on a task someone has previously handled well is worth a direct conversation without pressure before you assume anything.

None of these signals is conclusive alone. Used together, they give you a more reliable picture than asking someone to rate their own confidence on a scale of one to ten.

Context Changes the Call

Even when you have a good read on where someone sits, context can shift the picture quickly.

A regulatory deadline compresses your tolerance for experimentation. If a PRA submission is due in 48 hours and someone is still getting to grips with the requirements, this is not the moment for a Coaching conversation about developing their independent judgement. You direct, you check, you deliver. That is not a failure of leadership philosophy. It is reading the moment correctly.

A system migration or a restructure can temporarily reduce the effective readiness of an otherwise experienced person. They may know the business inside out but be operating in unfamiliar territory technically or politically. Treating them as Delegating candidates during that transition because they were previously is a mistake.

The model is a snapshot. The honest practitioner application of it is to keep refreshing that snapshot rather than assuming last month's assessment still holds.

Where the Model Falls Short

It is worth being direct about the limits before you rely on this too heavily.

• It is static by design. The model describes a moment. It does not predict how quickly someone will move through readiness levels, and people do not move through quadrants in a neat linear sequence. Someone can regress under pressure or advance quickly with the right support, and neither follows a predictable path.
• It focuses on the dyadic relationship. The model tells you about one manager and one team member on one task. It says very little about team dynamics, peer relationships, or the broader organisational environment. A team where a capable specialist is quietly undermining a colleague's confidence is a different problem from the one the model addresses.
• It puts a lot of weight on the manager's assessment. If your read of someone's readiness is wrong, because of a blind spot, a relationship dynamic, or insufficient information, the model will give you a very confident wrong answer. The framework does not have a built in check on your own biases.
• It is not a substitute for a real conversation. The best way to understand where someone is on a task is often to ask them directly, thoughtfully and without making it feel like an assessment. The model is a framework for structuring your thinking, not a replacement for actual dialogue.

Apply It This Week

The practical exercise from the video is worth doing in full. It takes less than 20 minutes.

Take a blank sheet or a simple table. List your direct reports down one side. For each person, write down one task they are actively working on right now. For each task, be honest about where that person sits on the two readiness dimensions: competence and commitment. Then write down the style you have actually been using with them on that task.

Check whether your current approach matches what the model suggests. If you are directing someone who is clearly capable and engaged, ask yourself why. If you are delegating someone who is struggling with an unfamiliar piece of work, ask yourself the same question.

Most managers find at least one mismatch when they do this honestly. That mismatch is the starting point. It is not a problem to solve immediately. Treat it as a prompt for a conversation or a small adjustment in how you run your next check-in with that person.

If you want to go further on your own awareness as a manager, the post on using MBTI, DISC, and feedback from 360 degree reviews covers the tools that complement this kind of situational reading. And if you are thinking about how you get things done without always relying on formal authority, the piece on power versus influence is worth your time.

For structured courses on leadership, treasury, and finance built specifically for practitioners, the Academy catalogue is worth a look.

The model does not make leadership automatic. But it gives you a consistent, repeatable way to ask the right question before you decide how to show up for someone.