The idea of situation based leadership has been around for a long time and is still popular, even if mainly in academic circles.

• The traditional idea is flawed because it presumes that leadership is about how the boss makes decisions. First of all, this conception fails to distinguish between leadership and management. Secondly, leadership is not primarily about making decisions anyway - it is about inspiring people to change direction. It is a change inspiring process not a decision making one.
• Leadership is fundamentally about having the courage (or the indifference to group acceptance) to advocate, or simply take, a direction that diverges from that of your group - it is about inspiring people to change direction.
• More pointedly: How can an individual inspire a group participatively? If a group jointly excites itself then no leadership has been provided by anyone but if one person does the exciting of the others then that person is the leader. Hence there can be no such thing as participative leadership.
• Certainly decisions can be made participatively but this is not leadership. And surely, making decisions autocratically cannot be seen as leadership at all.
• Leaders may indeed vary the way they inspire people to change but this is when they have already decided on the need to change - hence leadership style does not reduce to decision making style.
• The idea of participative leadership is as silly as the idea of participative motivation. If a person has no desire to do an unfamiliar and difficult task, you may motivate him, by involving him in deciding how to go about the task at an early stage. It is unlikely that the person will say: ''Yes, I do need to be motivated to do this task so please involve me so that I will become motivated.'' If the person is not motivated to do the task in the first place, he is unlikely to be motivated to feel that he should be motivated! - unless you motivate him - hence motivation is either self generated or other generated, not participative.
• Participative leadership is not possible because leadership involves one person persuading others to do something they would not otherwise do. Leadership is always unidirectional. More than one person in a group may show leadership but each instance of leadership has to be to take the group in a slightly different direction or to make a difference in how the group is thinking. If one person simply echoes the original leader then that is followership. So, leadership may shift from one person to another in short order within a group, but each instance of leadership is unidirectional not participative. Another way of putting this point is that there are only two positions: leadership and followership. You have to occupy one position or the other at any one moment in time.
• The problem here is a confusion over how participation is used - is it used to make decisions or to influence others to buy your ideas? If the former, then it is not leadership but management. If the latter, it is leadership but not genuine participation.
• Leaders, in other words, use pseudo-participation as a form of influence - a good tactic no doubt, but this has to be classified as influence rather than real participation - which presupposes that the boss's mind is not already made up.
• The history of situation based leadership can be stated quite simply.
• In the good old days the boss made all the important decisions.
• Then somebody noticed that some leaders got more done by focusing more on relationship building than exclusively on the task.
• Hence arose the confusion of two competing styles of leadership - which was best?
• The obvious compromise was to say neither is best - it all depends on the situation.
• Sometimes the leader should call the shots - be task orientated. Other times it is better to be relationship orientated and make decisions participatively.
• Both styles of leadership have two things in common: (1) the focus is on what the person in charge is doing and (2) the question is about how the leader makes decisions.

Critique of situation based leadership

• First of all: Is leadership really about making decisions?
• People in positions of responsibility must make decisions, but is that leadership?
• Being a manager means occupying a position with power over others and the authority to get things done - to execute tasks or direction.
• But leadership is about influencing people to change direction.
• Having managerial authority means having the right to make decisions.
• Showing leadership means persuading others to change when they wouldn't otherwise.
• If you could persuade someone by merely making a decision, would that even count as persuasion (or influence) let alone leadership?
• In fact, you could argue that managers cannot show pure leadership to their direct reports where pure leadership is the ability to influence a group to change direction over which you have absolutely no formal authority. The ability of a Martin Luther King to attract followers would be an example of pure leadership. In this sense, then, a manager can only show pure leadership to his or her peers or superiors. Your subordinates may do as you want but their followership could always result from a combination of your leadership and their recognition of your right to make the decision.
• In any case, surely, leadership is a matter of exercising some form of influence - it is not about making decisions. Conversely, management is defined as the responsibility and authority to make a particular set of decisions related to a specific task or set of tasks.
• In fact, the phrase ''leadership decision'' is a contradiction in terms. How can it be leadership if someone has already made the decision? Conversely, if the decision is arrived at in a fully participative manner, then no leadership has taken place. Only managers can make decisions.
• We get confused about this issue only if we equate being a leader with being a manager. It is not that someone we would normally call a leader does not make decisions - it is just that making decisions is not leading - only influencing or persuading is leading.

Leadership as creative action

• Leadership should no longer be seen as something that only the person in charge of others does.
• In its most general sense leadership is based on taking initiative to differerentiate yourself and to do things better than others, to excel or to achieve - hence some achievers are leaders in sports or the arts. In business we have market leaders in this sense.
• Such leadership is leading by example rather than through direct influence attempts aimed at potential followers
• Leaders have the same motivation to excel as sports people, but they do not have sufficient control over resources to simply lead by example.
• Hence, they have to rely on issuing promissory notes - claims to the effect that ''If we do x, we will achieve y.'' In other words, they are saying: ''Take it on faith that if you follow me, great things will be achieved.'' Although a lot of organizational leadership hence reduces to TALK, it is still based on a desire to excel and to improve things - all leadership whether direct or indirect has this in common.
• Anyone who has the credibility to be granted a senior executive position can often lead through issuing promises alone, so long as something valuable is eventually delivered.
• Employees lower down on the pyramid can also lead but they have to rely more on leading by example - often their leadership would be a combination of proving their ideas by acting them out and arguing for them - indirect and direct influence.
  In either case, leadership is about influencing people to do things they would not otherwise do - it is not about how you exercise decision making authority over others.
• Leadership on the part of managers with authority to make decisions is only a special case of a much broader notion of leadership that includes leading by example.
• From this point of view, leadership is not a position you attain when you get promoted. It is, rather, a way of behaving that differentiates you from others and which holds out the promise that if others behave in the same way they will reap similar rewards.
• Leadership is similar to creativity - seeing how things can be different and demonstrating it through example or proving it with clever, inspiring words.
• Leadership is as much about opportunity as it is about having the right personality. Nearly anyone who spots a way to improve things can show leadership to colleaguess if willing to take the risk of group disapproval.

Conclusion

Situation based leadership is an obsolete concept dating from the early 1960's when leadership was seen as a top-down affair in organizations. Today, the competitive environment is too complex for one person to do all the leading. Yes, people in charge of large organizations need to wear a wide range of hats to deal with an incredible range of situations. But this is not situation based leadership - many of the roles a senior executive has to play are not leadership ones at all. Some of them are management roles - driving to achieve goals efficiently and, yes, making tough decisions. Others involve coaching and developing leadership in others. It must be noted, however, that developing leadership in others is no more a leadership activity than training engineers is an engineering activity. One of the disasters of our outdated fixation with top-down leadership is that we think that every good thing a manager does must be regarded as leadership. For example, coaching is coaching, not leadership. In any case, we need to move away from focusing exclusively on how the person at the top leads and start looking at how all employees can also show leadership - in their case upwards.