Situational Management

• Management style as decision making style can be situational.
• What used to be called leadership style is really management style.
• Leadership is about advocating a change in direction, management is about executing existing directions as efficiently as possible.
• Being a manager means occupying a role of responsibility while leadership is about acting creatively to to bring about a change of direction regardless of your formal role. Hence it can be directed up as well as down. Obviously upward leadership has nothing to do with decision-making style because you cannot decide unilaterally for your superiors - a career limiting move if you dared try it!
• A manager can use a range of styles depending on his/her personality and the situation.
• Situation based management (or leadership) is really a red herring. It only arises if you see it as a problem that we can't define one universal style to apply in all situations.
• The real problem with the old concept of situational leadership is that it focuses too exclusively on what the person in charge does.
• We need to separate leadership from the person of the boss and redefine it as an initiative to get others to change direction regardless of the source of the leadership within the group - this is quite a mindshift away from our traditional way of thinking about leadership as something that a person is or a way of behaving for the person in charge.
• The real problem is that conventional theorists tried to define managers and leaders in personality terms - hence leaders are supposedly dynamic and managers not. The whole style issue arose because of problems with these personality definitions - that is it was obvious that some leaders are dynamic while others were not.
• This whole issue can be avoided by simply defining leadership and management in functional terms - leaders serve the function of generating new directions, managers execute existing directions efficiently. This view then says that how you influence or motivate people is totally open, not part of the definition of leadership or management.
• Of course both leaders and managers have to behave differently in different situations but that is just a trivial fact of life rather than anything profound in terms of our basic understanding of what it means to lead or manage.

Decision Making Style

• Situation based leadership has been a popular idea in academic circles for decades.
• Supposedly, good leaders vary their decision making style according to the situation.
• They make decisions unilaterally or use a degree of participation as appropriate.
• A participatory style should be used whenever employee commitment is required.
• But commitment is nearly always critical - except with trivial decisions.
• Also, commitment is harder to obtain with confident knowledge workers who scoff at arbitrary authority and don't respond unless involved.
• It's no surprise that discussions of situation based leadership and decision making style occur mainly in academia.
• Popular books on leadership written for practicing managers talk only of participation.
• Of course, unilateral decisions always need to be made, especially when time is short. Management is very much like investment - which calls for the making of smart decisions to get the best return out of all resources at the managers disposal.
• Important decisions are increasingly made on a partnership basis - multiple expert input.
• Today's managers need to think more about how they can coach employees and facilitate the making of sound decisions from those best positioned to make them.
• Top executives who appear to be making unilateral decisions are, more often than not, only pulling together multiple inputs from others.
• In any case, there is a choice to make - decide or lead. When the boss decides, that is not leading. When the decision is fully democratic, no leadership has occurred.
• It is only when someone explicitly tries to persuade the group to make a particular decision that leadership is shown.
• Leadership style is therefore really management style or simply decision making style.
• On this topic, see also "Situation Based Leadership"