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.

All pages written by Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. and copyright © Self Renewal Group 1996-2008