Leadership is seen as the ability to inspire people to follow your ideas, work together effectively toward shared goals, and achieve the results your organization needs.

If you're looking for a way to tailor your leadership style to meet the demands of increasingly diverse workplace environments, you might consider situational leadership as an alternative to the traditional one-size-fits-all approach. Here's how it can help you motivate your teams.

Situational Leadership Styles Explained

The Situational Leadership Model, developed by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey, looks at unique leadership styles that affect workplace perception and interaction dynamics. The various styles of leadership are briefly described below.

• Directing: This type of leadership is mostly one-sided, occurring within a tactical environment, with little to no input from teams. The approach may be necessary for projects where there are time constraints. As a leader, you may need full control over the process to accomplish such tasks, with group members having to rely on detailed guidance every step of the way.
• Coaching: Under this approach, the leader acts as a mentor to the team. Essentially, this leadership style works well when team members are willing and enthusiastic, but may fall short when it comes to the requisite skills for a task.
• Participating: In this model, leaders are facilitative or consultative rather than directive. You help group members make their own decisions through suggestions and feedback. Also, you empower them to contribute to finding solutions to challenges. Such an approach increases a sense of shared responsibility and accountability at all levels of the organization.
• Delegating: This type of leadership works very well in high-performance groups with extremely skilled, motivated, and willing employees. As a leader, this approach allows you to step out of the way as much as possible to give employees control of situations by delegating tasks and projects effectively.

The Best Strategies for Effective Situational Leadership

Whether it’s exhibiting flexibility or initiating activities that might enhance engagement and commitment, there's always more than one way to effectively develop leaders of 21st-century teams. Let's take a look at some of the strategies you can use to guide, train, and motivate your team members for success.

1. Earn Your Team's Trust

As the leader of your team, it’s important to earn credibility. It takes more than just providing direction. Responsive leadership requires you to adapt to ever-changing scenarios and meet your team's needs in the process. This allows you to build trust and gain support for your decisions along the way.

At all times, you should strive for transparency with your team, and maintain consistency by providing them opportunities for feedback. Decisions must be justified and reasonable if you want workable solutions.

2. Set the Right Example

As a leader, the example you set is important. Make sure you’re treating your team members with respect by listening to what they have to say and delivering on your commitments. You should make it a point to lead the way through collaboration while setting a strong example of business acumen and personal accountability with integrity.

3. Create Meaningful Equations

To build strong teams, you need to understand how to create meaningful connections and shared goals. Try to be a positive leader who’s approachable and appreciative of your team members.

Use opportunities throughout the year—meetings, shared projects, training, or social events—to foster such relationships within the team.

4. Coaching Your Team Members

It is imperative that you work with everyone to set and achieve clear goals. Devise a structure for developing skills and improving performance, such as conducting training programs via learning management systems, and setting up action plans and regular assessment sessions. Coaching is an evolving cycle of planning, doing, reflecting, and fine-tuning your approach as you go.

5. Learn to Get Your Ideas Accepted

If you want to improve your situational leadership skills to act more confidently and have greater influence, you'll need to learn how to persuade, influence, and convince your followers when it comes to new ideas, projects, or organizational objectives.

For this, you will need to adapt your leadership style according to context. This way, you'll get more done. Projects will get completed on time and on budget, and group members will feel more invested in their work and goals.

6. Develop Problem-Solving and Conflict-Resolution Skills

Problem-solving skills are critical for key leadership roles. This involves taking into account technical considerations as well as alternative approaches for better decision-making and positive outcomes.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to work collaboratively in a team environment because people have different personalities and can present conflicting opinions in different situations. As a leader, you should be able to resolve such conflicts and issues by identifying and isolating problems, and also making sure that your team members are on the same page.

7. Measure Your Team's Happiness Level

Teaming up with your group is essential, but understanding their morale is crucial. Your team members will react differently to change depending on their personality, the current situation, and their mood at the time.

To minimize conflict within teams, you need to recognize their emotional states in a given situation. Try asking for individual inputs and group feedback at regular intervals. Once you have an understanding of where team happiness fluctuates, you can work towards improving points of discontentment.

8. Evaluate Your Team's Engagement

The engaged employee is enthusiastic about work, takes initiative, and strives to reach his or her full potential, leading to better results for everyone involved. The most important qualities of such employees are usually willingness and enthusiasm.

If you want to get the most out of team members, you have to give them a sense of purpose—whether that's belief in the company's core values, ownership over their work, or acknowledgment and incentives for the work they're doing.

Related: How to Improve Your Team's Motivation and Engagement

9. Set SMART Goals for Yourself and Your Team

It's important as a leader to set clear and realistic expectations for yourself, your team, and your projects.

You should try to follow the SMART technique to create actionable goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help you make better plans and communicate more effectively with those involved in the project.

10. Keep Up With Deadlines

Working under deadline conditions is one of the inherent challenges of almost every professional role. You need to be ready to track and meet these deadlines by motivating your team to ensure they're on board with your decision, and helping them complete projects successfully.

This doesn’t mean that you can never change course or have flexibility, but it does show people that you have what it takes to be a good leader.

Situational Leadership: Leading Teams Through Change

The key to success with situational leadership is to understand the different kinds of motivation that your team members display. Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to put it into practice.

You can adopt a few of the techniques listed above to build a stronger relationship with your team, so you can all work together for optimal results. If you can use a mix of these leadership styles, you will be able to successfully navigate teams through change, ensure employee engagement, and contribute to organizational goals.