The Manager Who Treated Everyone the Same

Wes ran a product operations team of six. He prided himself on consistency. Same weekly check-in format. Same level of detail in every assignment brief. Same amount of autonomy for everyone. He called it fairness. His team called it frustrating.

His most experienced analyst, someone who had been doing the work for eight years, sat through the same step-by-step walkthroughs as the person who started three weeks ago. Meanwhile, the new hire smiled and nodded in meetings but privately felt lost because she needed more guidance than a weekly status update could provide.

Within four months, the veteran started interviewing elsewhere. The new hire made a costly data error that took two weeks to unravel. Wes could not figure out what went wrong. He had treated everyone equally. That, it turns out, was exactly the problem.

Situational leadership for managers is the practice of adjusting how you lead based on what each person needs right now, not what feels fair or consistent to you. It is one of the most practical leadership skills you can build, and most managers never learn it explicitly.

Why One Leadership Style Fails Every Team

The instinct to be consistent is understandable. Nobody wants to be accused of favoritism. But research consistently shows that rigid, one-size management backfires.

Gallup found that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. That variance does not come from applying the same approach to every person. It comes from the quality of the relationship between manager and individual, and that relationship depends on whether the manager is meeting each person where they are.

A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Management found that situational leadership style had a positive effect of 61% on job satisfaction and a 50.4% positive effect on employee performance in SMEs. The reason: when managers flex their approach, people feel seen. They get the right amount of structure and the right amount of space.

When you manage everyone identically, two things happen. Your high performers feel suffocated by oversight they do not need. Your developing team members feel abandoned by autonomy they are not ready for. Both groups disengage, just for opposite reasons. The result is a team where nobody is getting what they need, and you are working harder than ever wondering why things are not clicking.

The Situational Leadership Framework for Managers

Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard developed the Situational Leadership Model in the 1970s, and after 25 years of managing teams, I can tell you it holds up because it matches how people actually develop on the job.

The core idea: your leadership style should match the readiness level of the person you are leading, for the specific task at hand. Not their overall seniority. Not their title. Their readiness on this particular piece of work.

Here are the four styles and when to use each one.

S1: Directing (High Task, Low Relationship)

Use when: The person is new to the task, lacks confidence, or has never done this type of work before.

What it looks like: You define the what, when, and how. You check in frequently. You review work before it goes out. You are not being controlling; you are providing the scaffolding someone needs when the ground is unfamiliar.

The mistake managers make: Skipping this stage because it feels like micromanagement. It is not. A new team member who gets thrown into deep water without direction does not feel empowered. They feel abandoned.

S2: Coaching (High Task, High Relationship)

Use when: The person has some competence but is still building skill and confidence. They need both guidance and encouragement.

What it looks like: You still make the final call, but you explain your reasoning. You ask their opinion before sharing yours. You give feedback in real time and connect their work to the bigger picture. Think of this as teaching while doing.

S3: Supporting (Low Task, High Relationship)

Use when: The person is competent but may lack confidence, motivation, or buy-in for a specific initiative.

What it looks like: You pull back on telling and lean into listening. You ask what they need. You remove obstacles. You give them room to choose how the work gets done. Your job here is to keep energy and commitment high, not to direct the mechanics.

S4: Delegating (Low Task, Low Relationship)

Use when: The person is both competent and committed. They know what to do and they want to do it.

What it looks like: You set the outcome and get out of the way. You check in at milestones, not at every step. You trust their judgment. The biggest service you can offer here is not adding unnecessary meetings to their calendar.

The Diagnostic Question

Before every assignment, interaction, or project kickoff, ask yourself one question: “What does this person need from me on this specific task, right now?”

Not what do they need in general. Not what worked last month. Right now, on this task. A senior engineer who is a Delegating candidate on backend architecture might be a Directing candidate on their first client presentation. Readiness is task-specific, and it shifts constantly.

Real-World Application: From Micromanaging to Matching

Ingrid managed a marketing team of four. She had two years in the role and a default style: heavy coaching on everything. She was a good communicator, so her instinct was to talk things through with everyone, all the time.

Before: Her most experienced content strategist started showing signs of frustration. He would sigh during check-ins. His responses got shorter. Ingrid’s reaction was to coach harder, thinking he needed more support. The opposite was true. He was a veteran who needed to be left alone to do his best work. Her constant involvement signaled that she did not trust him.

Meanwhile, a junior designer on the team needed genuine coaching on stakeholder communication. But Ingrid spent so much time in collaborative conversations with the whole team that the designer never got dedicated attention for her specific development gap.

After: Ingrid mapped each team member against the four styles, task by task. She asked herself the diagnostic question before every one-on-one. For her content strategist, she shifted to Delegating on content strategy (where he was expert) and Coaching on a new analytics tool the team was adopting (where he was learning). For her junior designer, she moved to a focused Coaching style on stakeholder presentations, with clear frameworks and real-time feedback after each meeting.

Within six weeks, her content strategist re-engaged. He told her that the breathing room made him feel like she actually respected his experience. The junior designer landed her first solo stakeholder presentation and credited the structured coaching for giving her confidence.

The key insight: Ingrid did not become a better leader by doing more. She became a better leader by doing the right thing for each person. That is situational leadership in practice.

How to Start Today

Pick one person on your team. Before your next one-on-one meeting, pull up the four styles and ask yourself: which mode does this person need from me on their current primary project?

Write your answer down. Then run the meeting accordingly. If they need Directing, show up with clear expectations and check-in points. If they need Delegating, show up with one question: “What do you need from me?” and resist the urge to add anything else.

Do this for one person this week. Next week, add another. Within a month, you will have a mental map of your entire team, and your leadership effectiveness will shift because you stopped leading the team and started leading the individuals on it.

The best managers I have worked with in 25 years all share one trait. They do not have a leadership style. They have a repertoire. Start building yours today.