Situational leadership meets the 5 pillars

Situational leadership gives an excellent answer to how you lead each employee, with respect for their particular skills and level of experience. The 5 pillars of hybrid leadership are our take on a framework for making a hybrid team work. And when you look at them together, they solve a problem neither solves alone: leading people differently without leading unfairly.

“But then the others will complain”

That’s the sentence we hear most often when we talk to leaders about leading people differently. Not “how do I do it?”, but “what happens when they find out?”. And it’s a perfectly reasonable question. The moment you follow Anna closely and let Omar get on with it, you’ve created a difference that someone has to be able to explain. If you don’t do it yourself, the rumour mill will do it for you.

Situational leadership gives you an excellent answer to what to do with each individual. But the model says nothing at all about what the difference does to the team. And that’s exactly where it hurts in a hybrid team: when nobody sees the whole picture, people fill in the gaps themselves.

The model in five lines, in case it isn’t fresh in your mind

Situational leadership says there’s no single right leadership style. The right style depends on how competent and how committed the employee is on the task in hand, and it ranges from directing through coaching and supporting to delegating. The most important point in the model is also the one most people miss: maturity isn’t a trait of the person, but of the person doing a particular task. Your most skilled specialist can be completely self-sufficient in her own field and entirely green the first time she has to present to the executive team. If you want the model properly unpacked, it’s in Situational leadership: the model explained.

Two models, two different questions

Situational leadership is the individual model. It answers how you meet each person. We created the 5 pillars of hybrid leadership to give a structured overview of what you should give extra attention as a hybrid leader. In Danish we call the model De 5 R’er, after five Danish words: Retning, Relationer, Rammer, Rytmer and Robusthed. In English: Direction, Relationships, Ways of working, Rhythms and Resilience. It answers how the team holds together.

On their own, each leaves a gap. If you only have the individual model, in the worst case you end up with five perfectly tailored one-to-one relationships and a team that doesn’t hold together. No shared direction, no shared rhythms, and a feeling among employees that the terms are something you negotiate individually behind closed doors. If you only have the team model, you build excellent shared ways of working and then lead everyone the same way within them, whether each person needs scaffolding or to be left alone.

The link is the whole point: the team’s ways of working have to make the individual difference both possible and legitimate. And that isn’t just a nice turn of phrase. There’s research behind it that we think far too few leaders know about.

Fair isn’t the same as equal, and it’s actually been measured

Fairness at work isn’t one thing. Research on what’s called organizational justice breaks it down, and the most useful distinction is between two kinds. Distributive justice is about what you got. Procedural justice is about how it was decided. In 2001, Colquitt and colleagues brought together twenty-five years of research in the field in a meta-analysis, and one of the key findings across the studies is that the two have separate effects. The way a decision is made has its own effect on trust in management, regardless of whether people liked the outcome.

Translated to your working day: you can give two employees very different terms without trust taking a hit. But only if the process behind the difference is transparent. It’s rarely the difference itself people react to. It’s the arbitrariness.

As early as 1980, Gerald Leventhal put into words what it takes for a process to be seen as fair. He set out six criteria, and two of them matter most for a hybrid leader:

• Consistency. The rule has to be the same for everyone and over time. Not “Anna gets close follow-up”, but “everyone gets close follow-up on new types of task, and we scale it back once they’ve got the hang of it”.
• A way to object. There has to be a way to say “actually, I think I’m ready for more”, and that way has to lead somewhere.

The other four are just as relevant: the decision has to rest on a sound basis, it has to be made without bias, the people affected have to have been heard, and the whole thing has to stand up to scrutiny.

Notice what’s happening here. Situational leadership tells you what to do with each individual. Procedural justice tells you what has to be in place so you can do it without wrecking trust along the way. That’s exactly the gap the 5 pillars close.

Pillar by pillar: where the two models meet

Direction

Direction has to be given in the right dose. Someone new to the task needs to know what, how and when. Someone self-sufficient needs the purpose and the peace to find the way themselves. The mistake in many hybrid teams is to choose one shared level of detail, which ends up too sketchy for the newcomers and too detailed for the veterans. What has to be shared isn’t the level of detail. It’s the core task, and everyone should be able to retell it without looking at a slide.

Relationships

At a distance, you don’t judge maturity. You ask about it. And honest answers to “how confident are you really about this?” only come where there’s enough trust that the answer doesn’t cost anything. Without regular one-to-ones, you get polite answers instead of true ones, and then you’re judging on the wrong basis. Relationship work isn’t a soft extra. It’s your measuring instrument.

Ways of working

This is where procedural justice becomes something concrete. Write the principle into your team agreement: “Close follow-up on new types of task is standard here. It’s scaffolding, not mistrust.” Once it’s written down, individual leaders don’t have to justify the difference case by case, and nobody has to guess why a colleague has different terms. It’s Leventhal’s consistency rule, put in writing.

Rhythms

The follow-up cadence is the style turned into a calendar. If you’re new to the task, you get short loops, fifteen minutes a couple of times a week. If you’re self-sufficient, you’re kept at arm’s length, with a longer horizon. The rhythm communicates the style more clearly than any speech, and predictable rhythms make the scaling back visible as the employee grows. At the same time, some things have to apply to everyone: meeting-free focus blocks and the regular fixtures in the week. Otherwise the differences eat the calendar.

Resilience

Delegation builds resilience. A team where every decision goes through the leader breaks down the day the leader is away, or just stuck in meetings all Thursday. So the goal of situational leadership is also a team goal: more tasks that can run without waiting for a green light. That’s what hybrid resilience is about: the ability to anticipate, withstand and adapt when something slips. And that ability is built one well-judged delegation at a time, while things are calm. Not on the day things go wrong.

When nobody sees the whole picture, people make up the rest

The hardest thing about leading people differently isn’t the method. It’s how it looks. In a hybrid team nobody sees the whole picture, and we’re terrible at leaving a gap empty. Anna gets followed closely, Omar gets on with it, and if nobody has said why, people come up with their own explanation. That explanation is rarely flattering to you.

Take the two of them. Anna is new to the organisation, professionally sharp, and has to write her first paper for the executive team. She has three office days and follow-up twice a week. Omar has done this kind of thing for years, works mostly from home and checks in every other week. Without a visible reason, it looks like an A team and a B team. With a shared agreement that follow-up matches the maturity of the task, and that everyone starts close and scales back, it’s simply the same principle applied at two points on the curve.

The content is identical in the two stories. The experience is completely different. And the difference lies in whether the principle was known in advance, or explained afterwards, when someone finally asked. Procedural justice only works beforehand. Afterwards, it’s called an excuse.

“Anyone on the team should be able to explain the difference. Not just the leader.”

Getting started: three agreements for your next leadership meeting

1. Make the principle shared, not personal. Decide in the leadership team that follow-up and freedom match the maturity of the task, and write it into your team agreements, so it applies the same way across teams. As long as it’s your personal style, it’s up for negotiation. Once it’s the team’s principle, it’s part of how you work.
2. Make the judgement a rhythm. Build the maturity questions into your one-to-ones as a fixed part: how confident are you about your current tasks, and what do you need from me? If you only ask when you’re in doubt, the question itself becomes a signal of mistrust.
3. Make the scaling back visible, and create a way to push back. Celebrate when the scaffolding comes down. Going from close follow-up to free rein is an everyday promotion, so treat it as one. And make sure people can ask for more freedom without having to prove something first. That’s the right to object, translated into leadership.

If you only take one thing away from this, let it be this. The question isn’t whether you should lead your people differently. You already do. The question is whether your team knows the principle behind the difference. That conversation takes half an hour at your next team meeting, and it’s much cheaper than the six months people spend working it out on their own.

Want to practise combining the two for real? In our hybrid leadership programme, we work on leading differently and leading fairly as part of the module on relationships and wellbeing, built on the 5 pillars. And if you need the basic model first, start with Situational leadership: the model explained.

Sources

• Colquitt, Conlon, Wesson, Porter and Ng (2001), Justice at the Millennium: A Meta-Analytic Review of 25 Years of Organizational Justice Research, Journal of Applied Psychology.
• Leventhal (1980), What Should Be Done with Equity Theory? The six criteria for a fair process are reviewed in Procedural Justice: A Historical Review and Critical Analysis.