Situational leadership at a distance: how to assess maturity you cannot see

Situational leadership stands or falls on one thing: how you judge each employee’s maturity. But how do you judge competence and commitment in people you see two days a week, or only on a screen?

The model assumes you can see

At the heart of situational leadership is matching your style (directing, coaching, supporting or delegating) to the employee’s development level, D1 to D4, on the task in hand. Historically, that judgement was made with your eyes: you saw the uncertainty at the desk, heard the questions over lunch, sensed the energy in the room.

At a distance you see something else: output. The finished memo, the closed case, the green status. Not the process behind it, the detours, the deleted draft, the late evenings that saved the deadline. Output looks like competence, even when it’s covering up chaos. Your judgement rests on a sample, and the sample is skewed.

Proximity bias: a systematic source of error

The skew has a direction. People instinctively judge those they see often as more competent, more committed and more “ready for more”. It’s called proximity bias. In situational leadership, that bias turns into concrete mismatches. The people in the office get rated up to D3–D4 and are given freedom and visible assignments. The people working away from the office get either micromanagement they’ve outgrown, or invisibility when they actually need support.

It isn’t a flaw in your character as a leader. It’s a predictable mechanism, and it has to be countered by design. That’s the basic condition all leading at a distance rests on: agreements and rhythms have to replace what being seen used to give you for free.

Five ways to judge what you can’t see

1. Make the judgement a conversation. Ask two questions every time you hand over a task: “How confident are you about this one?” and “What do you need from me?” The answers place the employee on D1–D4 more precisely than your observation ever did, and at the same time they train the employee to ask for the right kind of leadership.
2. Judge per task, not per person. Your experienced project manager is D4 on the process and perhaps D1 on the new tool. Reassess when the task changes hands, not once a year at the appraisal.
3. Use short follow-up loops at the start, agreed and time-limited. “We’ll take 15 minutes every other day for the first two weeks, then I’ll let go.” Close follow-up with an agreed end date is scaffolding. Close follow-up without one is surveillance.
4. Read commitment from patterns, not gut feeling. Delivery rhythm, participation in meetings, the initiative they take, energy in the one-to-one. When the pattern changes, that’s a signal, but check your reading by asking before you draw conclusions. A camera that’s switched off can mean anything from a bad hair day to fading commitment.
5. Calibrate in the leadership team. Go through the team’s maturity ratings together a couple of times a year, and ask the test question: do we systematically rate the people we rarely see lower? Bias is easiest to see from the outside.

The typical mismatch: an example

A skilled consultant goes from three office days to working almost entirely from home when her family moves. Her skills haven’t changed: she’s D4 on her core tasks. But six months later she’s given a new type of task: onboarding clients onto a new platform. In the office, her manager would have seen her fumbling during the first week and given her more direction. At a distance, the manager sees only a green status and thinks “she’s on top of it, she usually is”. By the time the problem reaches her manager, it has grown, and the consultant has spent three weeks hiding that she was out of her depth. The mistake wasn’t hers. The mistake was a D4 rating that was never revisited when the task changed.

The story shows the most important rule for judging maturity at a distance: an old rating isn’t a valid rating. It has to be renewed every time the task is.

The maturity conversation as a fixed part of your one-to-one

The most reliable approach is to make the assessment a recurring routine in the one-to-one rather than a one-off exercise. A simple set of questions is enough:

• “Which of your tasks takes up most of your time right now, and how confident do you feel about it?”
• “Where would you like me to get more involved? And where should I get involved less?”
• “Is there anything you’re carrying on your own that you wouldn’t have had to carry alone in the office?”
• “What’s changed since last time: new tasks, new collaborations, something that’s got harder?”

The questions take five minutes and give you ongoing D ratings across the whole range of tasks, without it feeling like an exam. The bonus: the employee learns to think in terms of “what do I need from my leader”, which is half of self-leadership.

Agree on the style, out loud

Leading people differently without transparency looks like favouritism, especially at a distance, where nobody can see the reasoning. So say the reason out loud: “Anna gets close follow-up because the task is new to her. Omar runs on his own because he’s done it ten times.” When the style is tied to the task rather than the person, it stands up to scrutiny, and employees start asking for the leadership they need.

“At a distance, your judgement of maturity is only as good as your questions.”

If you’d like the whole model in place first, start with Situational leadership: the model explained. And if your challenges are more broadly about leading people you don’t share an office with, read about our work on leading at a distance: talks, workshops or programmes.