Hersey & Blanchard’s Situational Leadership Theory
Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard came up to Toronto in the early seventies to attend one of Bill Reddin’s 3-D seminars. They were both junior academics teaching in Michigan or thereabouts. They loved what they saw and took Reddin’s model and introduced what they called a “maturity curve". (They got this idea from Fred Fiedler’s work on what he called the least-preferred co-worker.) Their proposition was that, rather than go through a mildly complex process of analysing a set of situational demands, all you had to do was assess the degree to which subordinates were able and willing to do what they were required to do. If they were both unwilling and unable the manager needed to tell them what to do; if they were unable but willing the manager had to do a selling job on them, etc. Reddin saw this as a direct theft of his model and there was a long file of correspondence threatening various things, none of which ever came to anything.
Hersey and Blanchard’s model is still widely used. It is simple to apply and easy to understand. Ken Blanchard is a very nice chap and is very bright and creative. (You may recall that he wrote The One Minute Manager and an old publishing colleague of mine just told me that Ken sent him an autographed copy of the 7 millionth copy as thanks for his help in publishing his books!)
There really wasn’t a breakthrough with Hersey and Blanchard, but they did bring the idea of the importance of the situation to the attention of practitioners and consultants in leadership.
Roskin’s M.Ach One
Rick Roskin and I did our MBAs together and took our doctorates in the UK at about the same time. We had both been students of Reddin’s and were friends of his. Rick’s PhD research was in leadership behaviour and he began work on the development of a model he called M.Ach One (standing for 'Managerial Achievement' – M.Ach – and also referring to the speed of sound, mach one).
In the mid-seventies, about 25 years after the work at Ohio State, we had access to better computers and more sophisticated statistical techniques, so Rick was able to look at the Ohio State data again and try to work out what the unexplained third of the data meant. He recognised that it had something to do with coordination and integration and he called it “situation-centredness”. So his model looked at the degree to which managers exhibited task-centredness, relationship-centredness, and situation-centredness. (Managerial Achievement, R. Stuart-Kotze and R. Roskin, Reston, Reston Va., 1983.)
The major breakthrough with M.Ach One was the discovery that there weren’t just two basic things that managers did – task and relationships – but there was a third managerial activity that had to do with integrating things, coordinating activities, and looking at the longer term implication of actions and strategies. M.Ach One also developed a simple and straightforward methodology for determining the behavioural demands of a situation. M.Ach One talks about positive (+), neutral (o), and negative (-) behaviour but doesn’t explain why it occurs.
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