Yesterday I was in Mumbai to co-anchor a workshop with Dr. Ashok Korwar. The workshop, which was conducted over three months, concluded yesterday and Ashok was talking about many softer aspects of account management. It was in this context that he introduced the concept of Situational Leadership and explained how it could play a role both in customer management and team management.

As the name indicates, situational leadership proposes that managers need to adapt their style to a situation- a departure from the classical theories of sterotypical managerial styles such as Type X and Type Y.

There are several frameworks available for situational leadership – for example, Hersey and Blanchard’s model maps the leadership style to the team maturity and competence. Ashok used two axes, the degree of communication ( Expressive to Restrained) and  style of communication ( Ask vs Tell) and used different real life managerial situations to pick what style may be most apt.

The interesting point is that one could use this framework to also decide what may work, say, with a customer. An expressive- telling customer would warm up to a certain kind of interaction as opposed to a “telling- restrained” customer who probably only wants the results ( and stuff to be done as he wants!).

The bottomline is that adaptation is the key. Be it a team management context, a one one one coaching situation or a customer handling scenario, consciously adapting one’s approach could be the way.

I found this really interesting; it is possible that some of us do this unconsciously, but, what i figures is that deliberate application of such a framework can give us far better outcomes.

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