Part II · Teams, Systems & Hybrid Work
Situational Leadership II
Situational Leadership® II (now SLII®) is Ken Blanchard’s model for leading one person on one task: diagnose their development level — competence and commitment for that task — then match one of four styles: directing, coaching, supporting, or delegating.
Only 30% of US employees were engaged at work in the first quarter of 2024.
— Gallup, “U.S. Engagement Hits 11-Year Low,” April 2024Where Situational Leadership II came from
Situational Leadership began as a joint model. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard first published it in 1969 as the “Life Cycle Theory of Leadership,” and it became the foundation of their textbook, Management of Organizational Behavior.
In 1985, Blanchard and the founding associates of what is now The Ken Blanchard Companies, Patricia and Drea Zigarmi among them, released a revised generation of the model: Situational Leadership II, introduced in the book Leadership and the One Minute Manager. The original stayed with Hersey’s Center for Leadership Studies.
The two versions share four styles and the idea that the right one depends on the person in front of you. They differ in vocabulary and in how they read that person. SLII diagnoses development level (competence and commitment) and calls its styles directing, coaching, supporting and delegating. Hersey’s version diagnoses performance readiness (ability and willingness) and calls them telling, selling, participating and delegating. If you learned “telling and selling,” you learned the Hersey version.
Situational Leadership® is a registered trademark of the Center for Leadership Studies. The Ken Blanchard Companies used that mark under license, as Situational Leadership® II, until a 2018 settlement between the two set the license to end two years later, in 2020. Blanchard now markets the model as SLII®, its own registered trademark. This page uses the name the book uses. The Resilience Engine is not affiliated with or endorsed by either organization.
The four SLII styles: S1 to S4
Every SLII style is a mix of two kinds of leader behavior. Directive behavior shapes what gets done, how, and by when: setting goals, showing and telling how, setting timelines and priorities, clarifying roles, tracking progress. Supportive behavior builds the person’s motivation and confidence: listening, asking for input, encouraging, and helping them solve problems themselves. Put the two on axes and you get four combinations.
S1, Directing: high directive, low supportive. You set the goal, show how, define what a good job looks like, and check progress often.
S2, Coaching: high directive, high supportive. You keep directing, but you explain why, ask for their ideas, and acknowledge progress. You still make the final call.
S3, Supporting: low directive, high supportive. You make decisions together. You ask for their plan, listen, act as a sounding board, and clear obstacles.
S4, Delegating: low directive, low supportive. You agree on the outcome and how you’ll stay informed, then hand over the planning and the decisions.
- S1
Directing
High directive · Low supportive
For D1 · Enthusiastic Beginner
- S2
Coaching
High directive · High supportive
For D2 · Disillusioned Learner
- S3
Supporting
Low directive · High supportive
For D3 · Capable, but Cautious, Contributor
- S4
Delegating
Low directive · Low supportive
For D4 · Self-Reliant Achiever
The four development levels: D1 to D4
The style is chosen by the person’s development level on one specific goal or task. It has two parts: competence, the knowledge and skills they bring to that task, and commitment, their motivation and confidence about it. Blanchard is explicit that it varies from task to task. The same person can sit at one level on one goal and at a different level on the next.
D1, Enthusiastic Beginner: low competence, high commitment. New to the task and keen to start. Matched with S1, Directing.
D2, Disillusioned Learner: low to some competence, low commitment. Has found out the task is harder than it looked. Matched with S2, Coaching.
D3, Capable, but Cautious, Contributor: moderate to high competence, variable commitment. Can do the work but isn’t yet sure of it. Matched with S3, Supporting. Older Blanchard material calls this level the Capable but Cautious Performer.
D4, Self-Reliant Achiever: high competence, high commitment. Matched with S4, Delegating.
The match is one to one: D1 gets S1, D2 gets S2, D3 gets S3, D4 gets S4. Blanchard names the two ways to miss oversupervising and undersupervising, meaning too much direction for where the person is or too little, and both hurt their development.
One supervisor, four tasks: an example
A hypothetical, to show the mechanics. Your most reliable shift supervisor has four things on her plate this quarter.
Running the daily production meeting. She has done it for years and it runs without you. D4. Delegate: agree on what the meeting has to produce, then stay out of it.
Building next quarter’s staffing plan in a scheduling tool she has never used, and she is keen to learn it. D1. Direct: set the deadline, build the first week of the schedule with her, and check it twice a week.
Rolling out a new quality checklist. She started out keen, the first two weeks of audits came back full of errors, and now she is frustrated. D2. Coach: keep the direction tight, explain why each check exists, ask what is getting in the way, and point out what is improving.
Holding performance conversations. She has run several and they went fine, but she dreads them and keeps pushing the next one back. D3. Support: ask how she plans to run it, rehearse it with her if she wants, and let her lead.
Same person, same quarter, four levels. Lead her on her reputation and you delegate all four: right for the meeting, and wrong for the tool she has never used, the rollout that is knocking her confidence, and the conversation she keeps avoiding.
What it diagnoses
Leading from habit instead of from diagnosis. Most operators run one style — the one that matches their own temperament — on everyone. It works on the people who happen to fit it and quietly fails on everyone else. The book’s phrasing for the result: one-size-fits-all management “creates one-size-fits-nobody resentment.”
The habit is the norm, not the exception. The Ken Blanchard Companies reported in 2013 that 54% of managers use only one style when giving their people direction and support.
Situational Leadership II starts from a claim that sounds obvious and that almost nobody actually operationalizes — “there is no single best leadership style.” The unit of diagnosis is not the person. It is the person on this task. The same person can be a self-reliant expert on one task and an anxious beginner on the next.
The test question is the one used in the 5-Minute Systems Audit: do you adjust your management approach based on each team member’s skill level and confidence for specific tasks, or do you manage everyone roughly the same way? “My style, they adapt” is the bottom of that scale. A documented approach by person and task is the top.
How to run it
Pick the task first, not the person. Development level is task-specific — a résumé is not a diagnosis.
Read the two variables for that task, separately: competence and commitment. That pair selects the style, not your comfort or habit. Together they give the development level, D1 to D4.
Match the style: D1 gets directing, D2 coaching, D3 supporting, D4 delegating.
Say the objective out loud, in the same words, to everyone working on it. The style flexes; the standard does not. That second rail is the “Clear is Kind” protocol — without it, the step above reads as favoritism.
Tell the person your diagnosis and agree on it. Blanchard’s own line is that SLII is “not something you do to people; it’s something you do with people”: agree on the level, the style, and how often you’ll check in.
Write it down. Informal adjustment, however well-intentioned, is not yet a system. The goal is a development map per direct report, per task.
Re-diagnose when the task or the results change. Levels move in both directions, up as skill builds and down when the work changes or confidence drops, and the style moves with them.
How operators misuse it
They label the person instead of the task. “She’s a D4” is the shortcut that breaks the model: a development level belongs to one person on one goal. Your self-reliant achiever on client work can be an enthusiastic beginner on the budget.
They avoid direction because it feels like micromanaging. Blanchard’s own material names the pattern: leaders reach for the ask-what-you-think style with someone who has no idea how to do the task, and set that person up to fail. For a beginner, clear direction is the supportive move.
They hand over too early, or never. Empower someone before they have the skill and you have abdicated, not delegated. Hang on after they have it and you get dependence, then resentment. It is the same mistake in opposite directions: a style that doesn’t match the level.
They skip the goal. Blanchard’s model starts with goal setting (what the person is accountable for, and what good performance looks like) before any diagnosis. Without an agreed goal there is nothing to diagnose against, and the style becomes a matter of mood.
They run the style rail alone. They adapt — correctly, person by person — and never state the standard underneath out loud. The adaptation stops reading as responsiveness. It starts reading as inconsistency, and to the person on the receiving end, as favoritism.
The book names the failure directly: if “you roll out SLII but don’t combine it with ‘Clear is Kind’ communication,” it warns, “your adapted leadership styles come across as inconsistent and confusing.”
There is a popular version of this framework that stops exactly halfway — great leaders just flex their style to each person. It is half right, and the missing half is the one that matters. Situational Leadership II governs how you deliver. “Clear is Kind” governs what you deliver. The objective doesn’t bend; the delivery does.
From the trenches
I started leading people at twenty, and for most of the years since, my instinct in the moments that mattered was to reach straight for the commitment. Lay out the plan, ask for the yes, sort out the details after.
It backfired in a specific, repeatable way. The sharpest people on my teams — the ones whose buy-in I most needed — would answer a request for commitment by listing every reason the thing couldn’t be done. In order. Airtight. I used to hear that as resistance. It wasn’t. It was the predictable output of handing someone a how before I’d given them a why — and delivering it the same way I delivered it to everyone else.
The fix was not more conviction. It was inverting the order and tuning the delivery to the person in front of me. It took an embarrassing number of years to see what the mistake actually was.
You lead the task, not the résumé.
Where it lives in the book
Part II of The Resilience Engine: Teams, Systems & Hybrid Work. The book pairs Situational Leadership II with the “Clear is Kind” protocol: one flexes the delivery, the other holds the standard.
Questions operators ask
- What is Situational Leadership II?
- Ken Blanchard’s model for leading one person on one task. You diagnose their development level on that task (competence and commitment) and match one of four styles: directing, coaching, supporting, or delegating. Blanchard introduced it in 1985 as a revision of the Situational Leadership model he built with Paul Hersey.
- What are the four styles of Situational Leadership II?
- S1 Directing (high directive, low supportive), S2 Coaching (high directive, high supportive), S3 Supporting (low directive, high supportive), and S4 Delegating (low directive, low supportive). The person’s development level on the task selects the style, not your comfort or habit.
- What are the four development levels in SLII?
- D1 Enthusiastic Beginner (low competence, high commitment), D2 Disillusioned Learner (low to some competence, low commitment), D3 Capable, but Cautious, Contributor (moderate to high competence, variable commitment), and D4 Self-Reliant Achiever (high competence, high commitment). Each level is matched to the style with the same number.
- What is the difference between Situational Leadership and Situational Leadership II?
- Situational Leadership is the original Hersey–Blanchard model, first published in 1969 and now taught by the Center for Leadership Studies. It reads performance readiness (ability and willingness) and uses telling, selling, participating, and delegating. SLII is Blanchard’s 1985 revision. It reads development level (competence and commitment) and uses directing, coaching, supporting, and delegating.
- Why does adapting my leadership style feel like favoritism to my team?
- Because you adapted the delivery without stating the standard. Give one person room and another person structure without saying out loud that the objective underneath is identical, and from the outside it looks like two rulebooks rather than one standard delivered two ways.
- Does Situational Leadership II work?
- The evidence is mixed. A 2017 study co-authored by SLII co-creator Drea Zigarmi (573 working professionals) found that people who reported getting the style they needed scored better on nine of ten work outcomes. An independent 2009 study of 357 banking employees and 80 supervisors found that the 2007 version of the model, Blanchard’s SLII, predicted performance and attitudes less well than the original 1972 Hersey–Blanchard version. Use it as a diagnostic discipline, not a law.
Score it
Situational Leadership II is one of the frameworks scored in the free 5-Minute Systems Audit.