Situational leadership

Tareq al-Suwaidan presents situational leadership through a table of his own design: the leader plays two roles — directing (instructions: what, how, when, where, at what cost) and encouraging (motivation, appreciation, granting authority, listening, sharing in decisions, teaching) ^{1 2}.

From the mix of much or little direction and encouragement come four styles: the director (directs much, encourages little), the coach (directs and encourages much), the encourager (directs little, encourages much), and the delegator (neither) ^{3 4}.

He classifies subordinates by two measures — competence and enthusiasm — on a given task, not as a general evaluation: the beginner (enthusiastic, not competent), the intermediate (neither), the advanced (competent, not enthusiastic) and the expert (both) ^{5 6}. The matching rule: the beginner needs the director, the intermediate needs the coach, the advanced needs the encourager to raise his enthusiasm, and the expert needs to be shielded from interference and delegated to — and a leader who leads everyone in one style is a failed leader ^{7 8}. The best leader, to him, is the one who brings those with him to expert level, so that his style with them becomes delegation: providing them authority and resources and protecting them ^{9 10}.

He ties the theory to delegation: a task is delegated only to someone competent and enthusiastic for it; whoever delegates otherwise has only himself to blame, and whoever forces a person onto a task should not expect success, for he is not enthusiastic for it in the first place ^{11 12}. He applies the rule to raising children too: a child is assessed in each subject separately — he may be able and fond of one subject and otherwise in another — and is led in each by the fitting style, until he is competent and enthusiastic in all and needs not even supervision ^{13 14}.