Performance Readiness Levels – Paul Hersey
The term “maturity” became obsolete when the model evolved from a Life Cycle broad view of leadership into a Situational Leadership® task-specific focus. I must admit it took a couple of years to abandon trying to explain what we meant by the term “maturity,” but in the effort to explain it we came to a greater understanding of others. Perhaps the most profound learning for me was that managers willingly embrace complex learning if you provide a few solid touchstones. After creating some well-researched, sophisticated explanations such as Psychological Maturity and Job Maturity, we were humbled to find that time and time again managers would distill the elaborate explanations into the simple and timeless “Ready, Willing, and Able.”
In the most general of terms, Performance Readiness is the amount of willingness and ability the follower demonstrates while performing a specific task. Previously understated was the degree to which willingness and ability interact to determine Performance Readiness. Discovering more about the interaction has provided significant refinements in our thinking.
The number one error in diagnosing willingness is to view someone who is insecure or apprehensive as unmotivated. Willingness is a combination of the varying degrees of confidence, commitment, and motivation. Any one of these variables can be prepotent; that is, I may be completely committed to the job, quality, and the organization. I may be motivated with a strong desire to do well—and at the same time be insecure about my ability to do the job. Even though my commitment and motivation are strong, my insecurity will have to be addressed before I can move forward in my readiness. Someone or something will have to help me over this hurdle.
Ability is determined by the amount of knowledge, experience, and demonstrated skill that others bring to the task. A diagnosis is based on actual display of ability. The caution here is not to select a leadership style based on beliefs of what the follower should know. A frequent error is to impact knowledge and hold the person accountable for skills he or she has not had an opportunity to demonstrate.
Being task specific is critical to the success of correct diagnosis. This surpasses any implication that readiness is linear or accomplished in a highly predictive progression. For example, I would agree with Ken that most people enter a position or new task at readiness level two (not one).
Realizing this improves their accuracy in diagnosing development and helps leaders be more responsive in dealing with performance regression. It also highlights that a leadership intervention can be made anywhere along the readiness continuum; everyone does not start at the same place in their ability or willingness.
In Unity – Hersey and Blanchard
Employee Development Readiness/Performance Readiness
To cut to the heart of the matter, if you gain a better understanding of the people you work with, if communications improve, you’re using a great leadership model. We offer you one even better. Here is a guaranteed win. Should either version of our models get you to be more driven by the performance needs of others— celebrate! Responding to their needs appropriately is the surest way to achieve success and effectiveness.
Tribute to My Mentor and Final Comments - Ken Blanchard
When I developed Situational Leadership® II, generating a debate with Paul Hersey was the furthest thought from my mind. Why? He is my mentor, teacher, and friend. I had never thought about being a teacher or writer until Paul took me under his wing. He’d sit in the back of my classes at Ohio University and then share with me honest and helpful feedback. Later, when I’d finish a chapter for Management of Organizational Behavior, he’d not only critique my content presentation but also my writing style. He wanted me to be good—”Someday better than I am,” he would say. That’s a gift that few are willing to give.
Paul cared more about respect than popularity. He pushed me and others hard only because he believed in us and our ability to learn and excell. I certainly have. So, want to debate with Paul? I’d rather not. I’d probably lose anyway. I can’t recall ever winning an argument with Paul.
Gordon MacDonald wrote a wonderful book entitled Ordering Your Private World, in which he explains the difference between people who are “driven” and those who are “called.” Driven people think they own everything—their relationships, possessions, ideas. They spend all their time trying to defend what they own. Called people, on the other hand, think everything is on loan. Their job is to shepherd and nurture what comes into their lives. Situational Leadership® has been on loan to Paul and me for a long time. Even if we have shepherded it differently over the last decade or so, I hope we have nurtured it well. It certainly has seemed to make a real difference in the lives of many people.
As I approach my seventies, I hope I will always be viewed as an educational pioneer. While Situational Leadership® II is important to me, I never want to get stuck in one place. Ideally, when the enemy swoops down to take over my camp, all they will find are warm ashes because I will have gone somewhere else.
We hope that these thoughts will lead to your better understanding of the antecedents of Situational Leadership® and the important role it has played in our personal and professional lives.
We get questions all the time about what the differences are between the original Situational Leadership®—the cornerstone for the work of Paul Hersey and his Center for Leadership Studies—and Situational Leadership® II, which is central to the work of Ken and the Ken Blanchard Companies. We have considered several ways of sharing the commonalities and differences in our views and since we are “co-petitors,” have decided rather than doing it separately, to do it together. It is with fondness that we remember our past together.
The world refers to our behavioral model of how best to influence and lead people as Situational Leadership®, and it has truly taken on a life of its own. The different ways people describe their experience and sense of the model continue to instill feelings of pride in us—a touchstone, a cornerstone, a map, a compass, a sextant and a powerful lens. We often hear from clients that their introduction to Situational Leadership® has been their most important and valuable training experience.
Reflections from Dr. Blanchard. . .
When Paul and I decided to share our thoughts about Situational Leadership® and Situational Leadership® II together, I had two reactions. First of all, the fact that we are doing this acknowledges that Situational Leadership® is still alive and well today and more widely used around the world than ever before, even though the first thinking on the concept was done almost 40 years ago.
Second, I began to reminisce. When we first developed Situational Leadership®, Paul and I were both at Ohio University. I had come to Athens in the fall of 1966 as administrative assistant to the Dean of the College of Business. Paul had arrived shortly before to serve as chairman of the Management Department. Dean Harry Everts put me in the Management Department and asked that I teach a course. He wanted all his Deans to teach. Initially, Paul was not excited about having me dropped into his department, but that fall he assigned me a course and I began teaching.
During that fall I heard from students and faculty what a fabulous organizational behavior course Paul Hersey taught. When I saw Paul in the hallway one day that December, I asked him if I could sit in on his class the next semester. He was quick to reply, “No one audits my course. If you want to take it for credit you’re welcome.” Since I already had my doctorate, I was surprised by his initial reaction. However, my wife, Margie, helped me check my ego, and I signed up for the course. It turned out to be as fabulous a course as I had heard. Paul was a great teacher.
In June 1967, after the course ended, Paul came to me and asked if I would be interested in writing an organizational behavior book with him. Paul had been teaching in the management field for 10 years but had shied away from much formal writing. I had always been told by my faculty members in graduate school that my writing wasn’t academic enough. I later learned that meant you could understand it, but at the time I had never thought about writing a book. I didn’t think I had writing skills. But Paul disagreed, based on the papers I had written in his class. With his encouragement, we formed an unlikely alliance and began to write our textbook, Management of Organizational Behavior: Utilizing Human Resources, which was first published in 1969.
We turned out to be quite a writing team, as that text, first published by Prentice Hall in the fall of 1969, has been a bestseller in the field for almost forty years.
Paul’s course ended with a presentation of William Reddin’s 3-D model. His work was an outgrowth of the Managerial Grid® but suggested there was no best leadership style. While Reddin made a significant contribution to the field, Paul and I felt his approach still had some major limitations. That’s when we began to develop the “Life Cycle Theory of Leadership” (what we first called Situational Leadership®) for an article in Training and Development and our text.
Sometimes you just have to accept the blessings of some seemingly unrelated events. Such is the case with Situational Leadership®. As a young man working my way through college I made myself several important promises. I made an early decision that I would teach, and the subject I would teach was about working with people. I was excited by the whole academic exercise but felt that if I was going to be truly effective as a teacher, I really needed to work in the real world before standing in front of the classroom and contaminating the minds of young people. After college, I kept that commitment and filled several challenging positions. For over a decade I put my education to the ultimate test—improving performance and impacting the ability of managers to improve the performance of others. When I had a good dose of practical experience, I felt prepared to walk back into the classroom and work with the leaders of tomorrow.
Ken has relayed the story of our initial meeting at Ohio University pretty much as I remember. In his usual modest way, he has left out a few important points. I was working on a book for Prentice-Hall. In some ways the phrase “wrestling with” might be a better phrase than “working on.” I had the content for the book and knew the relevant research. What I needed was a partner who could get things down on paper and organize and think things through with me. From observing Ken’s work in my class, I felt Ken had those talents and more. His genuine interest in this field and in helping people made him the perfect partner. Look at the long list of Ken’s collaborative efforts— Spencer Johnson, Norman Vincent Peale, Sheldon Bowles, William Oncken, Jr., and Don Shula. I was impressed with that special talent on our very first project—and still am!
Initial Changes in the Hersey and Blanchard Model
In the 1972 edition of Management of Organizational Behavior, we not only began to use the term “Situational Leadership” rather than “Life Cycle Theory of Leadership” to describe our approach to leadership, but also made other important changes to the model.
Leader Behavior Dimensions
With the development of Situational Leadership®, we emphasized that the dimensions of leadership were “task behavior” and “relationship behavior.” Earlier models such as Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid and Reddin’s 3-D Management Style Theory used attitudinal dimensions like “Concern for Production” and “Concern for People” and “Task Orientation” and “Relationship Orientation.” With a behavioral emphasis, Ken and I argued that while there could be “best” attitudes for managers, there was no “best” leadership style. For example, every manager should be concerned about both production and people, but that attitude could be expressed in a variety of leadership styles, depending on the situation.
Leadership Styles
In the “Life Cycle Theory of Leadership” we did not label the four leadership quadrants. With the development of Situational Leadership®, we began to call quadrant 1 “Telling,” quadrant 2 “Selling,” quadrant 3 “Participating,” and quadrant 4 “Delegating.”
Further Evolution of the Model
Situational Leadership® has evolved and undergone a number of advancements in the last three decades. We continued to work closely together on the model until 1979, when Ken and his wife, Margie, founded Blanchard Training and Development, Inc. (BTD). Since then our separate clients and colleagues have helped us to grow with the model, to relearn it, and to gain a new and deeper appreciation of the subtle dynamics of influence. Our own journeys have, at times, taken us down different paths, with diverse conclusions of what we see. In a way it is not unlike raising a child. There is a uniqueness in the relationship the child has with each parent. One can argue over or celebrate the differences. We have chosen the latter. Respecting the other’s opinion continues to provide volumes of common ground from which we continue to “grow” Situational Leadership® and further its applications.
Leadership Style and the Changing Role of the Manager
When Management of Organizational Behavior was first published in 1969, the management hierarchy and the command and control approach to people management were alive and well. Even though managers and trainers got excited about Situational Leadership® and the fact thatthere was “no best” leadership style, managers were still considered to be in charge. In fact, it was rare indeed to even involve the follower in discussions about their own readiness or development level. Thinking back to the terminology used then—superior/subordinate, department head/hired hand, supervisor/laborer/worker—such conversations would not have been very fruitful.Today, managers speak of change as a constant process.
Many managers can give a pretty detailed explanation of empowerment, total quality control, team development, and partnering for performance. In essence, a transformation has occurred since the first edition of our book. It is now accepted that leadership is done with people, not to people.
While each of us uses different labels to conceptualize the leadership styles of Situational Leadership®, we feel this is not a major difference in our approaches. The years have taught us that within the simple and useful model, artistry and sophisticated skills are needed in each of the four styles. No matter what the label—telling or directing, selling or coaching, participating or supporting.
The critical point here is that the leader select the descriptor that best draws them into the appropriate style for the situation. For example, both coaching and selling are types of Style 2. Yet when you think of someone coaching or selling, distinctly different mental pictures are created. We need this type of variety to meet the moment-to-moment changes required of today’s leaders.
In today’s Situational Leadership® application there is a greater emphasis on the task or activity you are attempting to impact. The first step in using the model has always been to decide on the task. For a whole host of reasons people tend to generalize or look at too large a piece. To effectively assess a person’s performance needs, a leader may have to break a job into smaller elements. As a rule, if assessing a person’s needs seems confusing, begin by breaking down
the task.
Maturity Level
As times changed, so did our thinking about diagnosing a person’s ability to perform a specific task, as well as the terminology used. During the 1960s the term “maturity” in reference to assessing people did not seem offensive; it does now. It is in the area of assessing the performance needs of others—that we, the authors, have diverse conclusions of what we see.
First, the common ground. We would both state with conviction that Situational Leadership® is not as much about leadership as it is about meeting the needs of others. By getting people to focus on others, we can improve leadership skills more than by trying to teach a style. Leading without diagnosing is the same as a physician prescribing without diagnosing—a clear case of malpractice.
In this case we have some disagreement. We draw different conclusions about the same studies, and about the applicability of those conclusions. We frame our content from different life experiences, and find support for our interpretations from family, friends, colleagues, and business clients around the world. We are both men of conviction, so we believe heart and soul in our own evolutions of the model. And such are the behavioral sciences—as long as we are dealing with understanding people, there will be considerable room for interpretation.
We serve best by not becoming prisoners of our own doctrine or by not providing the appearance of unity for some commercial reason.What follows is a brief presentation of where each of us is today in our thinking on Development or Performance Readiness Level. It’s a long way from Maturity being Low, Moderate, or High in the days of The Life Cycle Theory of Leadership. Keep in mind that you are about to read two broad overviews. Given the natural confines of this short piece, we can provide little more than a brief exposure to our current thinking.
Development Level – Ken Blanchard
Don and Eunice Carew, founding asociates of the Ken Blanchard Companies, argued that if groups go through stages of development, why would the development process for individuals be that different? In particular, they were concerned about the first two levels of maturity in the original model
- being “unwilling and unable”
- “unable but willing.”
If the old terms were used, they felt the first level of development/maturity should be willing but unable, to correspond with the initial orientation stage of group development. When I thought about it and talked with practicing managers, what the Carews said began to make sense. It became clear that most of us hire either winners—people who are experienced and already developed in a particular job and can operate effectively with an S3 or S4 style—or else potential winners who need to be trained. Potential winners are often low in ability (knowledge and skills), but are high on willingness because of their initial motivation and eagerness to learn this particular job and their confidence in their learning capacity.
The Carews felt the second level of development/maturity should be “unwilling and unable” to correspond with the dissatisfaction stage of group development. Again, consistent with the stages of group development, managers told us that when people take on a new task where they are inexperienced, after a while disillusionment often sets in because they need more time and energy to gain competence than they had anticipated.
The new thinking required reconstructing how we looked at people and how to represent their stages of development. We needed a way to depict individual growth that moved from an enthusiastic beginner to a disillusioned learner, on to a capable but cautious performer, and finally to a self-directed achiever. The result was a continuum from “developing” to “developed.” Since those changes, we have also applied the basic Situational Leadership® II model to self leadership, team leadership, and organizational leadership. This permits organizations to use the same basic model for all four leadership domains—self, one-on-one, teams and organizations— while changing only the diagnostic framework. For self leadership it is “needs,” for one-on-one leadership it is “development level,” for team leadership it is “stages of group development” and for organizational leadership it is “concerns about change.”
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