Adaptive leadership vs situational leadership: which approach should you use?

Situational leadership adjusts the direction and support you give someone for a particular task. Adaptive leadership helps people tackle challenges that require learning and changes in established beliefs, behaviours or working relationships.

The practical distinction is this: are you helping someone deliver a reasonably clear solution, or helping people work out what needs to change when existing solutions are insufficient?

Neither approach is automatically better. A manager introducing a new system may need situational leadership to support individual users and adaptive leadership to address disagreements about how the system changes their work.

What is situational leadership?

Situational leadership starts with the idea that people need different amounts of direction and support depending on the task and their current ability and willingness to undertake it.

Developed through the work of Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, the approach subsequently evolved into distinct models. Their terminology and detailed prescriptions differ, so it is worth checking which version a training programme uses. The Center for Leadership Studies explains its Situational Leadership model in terms of task-specific performance readiness.

In practical terms, a manager varies two things:

• Direction: explaining what to do, how to do it and what a satisfactory result looks like.
• Support: listening, discussing concerns, encouraging involvement and helping someone build confidence.

Commonly used labels for the resulting approaches include directing, coaching, supporting and delegating, although names vary between models.

The important point is that the assessment concerns a specific task, not someone's overall worth or permanent capability. An experienced lecturer might confidently design a lesson but need close guidance when using unfamiliar assessment software.

Good application is collaborative. Rather than silently deciding that someone needs supervision, ask what they have done before, where they feel uncertain and what support would help. Agree checkpoints, then adjust your involvement as the evidence changes.

What is adaptive leadership?

Adaptive leadership is not simply another name for being flexible. It is a framework associated with Ronald Heifetz and colleagues for mobilising people to address challenges that cannot be resolved through existing expertise alone.

In The work of leadership, Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie distinguish technical problems from adaptive challenges:

• Technical problems can be addressed using available knowledge, procedures or expertise. They may still be difficult, expensive or urgent.
• Adaptive challenges require people to learn and change. They may involve competing priorities, established habits, professional identity or something people feel they stand to lose.

For example, configuring an online booking system is largely technical. Reaching agreement about who should receive priority access to a shared service may involve adaptive work, particularly where departments have conflicting expectations.

The leader's role is not to provide every answer. It is to clarify the challenge, bring relevant perspectives together, surface difficult trade-offs and organise manageable experiments.

This does not mean stepping back without support. Leaders still set boundaries, provide resources and take responsibility for decisions within their authority. They also help people face uncomfortable questions without allowing the process to become overwhelming or unsafe.

The main differences at a glance

Question	Situational leadership	Adaptive leadership
What does it primarily diagnose?	What a person needs to perform a particular task	What people must learn or change to address a challenge
What is being adjusted?	The leader's level of direction and support	Collective understanding, behaviours, relationships or priorities
How clear is the solution?	Usually clear enough to guide task performance	Existing expertise alone is insufficient to resolve it
What does the leader do?	Clarifies expectations, coaches, supports or delegates	Surfaces competing views, frames questions and enables learning
What indicates progress?	More reliable performance and appropriate independence	Evidence of learning and changes that address the underlying challenge
What is a common mistake?	Labelling a person instead of assessing a task	Calling every change initiative an adaptive challenge

This is not a short-term versus long-term distinction. Situational leadership can support development over months, while adaptive work may begin during an urgent discussion. Nor is adaptive leadership only for senior leaders: a team leader can facilitate adaptive work within their area of influence.

A practical diagnostic for choosing the approach

Before choosing a leadership response, work through these questions. Treat the result as a working diagnosis, not a definitive classification.

1. Can we describe an adequate solution?

Ask: If we had sufficient expertise, time and resources, would we know how to resolve this?

If yes, the challenge is likely to be substantially technical. Establish the correct process, then consider how much guidance each person needs to carry it out.

If informed people disagree about the goal, acceptable trade-offs or what must change, there may be an adaptive component. More instruction alone is unlikely to settle that disagreement.

2. What is preventing progress?

Look for evidence rather than assuming that staff are resistant or unmotivated.

• A knowledge or practice gap suggests instruction, demonstration and feedback.
• Uncertainty about performing a familiar task may call for discussion and reassurance.
• Inadequate staffing, inaccessible tools or conflicting instructions require practical management action.
• Disagreement about values, responsibilities or ways of working may require adaptive work.

A useful question is: What would remain unresolved even if everyone completed the training? That often reveals issues hidden beneath an apparent skills problem.

3. Who needs to contribute to the solution?

For a technical problem, specialist expertise may establish the answer, although users can still improve implementation.

For an adaptive challenge, people affected by the change usually need to contribute to the learning. This might include employees, learners, employers, support staff or other stakeholders. Consultation should make clear which decisions remain open and which constraints are fixed.

4. What would make US revise our diagnosis?

Set a review point and decide what you will examine. If people demonstrate competence but the problem persists, stop assuming that another training session will fix it. If discussion reveals a straightforward equipment fault, resolve it rather than continuing a broad change exercise.

Most workplace problems contain both technical and adaptive elements. Separating them is often more useful than choosing one label for the whole project.

Technical challenge example: introducing an expenses system

Consider an illustrative example from a UK engineering business. A finance team introduces an expenses platform. The policy, approval route and evidence requirements are already agreed, but employees have different levels of experience with the software.

This is primarily a technical implementation challenge: the organisation knows what correct submission looks like.

A manager using situational leadership might:

• Demonstrate a claim step by step to an employee who has never used the platform.
• Let a colleague complete a practice claim, then discuss errors together.
• Give an experienced user a short reference guide and responsibility for submitting independently.
• Check the first submissions and reduce supervision where performance supports it.

The manager could monitor rejected claims, recurring errors and requests for help. These indicators help determine whether support is working.

The boundary: if approvals remain slow because nobody agrees who should authorise cross-departmental costs, user training is not enough. Responsibilities need clarifying. If departments are unwilling to relinquish control, there may also be adaptive work around authority and trust.

Adaptive challenge example: improving learner attendance in FE

In a second illustrative example, an FE college finds that learner attendance remains uneven despite reminder messages and staff training on the register system.

Tutors, support teams and managers interpret the problem differently. Some favour firmer expectations; others highlight transport, caring responsibilities, employment or learners' experiences of college. Learner feedback suggests that several factors interact.

The technical work still matters: check register accuracy, make support routes clear and follow safeguarding procedures. However, buying another reporting tool will not necessarily resolve disagreements about responsibility or how the college responds to absence.

An adaptive approach could involve:

1. Defining a focused question: what prevents learners on two selected courses from attending consistently, and which factors can the college influence?
2. Gathering different perspectives: include learners, teaching staff, support teams and relevant employers rather than relying on the loudest view.
3. Making trade-offs explicit: discuss staff workload, fairness, flexibility and consistent expectations.
4. Testing a bounded change: trial revised contact arrangements or earlier support conversations for a defined period.
5. Reviewing evidence: consider attendance, learner feedback, staff workload and unintended effects before extending the trial.

This is not a claim that adaptive leadership will solve attendance problems. Some barriers require funding, external services or decisions beyond the team's authority. Its value is in helping the college examine assumptions and learn, rather than repeatedly applying a solution that does not address the problem.

Within the trial, situational leadership remains useful: a tutor conducting unfamiliar support conversations may need modelling and feedback, while an experienced colleague needs greater autonomy.

Limitations and common misunderstandings

Neither framework guarantees results

Both approaches can structure thinking, but a recognisable model is not proof that a particular intervention will work. Academic discussion has identified conceptual and evidential limitations in situational leadership, including in Claude Graeff's critical review of its development.

Use frameworks alongside professional judgement, employee feedback and observable outcomes. Avoid treating a style assessment as a precise measurement of another person.

Support cannot compensate for an impossible workload

An employee struggling with excessive demands may not need more motivation or closer supervision. Check capacity, priorities, accessibility and resources before diagnosing an individual development need.

Similarly, adaptive language should not disguise a decision to transfer responsibility to staff without giving them time or authority to act.

Learning needs boundaries and psychological safety

Inviting people to challenge established practices is risky if disagreement attracts blame. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety and learning behaviour in teams provides relevant evidence about the conditions that support team learning, rather than direct validation of adaptive leadership itself.

Set clear expectations for respectful challenge. Keep safeguarding, health and safety, employment obligations and other non-negotiable requirements outside informal experimentation. Where immediate protective action is needed, take it first.

Your next step

Choose one current challenge and write down three things: what is already known, what people need help doing, and what remains genuinely contested or uncertain.

Use situational leadership to tailor support for defined tasks. Use adaptive leadership where progress requires shared learning and changes in established ways of working. Where both apply, name the two strands and plan for each.

Then agree one proportionate action, one way to assess progress and a review date. The aim is not to select a leadership identity, but to give the problem and the people the response they need.

Sources and further reading

• Heifetz and Laurie: The work of leadership. A foundational explanation of adaptive work and the distinction from technical problems.
• Center for Leadership Studies: Situational Leadership. The model provider's explanation of its framework, rather than independent evidence of effectiveness.
• Graeff: Evolution of situational leadership theory: A critical review. Academic examination of the theory's development and limitations.
• Edmondson: Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Research relevant to creating conditions for collective learning.