Situational leadership as an individual contributor
How to build your leadership muscle while you grow as an engineer
One doesn’t need a leadership title (Manager, Director, CTO) to be a leader for their team. Engineers exhibit leadership traits when organizing and coaching their teammates and cross-functional partners. Therefore, it might be worth it to spend a bit of time internalizing a fundamental leadership model by the name of Situational Leadership Model. Building your leadership muscle can help you become more valuable to your team and organization and ultimately lead to a very fulfilling career.
What is Situational Leadership?
The key concept of situation leadership is that you need to adapt your leadership technique to the person and task at hand. In other words, how you work with someone should change based on who they are and what they are working on. Sounds simple enough but let’s look at things in more detail.
4 Styles of Situational Leadership
The four styles of situational leadership are an outcome of the interplay between directive behavior and supportive behavior. Directive behavior refers to the degree to which you tell your team members exactly what to do, and how to do it. Supportive behavior refers to working with your team mates behind the scenes in helping answer their questions, communicating with them but allowing them to take charge of the situation.
Situational Leadership in Practice
Let’s take a look at each of these 4 styles with some examples to understand better.
1. Directing
Say you just hired a fresh college graduate into your team, who has very little experience working in a professional setting. They likely don’t have much experience setting up local development environments and so they come to you with questions. At this point the best way to lead them is to tell them exactly what to do and how to do it. Trying to give them too much supportive context might actually lead to information overload as setting up a dev env is likely one of many things they are just starting to learn.
2. Coaching
Coaching is a style of leadership where you are still being fairly directive but you are also supportive and communicating additional context at the same time. For example lets say you have an internal transfer into your team. This person’s former team was using the same Javascript framework that your team uses. However it was being used in a completely different product. So they understand Javascript well and the specific framework thats used in your team. But they have never worked on your product before. So you need to coach on the specifics of your codebase, how JS is used in the context of your product, etc.
3. Supporting
Supporting is also called participating. It’s when point blank directives are not required, but suggestive ideas and brainstorming might be useful means of helping your team mates. For example lets say you did a bunch of work on DB sharding in your last job. Now your team needs to shard a big table as the most capable person on the team is working on the project. They likely don’t need many directives, but a fruitful brainstorming session outlining your learnings in the past can be super helpful.
4. Delegating
This style is also called empowering. This style is where you can take a proper backseat and watch as your teammates shine. But you should still monitor progress and make adjustments if required. For instance lets say a junior engineer has proved herself on various small projects and has shown solid work ethic. For her first mid size projects you can delegate all decision making and implementation efforts. You can try to check-in at opportune times if required and offer time to brainstorm if called upon.
Flipping the model
Now you can also find yourself wanting help from others. Using this model can help you identify how you want to work with people on your team. If you are brand new to a technology and don’t know where to start, ask for help - you are likely in the “Directing” quadrant. If you are super new to something, but have a track record of success in projects before where you have had to pick up the technology from scratch - you are likely in “Coaching” quadrant - find a coach who can help at the given task. If you are well versed with something but you lack context or motivation as to why a particular task if asked of you - ask for a 1:1 to sort out those issues as you are likely in the “Supporting” quadrant. And finally if you are well versed and also motivated, then you’ve got it sorted out! In that case you can ask folks to back-off and let them delegate it all to you. Be sure to provide frequent updates regardless!