Situational Leadership Theory

Good theories are like good chai — strong, simple, and best shared. Situational Leadership Theory qualifies.

What the theory says, finally, is that people are predictable in their unpredictability. That is useful knowledge. It lets you forgive more and be surprised less.

The idea is simple, and like most simple ideas it is easy to nod at and hard to use. The nod is free. The use costs attention, every day, in small change.

Consider the wedding caterer. Fifty dishes, three hundred guests, one small kitchen. He does not motivate his crew with speeches; he sequences the work so that nobody is ever waiting on anybody.

An organisation is only a group of people who have agreed, for now, to pull in roughly the same direction. Print it on a card if you like. Better: print it on a habit.