Ken Blanchard summarizes the concept of situational leadership in another short narrative parable about the One Minute Manager. The idea is to provide management appropriate to the development of the individual in question based on context.

Situational leadership is a concept that I was introduced to by a friend of mine named Phil Gaudette. Phil is in the Air Force, and he had been through a situational leadership training session and recommended this book to me. We talked about the implications of situational leadership and the applicability of this concept, and I got a copy of the book for myself.

Like most Blanchard books, you can put this one away in about an hour while you eat a sandwich. What you cannot do is learn and implement the concepts in that amount of time.

Situational leadership is not a complicated concept, and with the overall model that you manage to comes an understanding of the pain of being a new employee or someone learning a new job.

What you will learn in this book:

• The four phases of performance on a job
• Most people never make it through all four phases
• The difference between direction, coaching, support, and delegating
• The appropriate times to use each approach (according to Blanchard)

The most powerful thing that I gleaned from this book is some methods and phrases to use with my employees which do not involve me barking orders at them every time one of them is presented with a challenge that they are not sure how to overcome. The coaching and support concepts, while perhaps a little too granular for application, do perform the quite hefty work of taking a black and white mind such as my own and presenting a grey-scale of management behavior between “What is your problem? Just do it!” and “You can handle that without me.”

I find the references to the One Minute Manager and the writing style of the book to be a bit tedious. Like many business books, these ideas are just as usable when given in a five slide presentation with bullets and charts instead of a 100 page book. But it is a fast read, and you won’t find yourself wishing you had the hour back as it will require that long to think about the concepts you read.

Grab a copy of Leadership and the One Minute Manager: Increasing Effectiveness Through Situational Leadership from Amazon.com!