Mis and Match (Blanchard)

Blanchard’s situational leadership model of combining supporting and directing behaviors by using a telling (directing), selling (coaching), participating (supporting), or delegating leadership style depending on the followers’ task maturity and psychological maturity, is the model that will be discussed in this post. By matching the appropriate style to the situation of the followers, it is supposed to create positive leader and follower instances where mismatching causes a negative instance. For example, at my Westin job as a banquet server I am relatively new but have experience in F&B, so I have low/medium task maturity. However, because I have the willingness to learn and do well I have a high physiological maturity. Putting two and two together, the banquet captains have notice this and have taken on more of a selling or coaching style of leading me, which is high in both supporting and directing. This is effective in the directive part because I need direction and having someone telling me what to do because I do not know the job well enough to figure everything out on my own. And it is effective in the supporting part, because once they teach me and tell me what to do, they let loose on the reigns a bit and trust me to get my job done. On the other hand, at my other job at SDSU as a caterer, where I have been a caterer for almost two years, they are still micromanaging me and it’s frustrating. They do not like it when we take initiative and rather have us follow every single thing they tell us. This mismatch of them using the telling/directing style when we have high task maturity and high psychological maturity causes those of us who have been there a long time to become frustrated and annoyed. Mismatching the type of leadership can really hurt relationships and create a negative atmosphere.