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    The Right Gear: Why Situational Leadership Training Fails — and How Practice Fixes It

    Bernhard KerresMarch 28, 20269 min read
    The Right Gear: Why Situational Leadership Training Fails — and How Practice Fixes It

    Everyone knows the Situational Leadership model. Almost nobody can do it in real time.

    Hersey and Blanchard's framework is one of the most widely taught models in corporate leadership development. The idea is elegantly simple: there is no single best leadership style. Instead, effective leaders diagnose where their direct report is on a specific task — assessing both competence and commitment — and adapt their approach accordingly. A beginner needs clear direction. A frustrated learner needs coaching. A capable but cautious performer needs support. A self-reliant achiever needs you to get out of the way.

    Most managers can recite these four quadrants after a one-day workshop. Very few can execute the right style when a real person is sitting across from them, sending mixed signals.

    That gap between knowing and doing is exactly what we built "The Right Gear" to close.

    The model: simple to learn, hard to execute

    Situational Leadership, first proposed by Hersey and Blanchard in 1969 and later refined into Blanchard's SLII framework, rests on a two-by-two: plot a person's competence (can they do this?) against their commitment (do they want to, and do they believe they can?), and you get four development levels. Each level maps to a leadership style defined by the balance of directive behavior (providing structure) and supportive behavior (providing encouragement).

    D1, the Enthusiastic Beginner — low competence, high commitment — needs S1, Directing: high structure, low support. They're excited but clueless. Tell them what to do.

    D2, the Disillusioned Learner — some competence, low commitment — needs S2, Coaching: high structure AND high support. They've hit the difficulty curve. They need both a plan and someone who acknowledges how hard this is. This is the hardest style to execute because it demands both dimensions simultaneously.

    D3, the Capable but Cautious performer — high competence, variable commitment — needs S3, Supporting: low structure, high support. They can do the job. They just need confidence and obstacle removal, not a playbook.

    D4, the Self-Reliant Achiever — high competence, high commitment — needs S4, Delegating: low structure, low support. Get out of the way. Invest in them as a person, not a project.

    The matching principle is intuitive. The problem is that real people don't wear labels.

    The honest critique: what the research actually says

    It would be dishonest to present Situational Leadership as settled science. The model's empirical track record is mixed. Graeff's 1983 review in the Academy of Management Review raised fundamental questions about whether the specific style-matching prescriptions actually predict outcomes. Thompson and Vecchio's 2009 study in The Leadership Quarterly tested three versions of the theory and found limited support for the matching hypothesis as strictly defined.

    So why do we use it?

    Because the model's practical value doesn't depend on the precise mechanics of the 2x2 grid. What makes it useful — and what decades of leadership development experience confirms — is that it forces managers to do two things they otherwise don't: diagnose before acting, and differentiate between people. Most managers have a default style. They direct everyone, or they empower everyone, or they support everyone. The model's real contribution is making that default visible and giving people a language for adapting.

    The critique sharpens the design. We don't grade participants on whether they correctly label someone "D2." We grade them on whether their behavior — what they actually said and did — matched what the person in front of them needed. The model is the scaffolding. The behavior is what matters.

    Where training breaks down

    Here's what typically happens in a Situational Leadership workshop: participants learn the model, discuss some case studies, maybe do a short role play with a colleague, and go back to their desks. Within two weeks, they're back to their default style.

    This isn't a failure of the model. It's a failure of the training method.

    Research by Costello, Pennycook, and Rand, published in Science in 2024, demonstrated that practice-based dialogue produces durable behavioral change where passive information consumption does not. Their study showed that conversational practice — not reading, not lectures, not even discussion — is what actually shifts how people behave in subsequent real-world interactions.

    This finding is the core of what we do at RolePlays.ai. We don't teach frameworks. We create situations where you have to use them — with AI-powered personas that respond to your actual behavior in real time.

    How we built "The Right Gear"

    The scenario puts you in the role of an Area Manager at Banyan Coffee Co., a specialty coffee chain headquartered in Singapore. You have four stores and four direct reports. Today is your biweekly 1:1 cycle. Each conversation is a regular check-in — not a crisis, not a review. Just the kind of conversation where real leadership happens.

    Each direct report is at a different development level. Each one is designed with a diagnostic trap — a plausible reason you might misread them and apply the wrong style.

    The barista who just became a manager. He's 24, a latte art champion, full of ideas and energy. He sounds like a D4 — confident, articulate, forward-thinking. But on the leadership task, he's a D1 who has never managed a roster, handled a conflict, or run a P&L. He changed the schedule without consulting his team three days ago and two senior baristas are furious. If you empower him, he feels great and learns nothing. If you provide the structure he actually needs, you might save him from a crisis he doesn't yet see coming.

    The store manager who's drowning. She was a star at her previous location. Now she's running the flagship store and working until midnight because she doesn't trust her team to handle the closing routine. She opens with frustration that sounds like insubordination or burnout. If you crack down, she complies emptily. If you back off, she feels abandoned. She needs both direction and empathy — at the same time. That's S2, and it's the style most managers get wrong.

    The consistent performer who's hesitating. She's been asked to pilot a new sustainability initiative. She's clearly capable — her track record proves it. But she's asking questions that sound like she needs step-by-step guidance. She doesn't. She's testing whether the organization is actually serious about this initiative, or whether it's PR for the PE exit. If you start directing her, she'll comply and disengage. If you explore why she's cautious, you'll find the real issue.

    The veteran who has everything under control. His store is the top performer in the region. He's managing through a renovation with 40% less seating and his numbers are actually up. He mentions the challenges in past tense — he's informing you, not asking for help. If you jump into problem-solving mode, he'll politely shut you down. The real conversation he needs is about his future. And if you don't have it, you'll never know that a competitor just offered him a District Manager role.

    What makes it different from a case study

    Three things.

    First, the personas respond to your actual behavior. If you provide empathy to the drowning store manager without any concrete structure, she gets shorter and more cynical — not because of a script, but because the AI tracks whether you're giving her what she needs. If you start directing the veteran on things he's already solved, he politely closes down and the conversation stays shallow. You feel the mismatch in real time, the way you would with a real person.

    Second, each persona has hidden depths that only emerge if you lead well. The barista's scheduling conflict, the store manager's midnight hours, the pilot leader's greenwashing concern, the veteran's competitor offer — these aren't mentioned in the briefing. They surface through the conversation, or they don't. The quality of your leadership determines what you learn about your people.

    Third, you get graded on behavior, not knowledge. The automated feedback doesn't ask whether you can label someone D2. It assesses whether you diagnosed the development level correctly through your questions, whether your directive and supportive behaviors were at the right levels, and whether you adapted when new information appeared. It tells you what you did well, where you missed, and what the persona needed that they didn't get.

    Try it free in April

    "The Right Gear" is available for free on RolePlays.ai throughout April 2026. No commitment, no credit card. Four conversations, about 20 minutes each. You'll get automated feedback after every conversation that tells you exactly how your leadership style matched — or didn't match — what the person in front of you needed.

    If you've done Situational Leadership training before, this will show you whether you can actually do it under pressure. If you haven't, the scenario includes a framework briefing that gives you everything you need to get started.

    The skill isn't knowing the model. The skill is reading the person, matching your approach, and shifting gears when the conversation takes a turn you didn't expect.

    Try "The Right Gear" free on RolePlays.ai →

    References

    Blanchard, K. H. (2010). Leading at a higher level: Blanchard on leadership and creating high performing organizations (2nd ed.). FT Press.

    Costello, T. H., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. G. (2024). Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science, 385(6714), 1222–1228. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq1814

    Graeff, C. L. (1983). The Situational Leadership Theory: A critical view. Academy of Management Review, 8(2), 285–291. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.1983.4284738

    Hersey, P., & Blanchard, K. H. (1969). Life cycle theory of leadership. Training & Development Journal, 23(5), 26–34.

    Shaikh, O., Valentine, L., Rees, E., Rostami, R., Bernstein, M. S., & Landay, J. A. (2024). Rehearsal: Simulating conflict to teach conflict resolution. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642159

    Thompson, G., & Vecchio, R. P. (2009). Situational Leadership Theory: A test of three versions. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(5), 837–848. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2009.06.014