Good morning. Your best person is a beginner again. All it took was a task they haven't done before.
Leadership.
The Readiness Match
Take the three pieces of work you handed out on Monday and say, for each one, whether that person can actually do this particular thing and whether they actually want to. Now say where your grip came from. It wasn't those two answers, was it — it was an impression of them you formed last year and have never revisited.
In 1969 Paul Hersey and Kenneth Blanchard, then colleagues at Ohio University, published 'Life Cycle Theory of Leadership' in the Training and Development Journal. It was a rebuke to a decade of research hunting for the one best leadership style. There isn't one, they argued. There are four, and the right one depends on where the person sits on the task actually in front of them — what the 1969 paper called maturity, and what the later revisions relabelled readiness: how able they are at this particular thing, and how willing. The four came to be called telling, selling, participating and delegating. Low ability with low willingness needs telling, which means structure, specifics and close supervision. Low ability with high willingness needs selling: still directive, but the reasoning travels with the instruction, because the enthusiasm is real and only the skill is missing. High ability with uncertain commitment needs participating, so leave the method alone and stay close to the person. High on both needs delegating, which mostly means leaving. The empirical support has always been thinner than the theory's fame, so don't carry the four boxes around as a diagnosis you defend. Carry the two questions instead, and put them to yourself before every handover — because the error the model really corrects is the one nearly every manager makes: choosing a grip once, as a personal style, then applying it to work that changes every week.
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