As part of my Master’s Degree I wrote a thesis on some research I did. You can download it if you want. It’s about Situational Leadership, which is an interesting old-school model for management and one connected to many similar models that have shared origins in time and concept. I wrote up a basic explanation of Situational Leadership over at this page, if you’re interested. I’d like to write up what I learned in an essay format in some way, and this is the beginning of that effort.

These two-factor theories of management from which Situational Leadership emerged have lost some luster in recent decades as models such as Transformational Leadership have come into favor, but I find them to still be useful. I’m also interested in learning and thinking a little bit more about how the various models relate to one another. I’m going to try to write about that too, and this post is also the home for that writing I intend to do.

I’ve done a training at work in the past where I try to expand the concept of management/leadership slowly from a singularity of authority into a binary of democratic or authoritative, and then into a spectrum of the two, and then into two spectrums which form a grid. It’s not a true history of these models emerged, but it is a convenient way I’ve come to understand the 2-factor models. I’m trying to distill this idea into a slide-show to post to LinkedIn at the moment (early 2024), but am finding it requires too many words to make a compelling slide show so far.