Why doesn’t one management style fit every team?
Hersey and Blanchard published situational leadership in 1969. The idea: different teams need different things from you. Apply the wrong style and you either micromanage people who don’t need it or abandon people who do.
Most PMs pick one style and apply it everywhere. It’s the single most preventable source of friction in product delivery.
The Styles, Simply
Two dimensions: how much direction you give (telling people what to do) and how much support you give (listening, encouraging, involving them).
A new team facing an unfamiliar problem needs high direction and low support. Tell them what to do. They need clarity, not options.
A team that’s capable but shaky needs high direction and high support. Give them the plan and explain why. They need confidence, not just instructions.
A capable but unmotivated team needs low direction and high support. They don’t need you to tell them how. They need you to listen and reconnect them to purpose.
A team that’s capable, confident, and motivated? Get out of the way. Provide context and remove blockers. Trust them.
The Failures Are Predictable
The PM who micromanages a senior team that’s shipped together for years. Autonomy is zero. The team resents it.
The PM who delegates to a brand-new team and calls it trust. “They’re smart, they’ll figure it out.” They won’t. That’s abandonment.
The PM who keeps prescribing solutions to a team that needs support, not direction. The team feels unheard. The PM feels unappreciated.
How to Diagnose
Three questions before any new team or engagement:
Can this team do the work? Have they shipped something similar? If yes, direction drops.
Do they believe they can? A team can be competent but shaken (new leadership, a recent failure, an unfamiliar domain).
Are they motivated to do this specific work? A capable team might be checked out on this initiative. That’s not a delegation scenario.
Consider the two ends of the spectrum. A team inheriting chaos, behind schedule, with no consistent sprint goals and stakeholders pulling in different directions: the capability exists but the system is broken. High direction is the right call. Rebuild the backlog, enforce sprint goals, make tradeoffs explicit. You don’t write their code. You create the conditions where their competence can ship.
The opposite end: an experienced org with project leads who know their domains. High direction reads as micromanagement. The right call is influence: pilot the change, show results, let the teams adopt it themselves. It takes longer and it sticks because they own it.
Same leader, different styles. The skill isn’t picking a style. It’s diagnosing the team and adapting.
Most PMs never ask which style their teams need. Their teams are already paying for it. Run the three questions on your next engagement and let the answers pick the style. s@spencervaradi.com.