Body of Knowledge · Glossary
Situational leadership
Adjusting leadership style (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) to a person's competence and confidence on the task at hand. The style follows the task, whatever the person's title.
Where the standard develops it
- PL-1Delegation, ownership, and decision rightsMatching scope to capability, making authority explicit, not taking work back.
Related terms
- Decision rights
- The explicit statement of who may decide what, and at which level of authority.
- Delegation brief
- The written form of a delegation for anything larger than a day's work: outcome, constraints, authority level, who else is involved, and when the work is next reviewed together.
- Intent-based leadership
- Replacing "may I…" with "I intend to…".
- Managerial leverage
- Grove's framing that a manager's output is the output of the organisation under them, and that activities differ in how much output they produce per hour spent.
- One-way door
- A decision that is hard to reverse and so deserves deliberation and senior involvement.
- Reaching around
- A leader of managers overriding a manager's decisions with that manager's own engineers, fixing their team's problems directly, or letting their escalations become the leader's workload.
- Rescuing
- Stepping in with the solution the moment someone struggles.
- Task-relevant maturity
- How much direction a person needs on a specific kind of work, set by their experience with that work and not by their general seniority.
Cite this definition
Chicago, BibTeX and licence →Engineering Management Academy. (2026). Situational leadership. In Engineering Management Academy Body of Knowledge (Version 3.1, GLO.situational-leadership). https://www.engineeringmanagement.academy/body-of-knowledge/glossary/situational-leadership