Stop leading everyone the same way — learn to match your direction and support to the person in front of you. Build the professional judgement to apply this capability confidently in consequential management and leadership decisions.
Meet the course lead and explore the practical focus, learning experience, and professional value of this course.
Enroll in this course →Plenty of managers can name the four leadership styles. Far fewer can look at a specific person and reliably choose the one that will help
Most of us lead the way we would like to be led, and apply that one approach to everyone. It works with some people and quietly fails with others — the confident expert we supervise too closely disengages, the anxious beginner we leave alone flounders — and it is easy to conclude that the people who do not respond are the problem. The same leadership behavior produces opposite results depending on who receives it.
The gap is in the doing. Situational Leadership is among the most recognized ideas in management and among the most loosely applied. In practice it becomes a poster of a quadrant rather than a habit the leader can run on a real person: a style chosen from comfort rather than diagnosis, a development level guessed at rather than read from evidence, a plan to ‘manage people better’ that could never be checked. Work in that form changes nothing on Monday.
This course closes that gap by making you produce the artifact. Each lesson explains one part of the skill and shows it worked through on a running case — Rowan Meade and a team of four at Kestrel Support Co. — then hands the work to you on your own person and goal, with a model to check yourself against and a rubric that names what a strong plan contains. By the close you hold a partnering-for-performance plan: a specific goal, a development-level diagnosis backed by evidence, a matching style expressed in observable behaviors, and a date to review it.
Most leadership courses encourage you to discover one preferred style and apply it consistently. This course teaches a more demanding capability: diagnosing what a specific person needs for a specific task, then adjusting direction and support as competence and commitment change. You will build a practical leadership plan that fits the individual, the work and the moment instead of relying on habit.
You pick one real team member and one specific goal in the first lesson, and every lesson applies to them. The output is not a certificate of attendance but a finished partnering-for-performance plan for a relationship you are actually managing — something you can use the following Monday.
Situational Leadership is often reduced to a quadrant to memorize. Here every lesson works a specific move — reading direction and support, naming the four styles, diagnosing competence and commitment, matching style to level — on a running case and then on your own person, and the quality rubric your plan is measured against is published in the lessons, so the standard is visible from the start.
Situational Leadership is intuitive and widely used, but its research support is limited and mixed — strongest for newer team members, weaker at higher levels. The course teaches those documented findings directly, so you learn to use the model as a disciplined diagnostic heuristic rather than a formula that guarantees a result. Knowing where a tool stops is part of using it competently.
Every MMI course includes a course-specific interactive Practice Toolkit—original Monarch intellectual property developed by Monarch faculty to support its learning objectives. Use the toolkit to apply key concepts, practise professional judgement and produce work you can carry into practice.
Discover Monarch Practice Toolkits →You can tell directive behavior from supportive behavior, and read them as two independent dials rather than one slider You can name the four styles — Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating — and say what separates Coaching from Supporting You can diagnose a person's development level from D1 to D4 on a specific goal, reading competence and commitment as two things that move on different clocks
You will learn to tell directive behavior from supportive behavior, and read them as two independent dials rather than one slider. You will learn to name the four styles — Directing, Coaching, Supporting, Delegating — and say what separates Coaching from Supporting. You will learn to diagnose a person's development level from D1 to D4 on a specific goal, reading competence and commitment as two things that move on different clocks. You will learn to match the style to the level, and recognize oversupervision and undersupervision when you see them. You will learn to name your own default styles, identify the levels you are most likely to mismatch, and use the model as a disciplined heuristic with its evidence in view. You will learn to build a partnering-for-performance plan with the person: an agreed goal, a jointly diagnosed level, a matched style in visible behaviors, and a dated review point.
Select credible trustworthiness measures and evidence, monitor performance and drift, prioritise treatment, and design escalation and incident-response actions.
Produce a prioritised, evidence-based AI risk response with monitoring and accountability.
Dean of Student Development
Dr. Donald York is Monarch’s leadership specialist, bringing applied experience from high-stakes healthcare environments to the study of leadership, organisational culture and group dynamics. His professional background includes critical-care work in Montreal operating rooms and emergency wards, where he held direct responsibility for patient life support, as well as extensive healthcare instruction and multiple professional certifications. A Fellow of the Heart & Stroke Foundation of Canada and Certified Management & Business Educator, he serves as Professor of Leadership Studies and Dean of Student Development, helping MMI participants translate leadership principles into credible action under real organisational pressure.
