Millions of managers know the power of Situational Leadership in helping individual employees with direction or support when they most need it.

Yet the usefulness of Situational Leadership is not limited to managing others and understanding organizational needs. Many people have found it useful for working with others, including peers. Employees use it to “manage up.”

Situational Leadership II that I developed with my colleagues Don Carew, Eunice Parisi Carew, and Fred Finch, is one of the leading management theories of our time. The theory is an outgrowth of the earlier model I developed with Paul Hersey.

In a nutshell, Situational Leadership states that the best style of leadership is a function of the development level of the person for the specific task on which he or she is being supervised. A manager who wants to be effective should provide direction (what exactly needs to be done, how to do it, etc.) and support (listening, praise, encouragement, etc.) when the person most needs each.

Depending upon the individual’s level of competence and commitment, the manager should use one of four combinations of direction and support: Directing (high direction, low support), Coaching (moderate direction, increasing support), Supporting (low direction, high support), and Delegating (low direction, low support). Using Situational Leadership, the manager is able to help employees develop to their fullest potential-while getting the needed work completed.

As a peer-coaching model, you can use Situational Leadership to help co-workers think through their actions and options for action. When a colleague discusses a problem he is having at work, you can use Situational Leadership II to guide him toward a workable solution. You can help to identify likely objections and ramifications of different courses of action. By asking questions and offering constructive feedback and suggestions, you are subtly giving direction and guidance.

Employees can also use Situational Leadership to “manage up.” They assess their own level of development and needs and develop a plan to get those needs met in the organization. They might ask their manager to review a plan and give suggestions, or request the additional resources needed to make the plan a reality. An administrative assistant in my company recently used the Situational Leadership II model to evaluate her manager’s likely perspective on an issue… and how to convince him to change his position.

Using Situational Leadership II, employees can solicit the type of support they need to do what is expected of them. They can coach their manager when and how to give praise: “I need you to tell me when you think I’ve done a good job, so I will be better able to see what you want and expect.”

We all know that empowerment doesn’t just magically happen, yet much of the literature on employee empowerment seems to take specifics of “how to empower employees” for granted. For empowerment to occur, employees need to become both competent and committed, have relevant information, and have the opportunity to perform.

Competence comes from the help of their managers, and/or with the help of their co-workers. Increasingly the expectation is that employees will be self-starters, taking the initiative necessary for their own development and obtaining help from whomever they have contact with in the organization.

As the work force shifts to being more self-directed and autonomous, individuals will need to increasingly play roles that their managers played in the past. Thus, everyone in an organization will be responsible for helping provide for each other’s needs, whether those needs are of an employee, team member, colleague or boss. The role of leadership will be shaped both by the circumstances of the individual and by the needs of the business.