Use contingency theory to assess how favorable or unfavorable your situation is and identify which factors you need to address to improve the situation. Fred Fiedler’s contingency theory tries to match leaders to posts in which they will be successful. It’s called contingency theory because it suggests that a leader’s effectiveness will be contingent upon…
Tag: Project Management
Situational Theory – Leadership Theories Series
Use situational theory with staff every time you give them a new task to perform. If you’ve ever been on a middle managers’ leadership course there is a good chance that you are familiar with Ken Blanchard’s and Paul Hersey’s situational leadership theory. It’s widely used by trainers and popular with managers because it provides…
Action Centered Leadership – Leadership Theories Series
Use action centered leadership to remind you that you have to continually balance the needs of the task, the team and the individual and that on occasions you will have to emphasize the needs of one over the other two. John Adair’s action centered leadership model contains elements of both style and contingency theory. He…
Leadership Grid – Leadership Theories Series
Use the leadership grid to confirm your preferred leadership style while recognizing that you can change your style as circumstances require. Blake and Mouton built upon basic style theory and produced their leadership grid. The grid identifies how much concern the leader has for getting the job done (task-centered) and for their staff (person-centered). They…
Basic Style Theory – Leadership Theories Series
Use basic style theory to identify your default leadership style: are you a task or person-oriented person? In the 1940s the University of Michigan suggested that leadership behavior could be described as either person or task oriented. Person oriented leaders are concerned with maintaining good relationships with staff and believe in a participative and democratic…
Trait Theory – Leadership Theories Series
Use trait theory to identify the key traits that you need to exhibit consistently if you wish to be considered a leader. The origins of trait theory are unknown but its purpose is simple. It tries to identify the innate characteristics that distinguish leaders from followers. Unfortunately, over a century of research has failed to reveal…
How to lead people, 12 leadership theories you should know and use
So why take advantage of leadership theories? The word lead means ‘to guide on a way by going in advance’ (Longman New Universal Dictionary). So its safe to say that leading involves taking someone on a journey from their current position to somewhere else. The journey can be physical as when Moses led the Israelites…
21 Interesting Project Management Tools 2016
Thanks to some outstanding project management tools out there handling your project has never been easier. Whether you are nibbling away at a personal project by yourself, managing a small project team or working on a full portfolio, you now have access to a wide range of products and services that will cater to your…
5 Project Planning Tools You Should Use
I have decided to make a quick list of project planning tools that can help you during the planning stage of a project. Gantt Chart, WBS (Work breakdown structure), PBS (Product Breakdown Structure), PERT chart or Logic Network are some of the most important ones. So let’s take a look at each of them. Project…
8 Best Team Building Methods Series – Wheelan and Locke Methods
This article is the last part of a 4 segments series on best team building methods. If you have found this article through search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) I would recommend you start by reading the head piece of the series – The 8 best team building methods – to get an overall view…