“Consistency of character is essential. Consistency of style is a trap.” — Steven Bartlett
Leadership development has long emphasised consistency. Be consistent in your values. Be consistent in your expectations. Be consistent in how you treat people. This advice contains important truth — and an important misunderstanding.
Consistency in values and character is essential. Your team must be able to trust that your word means what it says, that your values are non-negotiable, and that you will behave according to clear principles.
Consistency in style — in how you manage, communicate, and engage with every individual in every situation — is not just unhelpful. It actively undermines your effectiveness.
Steven Bartlett’s law: You must be an inconsistent leader. The best leaders adapt their style fluidly to the individual and the situation, rather than applying one approach regardless of context.
Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership model was one of the first formal frameworks to recognise that effective leadership is not a fixed style but a dynamic response to the maturity and motivation of each team member. A new hire needs different guidance than a ten-year veteran. A confident team member needs different engagement than an anxious one. The leader who responds to all of these the same way is consistently suboptimal.
Bartlett describes the effective leader as operating in multiple modes, deployed as the situation demands:
1. Empathetic and supportive: When a team member is struggling, overwhelmed, or going through difficulty, the leader needs to be emotionally present, understanding, and supportive. Demanding performance in this moment creates defensiveness and closes down.
2. Challenging and demanding: When a team member is capable but coasting, performing below their potential, or needs to be stretched, the leader needs to create productive discomfort. Empathy in this moment enables underperformance.
3. Coaching and questioning: When a team member has the capability to solve a problem but needs to develop their own thinking, the leader asks rather than tells. Providing the answer in this moment robs them of the growth.
4. Directing and deciding: When speed is critical, ambiguity is harmful, or the stakes are high enough to require the leader’s specific judgement, the leader takes charge and is clear. Coaching in this moment wastes time and creates confusion.
Adapt your leadership style to the individual and the situation. The mode that serves one person in one context actively undermines another person in another context. Rigidity of style is a failure to lead.
The starting point of situational leadership is genuine interest in and understanding of each individual team member. Different people have different:
The leader who invests time in understanding each individual — through curiosity, observation, and genuine relationship — is equipped to deploy the right style in the right moment.
For each person on your team, map:
Inconsistent leadership — in Bartlett’s sense — requires high emotional intelligence: the ability to read emotional states, understand motivations, manage your own reactions, and deploy different responses without triggering defensiveness or confusion.
This is the advanced skill that separates great leaders from technically competent ones. Anyone can master a single leadership style. The ability to read the room, the person, and the moment — and respond in whatever way best serves them — is what makes leadership transformational rather than merely managerial.