📘 Keep leadership from meaning pep talk

What you’ll learn

1. Reading the Situation: Diagnosis Before ActionDiagnose a real leadership situation by assessing follower readiness and your own emotional state before choosing how to act.A practicum begins with diagnosis, not action. Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership Model holds that effective leadership is task-relevant: the leader reads a follower's readiness — ability plus willingness — for a specific task before choosing a style. Goleman's 1998 HBR essay adds self-awareness as the instrument that keeps that read from being a projection. You select one real situation and gather the evidence to characterize it.
2. Building Influence: Vision and the Four I'sApply the four components of transformational leadership to design how you will build genuine influence in your chosen situation.Diagnosis tells you where people are; influence moves them. Bass described four transformational behaviors — idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration — and argued they augment a transactional foundation rather than replace it. You draft a short, honest vision and one action for each I, tailored to the person you diagnosed.
3. Leading the Conversation: Coaching, Goals, and FeedbackUse the GROW model, Doran's SMART criteria, and CCL's SBI/SBII tools to plan a concrete leadership conversation for your situation.Influence becomes real in conversations. Whitmore's GROW (Goal, Reality, Options, Will) structures a coaching dialogue; Will means commitment, not wrap-up. Doran's 1981 SMART named the owner as Assignable. CCL's SBI keeps feedback on observed behavior; SBII adds asking about intent. You script the conversation you intend to have.
4. Capstone: Build Your Leadership Practicum Action PlanAssemble your diagnosis, influence plan, and conversation script into a single Leadership Action Plan and define how you will evaluate it.You integrate the three components produced across the practicum — situational diagnosis, transformational influence plan, and GROW/SMART/SBI script — then add reflection and measurement so the plan can be tested. The result is a plan you could execute this week, with explicit success criteria and a way to learn from the outcome.

Grounded in trusted sources

• There's a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management's goals and objectives — Management Review 70(11), November 1981 (George T. Doran)
• What Makes a Leader? — Harvard Business Review / PubMed (Daniel Goleman, 1998)
• What Makes a Leader? (2004 reprint) — Harvard Business Review
• Use Situation-Behavior-Impact (SBI) to Understand Intent — Center for Creative Leadership
• The GROW Model: Goals, Reality, Options and Will — Performance Consultants (Whitmore)
• Transformational Leadership, Transactional Contingent Reward, and Organizational Identification — Frontiers in Psychology / PMC (Xenikou, 2017) — Bass augmentation hypothesis
• The 4 I's of Transformational Leadership — Michigan State University
• Paul Hersey and Kenneth H. Blanchard, Management of Organizational Behavior (Prentice Hall) — origin of Situational Leadership, R1–R4 and telling/selling/participating/delegating.

Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.

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