> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.cmoalliance.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Situational leadership has a blind spot, and it's you - URL: https://www.cmoalliance.com/situational-leadership-has-a-blind-spot-and-its-you/ - Published: 2026-09-14T09:33:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-14T09:33:11.000Z - Description: Situational leadership teaches you to read others. It rarely teaches you to read yourself...and that gap is where most of the real work happens. - Author: Felicitas Sommer - Tags: Leadership, Team management, Articles The first time someone told me I was too harsh, I genuinely didn't understand the feedback. I had been clear. I had been direct. I had said the thing that needed saying without wrapping it in three layers of padding. Where I come from, that is a form of respect. You assume the other person is a competent adult who would rather hear the truth than be managed around it. What I heard as respect, they had heard as cold. That gap is where I have spent most of the last few years, and I still haven't fully closed it. I lead a team spread across several countries and cultures, in more than one language. I've also lived in five countries myself, which I used to think had taught me how to read them. And the lesson I keep relearning is not the one the leadership books prepared me for. ## **The model I believed in** The books gave me situational leadership, and it is genuinely useful. The idea is simple: you don't lead everyone the same way. Some people, in some moments, need you to be directive, to just tell them what the next step is. Others need coaching, questions rather than answers. Others need you to get out of the way entirely and let them run. The skill is reading which person, in which moment, needs which thing, and adjusting yourself accordingly. I believed in that model. I still do. But it has a blind spot, and the blind spot is *you*. Situational [leadership](https://www.cmoalliance.com/leadership-skills-you-should-develop-to-enter-the-c-suite/) quietly assumes you are a neutral instrument, dialling your style up and down at will. It doesn't account for the fact that you arrive in the room already set to defaults you didn't choose, and that you mistake those defaults for neutral because they're simply how the world has always felt from the inside. Mine run toward directness and speed. That's my resting state, not a setting I select for the occasion. And nothing about it is neutral. In one setting it reads as clarity and respect. In another, it reads as impatience, or coldness, or a lack of care for the person in front of you. Same words. Opposite message. So before you can read what the other person needs, you have to know what you are transmitting when you think you're transmitting nothing at all. That turned out to be the harder skill, and I'm still not sure I've mastered it. [A marketing leader’s guide to working with salesBroken handoffs aren’t the real problem between marketing and sales, broken trust is. A marketing leader’s playbook for the first 90 days and beyond.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192--1--fa64d895-ccee-4438-929a-07df917559fe.png)CMO AllianceFelicitas Sommer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/thumbnail/relationship-strategy------Felicitas-Sommer-----PriceHubble-2a7e4101-33e5-43c7-856c-f0f2c6c65b43.png)](https://www.cmoalliance.com/the-relationship-is-the-strategy-a-marketing-leaders-guide-to-working-with-sales/) ## **What I'm practising, imperfectly** Here's what I've learned to watch for, offered as things I try to do rather than things I've perfected. ### Treating silence as a question I assume my read of a situation is incomplete. When someone goes quiet, I used to fill the silence with my own interpretation, usually that we were aligned and could move on. I've learned that silence carries different meaning for different people. Sometimes it's agreement. Sometimes it's disagreement that the person doesn't feel able to voice directly to a manager. I try now to treat silence as a question rather than an answer. ### Intention isn't reception I check how something landed instead of trusting how I meant it. This is the discipline that goes most against my instinct. My instinct is that if I said it clearly, my job is done. But intention and reception are two different events, and they come apart more often than they stay together. So I ask more than feels natural to me. Did that come across the way I hoped? Is there something you're not saying? It feels slightly clumsy every time. I do it anyway. ### Person first, category second I try to separate the person from the pattern. It's tempting, when you lead across cultures, to build a little private taxonomy in your head: this kind of person is indirect, that one needs warming up, this one wants the headline first. Some of that carries a grain of truth, but the moment you lead the type instead of the person, you've stopped actually seeing them. Every one of my people is an individual first and a category a distant second. The generalisation is a starting hypothesis, never a conclusion. ### Losing the momentum on purpose And I slowed down. Directness has a pace to it, a certain momentum, and that momentum is exactly what flattens nuance. Leading across differences has forced a deliberateness on me that I would otherwise have skipped entirely. I check in more. I move a beat slower. Early on I resented that as friction. Now I think it might be the most valuable thing the whole experience has taught me, because it made me a more careful reader of people generally. [Marketing a SaaS product that refuses to stand stillA campaign goes live on Monday. By Thursday, the product has already changed. Here’s how great marketing leaders maintain strong messaging.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192--1--d37d6f42-95f7-4135-a01e-88e8f57ba932.png)CMO AllianceFelicitas Sommer![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/thumbnail/Marketing-a-SaaS-product-that-refuses-to-stand-still-----Felicitas-Sommer--PriceHubble-1-fbdf59e1-ba70-4696-8cd6-37beb8357690.png)](https://www.cmoalliance.com/marketing-a-saas-product-that-refuses-to-stand-still/) ## **The stranger part** There is a stranger, more personal thing underneath all of this, and I'm still deciding how I feel about it. Somewhere in the years of adjusting, I noticed I'm not quite the same person in English as I am in my first language, German. German is more measured, more reserved, a little more careful about showing too much. In English I am more enthusiastic, more openly warm. I'll tell someone "I love it" as feedback without thinking twice; in German that sentence would never leave my mouth. Neither is a performance exactly. Both are me. But they are different mes, and leading across languages means spending a great deal of my working life as a slightly translated version of myself. I used to experience that as a loss, a sense of leading at a small remove from my own personality. I'm coming round to a different view. Maybe having to consciously choose how I show up, rather than defaulting to a setting I never questioned, has made me more intentional as a leader than I would ever have been if everyone around me simply shared my instincts. The friction isn't the tax on the work. It might be the point of it. I haven't resolved this. I don't have a clean framework to hand you, and I'm wary of anyone who claims one, because the entire lesson here is that the clean framework is exactly what misses the person in front of you. What I have instead is a set of habits I'm still practising, imperfectly, and a working belief that leading well across differences starts not with learning to read everyone else, but with finally noticing yourself. [SMART template | Slide deck downloadSet smarter goals, stay on track, and achieve more with this simple yet powerful framework.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/icon/android-chrome-192x192--1--644dae29-75b2-4f03-9ea7-1a0a246243b1.png)CMO AllianceAmelia Wilson![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ff/09/ff09ec2c-5937-45c2-bd7e-bcc809b43924/content/images/thumbnail/SMART-template-18ed6787-16a0-4a28-9cc0-1c1df9bc0c19.png)](https://www.cmoalliance.com/smart-template-framework/)