The authors give three steps: decide which areas of the person's or group's work are to be influenced (a salesperson has sales, paperwork, service and team development); determine the readiness (ability and willingness) in each area; and choose the matching style for each area (R1 to S1, R2 to S2, R3 to S3, R4 to S4), read off the curve by a perpendicular from the readiness point. The match need not be exact: the probability of success falls off slowly near the best combination and faster further away, and the model ranks the alternatives (for R1, S2 second and S3 third; for R2 and R3 the two adjacent styles second; for R4, S3 second and S2 third; the opposite corner lowest). A leader may use one style with the group and different styles one-to-one with its members. SLII names the two mismatches oversupervision (S1 or S2 with a D3 or D4) and undersupervision (S3 or S4 with a D1 or D2).
The graph holds this control, the 0 it maps to, and the evidence behind each claim, over MCP and REST.