Adaptive Leadership
One thing is certain – change! But change doesn’t come at us in steady, easily digested, doses. The rate of change is ever changing as well. While the overall average trend may be that we will encounter faster and faster rates of change, the real disruptions will occur in huge step-changes. Like huge stone walls being hurled against all of our established plans and processes. These sorts of changes require adaptive leadership for organizations to survive and thrive.
The pandemic was one such disruption to our workplaces. Will A.I. be the next?
Leaders need to be thinking ahead, anticipating likely changes, and working to create resilience in their teams to cope with such disruption.
What is Adaptive Leadership?
Adaptive Leadership was described by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009) as the ability to anticipate changes and creating a work culture that enables team members to be prepared to weather and overcome the adversity.
Challenges requiring this sort of approach are named, appropriately, adaptive challenges, and are typified as being challenges where there are no experts in existence to tell you how to solve the problem. The challenge is truly unprecedented! (a way over-used term these days)
The leader therefore needs to prepare the team for this type of disruption and unprecedented need for creativity, by helping them become more resilient as well as more curious and open minded. Cultivating habits of life-long-learning, empathetic listening, and testing alternatives, are required.
How Do We Help Our Teams Be More Adaptive?
Adaptive Leadership overlaps heavily with the techniques of Servant Leadership. In fact, it seems from the various articles on the subject that a recipe to create an adaptive leadership style might be:
Combine 3 parts servant leadership with a strong flavor of empowerment, in a high-powered blender. Add gradually a healthy dose of managing diversity, encouraging constant learning at all levels, empathy, emotional intelligence, and a fail-fast risk taking philosophy. Bake in a trusted oven for as long as practicable. Serve hot if the audience is receptive, elsewise, cool rapidly.
Indeed, it seems the best approach to prepare our teams would be to follow the servant leader or empathetic leader handbook. Specifically we should;
1. Build organizational trust to create an empowered and engaged team.
This ensures that many people on the team will be watching for changes and looking for the best solutions independently – not waiting for centralized direction. Building Organizational Trust.
2. Encourage true life-long learning.
Creating curiosity will help anticipate, or spot early, the types of disruptions that will rock our world. Open mindedness will help us solicit many diverse perspectives and ideas to have a full array of potential responses to try. Life-Long Learning.
3. Promote a ‘fail-fast’ risk-taking environment.
Since no experts are available to guide us knowingly through adaptive change, we must be well practiced at quick trial and error experimentation to discover our best paths forward, and to quickly abandon poor strategies.
Conclusion
The next adaptive change is coming. We can be sure of it. But we have no idea what that unprecedented change might be. We must be prepared as leaders to guide our teams and promote the types of behaviors that will help the organization succeed in the end. Being prepared with the right workplace culture is our best defense!
