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Adaptive Leadership |
- The following section on Adaptive Leadership, Using Leadership to Deal with Challenges and Promote Change, is adapted from the Child and Family Services Reviews Information Portal provided by The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), a division of the Department of Health & Human Services.
- Leaders in today’s changing organizations must deploy resources toward adaptation and innovation in implementing and managing their programs and must energize and inspire those around them to achieve.
- Various leadership models help develop leadership knowledge, skills, and capacity to lead effectively on a day-by-day basis.
- The Adaptive Leadership model is particularly effective for significant systems change efforts; it enables organizations to adapt and flourish in complex, challenging environments.
- Adaptive Leadership presents strong evaluative skills and techniques for distinguishing the necessary from the dispensable, having courageous conversations, encouraging experimentation and creativity, tolerating risk-taking and mistakes, and dealing with loss.
- A capable leader continually and artfully works to bring about real change, embraced by the entire organization, from the status quo.
- Adaptive Leadership recognizes the value of individual employees and their contributions to the organization’s overall success, and stresses that effectively using a systems change leadership model will result in much greater engagement of the workforce in the workings of the organization.
- One difficulty many leaders have is distinguishing technical from adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges require people to learn new behaviors or change attitudes or beliefs. Technical challenges have known solutions. The ability to distinguish between the two types of challenges and tailor efforts to meet the challenges is a leadership skill. If technical fixes are employed for a problem that continues to persist, that is an indication that an underlying adaptive challenge exists.
- Having Courageous Conversations
- A critical leadership task is producing a culture that encourages creativity, flexible behaviors and attitudes, and embracing new ideas.
- It’s important to have dialogue during solution-seeking that is probing and challenging or having “courageous conversations.”
- Since change often challenges deeply held values and beliefs, courageous conversations confront delicate issues and challenge assumptions, beliefs, and processes at the individual, unit, division, regional, and organization-wide levels.
- They are also about leaders listening to all voices, including dissenters, and giving and receiving tough messages. Openness to these conversations allows leaders to be perceived as more authentic, credible, and trustworthy.
- For example, a far-reaching issue that impacts staff, stakeholders, and other community agencies is institutional racial/ethnic disparity and disproportionality.
- Courageous conversations may be needed to reveal and articulate deep-seated behaviors, beliefs, and attitudes that impair individual and organizational ability to ensure fairness and equity in dealing with families of different races or ethnicities.
- Such individual conversations may cause discomfort and even distress, but they are necessary to confront assumptions and prejudices, foster true learning and growth, and promote deep, effective, and lasting change.
- On an individual level, a courageous conversation with a caseworker could involve a situation where a state began dual licensure of both foster and adoptive homes, using the same standards and processes, and an adoption worker expressed strong resistance.
- Encouraging Experimentation and Creativity
- Finding true solutions to adaptive challenges means the involvement of leaders, staff, external stakeholders, and consumers. Leadership must empower these groups to explore novel solutions.
- Integral to leadership is a willingness to take calculated risks and encourage innovation and experimentation in problem-solving around major challenges and day-to-day situations.
- Leaders can foster an atmosphere of exploring unprecedented ideas and measured risk-taking by framing solution-seeking efforts as experiments.
- To set the stage for experimentation, it may be necessary to disrupt existing patterns and allow uncertainty and conflicts to emerge between individuals and groups.
- Skilled leadership involves active orchestration of uncertainty and discomfort toward a focused dialogue of the presenting issues so that the disturbance is productive, rather than destructive; through this “disequilibrium” and dynamic interaction, change and new ways of doing things often emerge.
- This solution might pose several adaptive challenges to be resolved, such as “turf” issues and empowerment of the review board and might also require courageous conversations.
- Some agencies have devised unique ways of educating managers and supervisors to manage by data.
- Tolerating Risk-Taking and Mistakes
- A critical element of effective change leadership is a tolerance of risk-taking by those who, while working through the change process, make mistakes or try new ideas that prove unsuccessful. Trial and error are an important part of successful change, so those navigating the change process must develop the insight to risk and know failure and be able to learn and adapt from those failures.
- Tolerance of risk-taking as part of the change process does not mean tolerating risks that result in people being unsafe. The improvement process requires informed, balanced risk-taking to improve outcomes for families ensure safety. Leaders who accept and effectively deal with lack of success as part of change become stronger because resulting lessons show where assumptions were wrong and where future investments could be targeted.
- Dealing With Loss
- Rather than resisting change per se, many people resist loss of their roles or of the status quo. A common factor contributing to difficulty adapting or changing is fear of, and resistance to, loss and doing things a new way. If change involves real or potential loss, even in perceptions and beliefs, it can be painful and difficult. Those affected may respond out of fear and anxiety, and these feelings, if not addressed, can slow down or even derail a thoughtful, well-managed change effort.
- A key to effective leadership is to anticipate and deal with the kinds of losses – from roles, job functions, status, and relevance; to beliefs, identity, and competence – that are at stake in a situation. Capable leaders will identify, assess, provide context for, and manage losses so that people can move to new ways of doing things. Helping people learn and appreciate that their loss contributes to beginning something valuable and substantive should help move them along.
The following section is adapted from “Becoming an Adaptive Leader” Based on the work of Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky:
- Adaptive leadership mobilizes people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. The concept of thriving comes from evolutionary biology, in which successful adaptation has three characteristics: (1) it preserves what is necessary for a species’ continued survival; (2) it discards what no longer serves a species’ current needs; and (3) it creates new arrangements for the species to flourish in more challenging environments. How does this apply to adaptive leadership?
- Adaptive leadership is about change that enables the capacity to thrive. New environments and new dreams demand new strategies and abilities, and the leadership to mobilize them.
- Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than throw it away. Adaptive leadership engages people in distinguishing what is essential to preserve and what is expendable.
- Organizational adaptation occurs through experimentation. Adaptive leaders have an experimental mindset. They improvise. For example, companies might lose money on failures until they identify a successful product.
- Adaptation relies on diversity. Nature builds in diversity so that a species will survive in a changing ecosystem. Adaptive leadership builds a culture that values diverse views and relies less on central planning by the few at the top.
- New adaptations significantly displace and rearrange old ways. Adaptive leadership can generate loss and learning can be painful. One person’s innovation is another person’s feeling of being irrelevant or incompetent. Adaptive leadership must predict and recognize these defensive patterns and counteract them.
- Adaptation takes time and persistence to consolidate adaptations into new norms and processes. Cultures change slowly. (Source: The Practice of Adaptive Leadership)
- Adaptive challenges require leadership that mobilizes people to address tangled, complex problems composed of multiple systems that resist technical analysis and where there is a lot at stake. Adaptive challenges require creating new models and approaches, experimenting, evaluating, redesigning, and continuous learning.
- Adaptive leadership is mobilizing employees to engage and make progress on its deepest challenges. Mobilizing people for adaptive work is to help them enter into that risk zone where there is new learning, new self-understanding, and new ways of acting.
- The Process of Adaptive Leadership is an iterative process involving three activities:
- Observing events and patterns
- Interpreting what you are observing and developing multiple hypotheses about what is going on
- Designing interventions based on the observations and hypotheses.
This process is repeated and refined.
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- Leaders feel pressure to solve problems quickly. Often leaders minimize the time spent in diagnosis, data collection, or exploring multiple interpretations and potential interventions. To diagnose an organization requires achieving some distance from the “on-the-ground” events.
- Adaptive leadership uses “getting on the balcony” above the “dance floor” to gain a distanced perspective to see what is really happening.
- A leader who can continually move between the dance floor and balcony will continually assess what is happening in the organization and take corrective action. This allows the leader to see what is happening immediately and see the larger patterns and dynamics.
- Sometimes people begin analyzing a problem by personalizing them (“if s/he was a better leader . . .”) or attributing the problem to interpersonal conflict (“these two people don’t work well together . . .”).
- Personalization can obscure a systemic understanding of the situation. Conflict between two people can be structural even if it seems personal. Counteract personalization by diagnosing and acting on the system.
- How an adaptive leader designs effective intervention
- Get on the balcony. Observe what is going on. Stay diagnostic. Develop more than one interpretation. Look for patterns. Reality tests your interpretations. Debrief with partners often to assess information and think through your next move.
- Determine the ripeness of the issue. Are people ready to address the issue? Is their urgency to deal with it across the organization? If only a subgroup cares passionately, it’s not ripe yet. Ripeness is critical in planning and timing an intervention.
- Ask, who am I in this picture? How are you experienced by various groups and subgroups? What role do you play in them? What perspectives on issues do you embody for them? If they are comfortable with the way you usually act, they are probably proficient at managing you in that role so that you don’t disturb their equilibrium. Consistency is a high value in management but a significant constraint in leading adaptively. You will have to be less predictable than usual to get constructive attention and make progress.
- Think hard about your framing. Communicate to help group members understand what you have in mind, why the intervention is important, and how they can help carry it out. A well-framed intervention starts where they are, not where the leader is. Think about whether the people you are talking with need data first or emotion. Connect your words to the group’s values and purpose. Think of the difference between strong attention-getting language and loaded language that may trigger a flight-or-fight response instead of engagement.
- Hold steady. When you make an intervention, let people digest it and let it make its way through your organization. Don’t think of it as “yours,” you want it to become their idea. You can’t control what happens with your intervention so resist the impulse to jump in. Listen closely to how various subgroups respond to your idea, so you can calibrate your next move. Watch for how and what about your idea takes hold. Watch for avoidance in the form of silence or immediate rejection. Your silence is a form of intervention. Stay present and keep listening. People will appreciate, even if they never say so, the patience and respect you show.
- Analyze the factions that begin to emerge. As people in your own group begin to discuss your intervention, pay attention to who is engaged, who starts using your language or ideas as if their own. Listen for resistance. Use these observations to see the factions that various people represent on the issue. Faction mapping of your own group informs you about how the larger organization will respond. This is helpful because refining and implementing your intervention will require the involvement of people from the larger organization.
- Keep the work at the center of people’s attention. Expect that your team will find ways to avoid focusing on doing the diagnosis and action work of adaptive change. Resistance to your intervention is more about fears of loss than the merits of your idea. Begin by learning how your idea will impact your constituents and the team member who represents them, and how the constituents’ pleasure or displeasure will affect your team’s behavior. Then help your team member present the idea to their group and make sure your team member gets credit for making the idea happen. Another strategy is to think about how a group’s resistance may represent threat and loss. Take these fears seriously and treat them with respect. Finally, identify allies to help you in this process.
Weaknesses of the adaptive leadership style:
- Adaptive leaders must learn and have a very wide set of skills to be able to adjust their approach to leadership based on the circumstances they face. Instead of always relying on one type of leadership, an adaptive leader must be able to evaluate their circumstances and adjust their approach whenever and however it is necessary.
- Adaptive leaders challenge the status quo and lead major systemic changes. This type of leader is not the right leader for an organization whose governing body wants to limit change.
- Adaptive leaders are skilled at identifying creative, innovative responses to problems that may be uncomfortable for some who are seeking a definite, tried-and-true solution to a problem.
Adaptive leadership quotes:
- Chinese proverb: Learning is like rowing upstream; not to advance is to drop back
- Stephen Covey: Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
- Brent Gleeson: Adaptive leaders get better results because they build dynamic teams that embrace change and channel fear into positive outcomes.
Ronald Heifetz: Leadership is the process of bringing a new and generally unwelcome reality to an individual, organization or setting, and helping them successfully adapt to it. |
