Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive leadership: definition, principles and examples
Adaptive Leadership offers principles that leaders can use to lead their organizations and employees through difficult times. What is that? What are the basic principles behind it? And why should leaders use adaptive leadership? Read on and find out…

What is adaptive leadership?
Adaptive leadership is an approach to tackling complex business problems developed by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky of Harvard University. Designed to help organizations remain resilient in difficult times, it includes a range of skills and tools to help leaders focus on the real, critical drivers of change.

• Adaptive leadership is based on four key elements:
• Emotional intelligence
• Organizational justice
• Development
• Character

Once these elements are understood, leaders can use them to solve underlying problems and help companies and people succeed.

The four main principles of adaptive leadership
Heifetz proposed several adaptive leadership principles. They are: emotional intelligence, organizational justice, development and character and are explained below.

1.Emotional Intelligence
How well do you understand your own emotions and those of the people around you? If you can do this well, you probably have a high level of emotional intelligence. This is a great adaptive leadership trait because it means you are more easily able to build relationships based on trust.

When teams trust you, you can help them cope with new ways of working, learn new things, be more flexible and change more easily: all necessary skills for adaptation.

2.Organizational justice
During times of change, can your company culture support the changing needs of your team? Employers with a positive culture that honors their psychological contracts and provides employees with a sense of security have something called organizational justice.

Safety and justice help employees find creative solutions to problems necessary to address adaptive challenges. By applying an adaptive leadership style, leaders can engage employees in the process and make them feel like they are a valued part of the change. This, in turn, helps them adapt and even embrace change.

3.Development
How open is your organization to development? If you offer a professional development framework, an employee training program, personal development plans, and other tools that help employees do more, be more, and become more fulfilled people, then you likely have a positive development culture.

This is very important if you strive for adaptive leadership because a positive attitude towards learning and growth is crucial for the company to adapt. Employees who acquire knowledge are also more willing to embrace change. You will also be more willing to learn from mistakes, experiment, and solve problems in innovative ways.

4.Character
Do you have a company code of ethics or a culture code? At Personio we have one. It is part of our corporate culture and this is how we select the right people for our team. Your character fits our culture.

Leaders with strong ethics and good character thrive in a positive company culture, and the same goes for their employees. The ability to make mistakes is an important part of adaptive leadership because leaders don’t always get everything right – but if their team trusts them and vice versa, failure isn’t the end. It can even be the beginning of new discoveries.

When leaders create and promote a culture of trust, respect, openness, authenticity and non-judgment, employees are much more likely to be innovative, creative and – yes – learnable!

What is the difference between technical and adaptive challenges?
Imagine a challenge your company is facing… If it’s a well-known, standard technical challenge, chances are you can clearly define it, have a clear solution to it, and have a… there is a known authority who can solve the problem. Today, however, most challenges are anything but easy to solve.

The father of the adaptive leadership framework, Ron Heifetz, says it is important to distinguish between the parts of a complex challenge that:

• that are known and easy to fix (technical challenges), and
• that require adaptation (adaptive challenges).

Why is it important to know the difference?
Understanding the difference between technical and adaptive challenges is the starting point for solving the fundamental problems. Heifetz explains: “The most common failure I have observed in leadership over many years is the diagnostic failure of people in high leadership positions who have failed to lead because they have treated adaptive challenges like technical problems. They try to to find technical solutions to the problem. The problem persists, and over time people become disappointed that the problem hasn’t really been solved.”

What is an example of adaptive leadership?
Imagine that one of your teams is simply not performing well. Maybe your product marketing team previously met and even exceeded their goals. Now her work is dull and boring. They’re only doing half the webinars they used to do. You will no longer send product-related emails. And they haven’t released a new brochure in five months.

They know what needs to be done, so there are no technical challenges that prevent them from doing their job to the best of their ability. That means it has to be an adaptive challenge…

How can you help them?

If you’re a fan of adaptive leadership, you might expect your managers to be bold and challenge the status quo to solve underlying problems. You might make changes that seem drastic but are actually necessary. And the decisions could be surprising or unexpected. Now we’ll explain how your managers could do this…

How do you solve adaptive challenges?
Solving adaptive challenges is an important part of adaptive leadership. But before you can solve them, you have to figure out which part of the challenge is technical and which part is adaptive. Heifetz says using diagnostic indicators helps us identify what underlies the challenge. The technical challenges can be addressed in familiar ways, but the adaptive challenges “require a different way of working than just authoritarian commands.” Managers have to adapt.

To explain this, let’s go back to our product marketing team example.

The CMO noticed that the team was not performing well. She looked at the numbers, the resources and the budgets. Nothing had changed. But something had changed in the team’s attitude.

To find out what was really going wrong, she looked deeper – to discover the adaptive challenges – by applying these four principles of the adaptive leadership model…

The challenges of implementing adaptive leadership
Like any leadership model or theory, adaptive leadership has its challenges. It is not always easy to convince managers who are accustomed to behaving in a certain way that changing their attitudes and behavior will lead to positive organizational change.

Frequently asked questions about adaptive leadership
What is meant by adaptive leadership?
The Adaptive Leadership Framework is designed to help organizations remain resilient during difficult times. It includes a set of skills and tools that help leaders focus on the real, critical factors behind change.

What is an example of adaptive leadership?
Turning around a low-performing team is an example of adaptive leadership. As you read through this blog post, you will see the example of a marketing team applying the principles of adaptive leadership to achieve change.

What are the characteristics of adaptive leadership?
The four characteristics of adaptive leadership are emotional intelligence, organizational justice, development and character.

What is the goal of adaptive leadership?
Adaptive leadership is a set of principles and tools that help leaders lead their organizations and employees through difficult times.

Start enabling adaptive leadership today
If you are one of those HR leaders who believe that positive change is possible and who consider it more important to deal with strategic issues than paperwork or routine tasks, then perhaps it is time to get to know IceHrm.