Leadership Series: Introduction to Adaptive Leadership, Part 1

I‘m thrilled to share with you the first of a six part series authored by Susanna Katsman, a former colleague at Harvard University.  Susanna has an impressive background in management at the University and she is currently working as a Program/Training Specialist leading a cross-school effort to create a comprehensive and efficient onboarding experience for the new employees at the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The series highlights how leaders can guide their organizations through change. Each Tuesday, we’ll feature Susanna’s insights in the following areas:

• Distinction between “technical” problems and “adaptive” challenges
  
• Distinction between “leadership” and “authority”
  
• Resistance to adaptive change
  
• Holding environment
  
• Can Adaptive Leadership skills be developed?

Introduction to Adaptive Leadership

The complexity and unpredictability of modern organizational challenges call for a new type of leadership.  Adaptive leadership is well suited for guiding organizations through change because it employs diagnosis and intervention models that starkly differ from more traditional models utilized by those in position of authority.  In the absence of known solutions, adaptive leaders generate knowledge through collective experimentation, conflict, reflection, and learning. Adaptive leadership demands profound changes in thinking and behaviors of individuals, and requires them to sustain painful short-term losses as a price for better future.  Therefore Adaptive Leaders must build an arsenal of skills for seeing organizations through periods of upheaval, disorientation, and resistance that invariably precede successful organizational adaptations. 

Dr. Ronald Heifetz is a premier expert on the practice of Adaptive Leadership and an author of several seminal works on this subject.  Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky (2009) defines Adaptive Leadership as “[T]he practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive” (p.14).  The tough challenges that Heifetz refers to in his definition are adaptive challenges.  Adaptive challenge is a term describing “The gap between the values people stand for (that constitute thriving) and the reality that they face (their current lack of capacity to realize those values in their environment)” (Heifetz et al., 2009, p.303).  The following key concepts constitute foundation of Heifetz’s Adaptive Leadership Theory:

• Distinction between “technical” problems and “adaptive” challenges
  
• Distinction between “leadership” and “authority”
  
• Resistance to adaptive change
  
• Holding environment
  
• Can Adaptive Leadership skills be developed?
  

References