Despite common entrenched beliefs, leadership skills can learned. Building familiarity with Adaptive Leadership Theory, practicing reflection, and treating one’s environment as a “case in point” laboratory full of adaptive challenges helps leaders build up the arsenal of skills needed to effectively exercise adaptive leadership in and out of one’s workplace. Heifetz et al. (2009) puts […]
Adaptive Leadership: “Holding Environment”, Part 5
Holding environment, also referred to as “pressure cooker” (Heifetz et al., 2009, p.306), is defined as having “The cohesive properties of a relationship or social system that serve to keep people engaged with one another in spite of the divisive forces generated by adaptive work” (Heifetz et al., 2009, p.305). Holding environment provides appropriate adaptive […]
Adaptive Leadership: Resistance To Adaptive Change, Part 4
Adaptive leadership involves telling people the hard truth and asking them to sustain losses, therefore adaptive leaders invariably provoke resistance. Flower (1995) writes, Some resistance strategies are well known and rather obvious, such as scapegoating, externalizing the enemy, or killing off the leader in the hopes that if only we had the right leader our […]
Adaptive Leadership: Distinction Between “Leadership” and “Authority” – Part 3
Most people use “leadership” and “authority” interchangeably. Heifetz argues that there is a great difference between a figure of authority and a leader and that people in authority do not usually exercise leadership, while a leader oftentimes leads without formal authority (Flower, 1995). In the language of Adaptive Leadership, authorities perform very distinct functions: they […]
Adaptive Leadership: Distinction Between “Technical” Problems and “Adaptive” Challenges, Part 2
While most challenges contain both technical and adaptive aspects, it is critical to distinguish between those two elements. Otherwise all too often adaptive challenges get treated as if they are technical problems and do not get resolved. According to Heifetz et al. (2009) technical problems share the following elements: existence of known solutions, made feasible […]
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 […]
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