We would like to introduce our new podcast series, Living Adaptive Leadership!
We are excited about these podcasts because we have been training in and coaching around adaptive leadership for the last 25 years. We have also incorporated this style of leadership into the work that we do at Change Matrix and try to lead in alignment with adaptive leadership principles.
Adaptive leadership is based on the work of Ron Heifetz and Martin Linsky, in two of their seminal books, one called Leading Without Easy Answers and the other called Practicing Adaptive Leadership – it’s more of a field book. These books lay out a principled approach to adaptive leadership that is particularly appealing to us because it is a shared leadership model that doesn’t depend on an individual, or a set of characteristics, or authority, or power. It depends on the ability of a group to come together and understand or share their values and beliefs that go to complex change, that lead to complex change.
There are several characteristics to adaptive leadership that I just want to outline very quickly because you’re going to hear some of this language.
The first thing that adaptive leadership asks us to do is to consider the context. Heifetz and Linsky called this “getting on the balcony.” Getting on the balcony is an opportunity to get away from the day-to-day operational work, and consider the context within which change is necessary, change is going to be made. Tt is an opportunity to consider politics, and social issues, and economics, and history, and the community at large. Tt’s an important opportunity to understand how the environment is shifting, because that’s what’s calling on us to consider change.
The second principle that Heifetz and Linsky put out is one called the “adaptive work.” They distinguish between “technical” and “adaptive” work in the following way:
- Technical work is that day-to-day work that you check off your list. It has an easily definable task, and an easily definable solution.
- Adaptive work is much more complex because it is usually driven by a set of values and principles that can be different across a group of people. Those values and principles are at play when we’re thinking about the way that we practice. The adaptive work calls on us to think about the values and principles that might have to shift because there’s an environment around us that shifting.
The adaptive leader is called on to, with the help of a group, to mobilize others to think about what’s technical that we can just do, and what’s adaptive that we have to stop and think about acting on together. By together, I mean a couple of things:
- We have to engage diverse voices. We can’t just get the people around us that agree with us it’s important to gather together people who don’t agree with us, who have different ways of thinking. It is based on those diverse perspectives that adaptive leaders create the best path forward.
- It also calls upon leaders to believe that they can’t do the work of adaptive change themselves. That they have to share the work with others. For us at Change Matrix, that makes this a particularly equitable practice of leadership.
Leadership that is adaptive is also risky because you were standing on the frontier of the unknown. You are called upon as adaptive leaders to take risks, to think about what you don’t know, to learn your way to solutions. Sometimes that causes distress in groups where there are lots of different opinions. Holding space for that distress is part of the work of adaptive leaders.
Lastly, we ask adaptive leaders to maintain disciplined attention on the work at hand. When you get past the initial excitement of the change process, you have to stay in the work. You have to keep focusing on the work at hand. So, adaptive leaders are called upon to maintain disciplined attention to the work.
We’re particularly excited about some of these podcasts because we know that there are lots of people out there practicing. We know there are people practicing while transitioning is leaders into new spaces. We know that there are people that are practicing adaptive leadership as advocates, as young people in pursuit of equity. And right now we know there are people practicing adaptive leadership in crisis, because of the pandemic that we’re dealing with right now. We hope that this is an opportunity for listeners to learn about how people are not just thinking about adaptive leadership, but really applying it, and seeing some results, and learning from it. So, they’re learning along the way.
We at Change Matrix are really grateful that you tuned in for this. We’re really excited about hearing from you if you have feedback or requests for ways that we can highlight adaptive leaders out in the field making complex change so that communities and individuals have a better opportunity for a happy and healthy life.
