Many successful companies have thrived in crises due to their ability to adapt to changing times.
Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have consistently demonstrated the power of adaptive leadership. These tech giants have navigated significant challenges—from economic downturns to technological disruptions—by embracing change and constantly innovating.
Leaders who want to thrive in these ever-changing times can consider practicing the adaptive leadership style.
What is Adaptive Leadership?
Adaptive leadership, created by Dr. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard University, is a practical approach designed to assist organizations and individuals in effectively managing change and challenges.
The framework focuses on resilience and adaptability, encouraging leaders to facilitate collaborative problem-solving in complex situations.
It is particularly valuable in fast-paced, ever-changing environments, helping organizations to navigate disruptions with agility and succeed.
Core Principles of Adaptive Leadership
1. Organizational Justice
Organizational justice means making sure everything at work is fair. This includes the way policies are made, how people are treated, and how decisions are made. A meta-analysis published in the Journal of Management Studies found that a leader’s behavior is a key factor in deciding justice perception.
The behaviors involve four key areas:
- Procedural Justice (Fairness in Processes): Adaptive leaders ensure decisions are made through transparent, consistent methods uniformly applied to everyone.
- Distributive Justice (Fairness in Outcomes): The fair distribution of resources and recognition, and ensuring allocations are equitable.
- Interpersonal Justice: Making sure each team member is treated with respect and dignity.
- Informational Justice: Clear, timely, and honest communication that promotes team trust.
2. Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize, understand, and manage one’s own emotions. It also involves empathizing with other people’s emotions and properly communicating your own with them.
According to Daniel Goleman, the author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ, emotional intelligence has five components:
- Self-awareness: Leaders are aware of their own emotions and how they influence their behavior and decisions.
- Self-regulation: Adaptive leaders can control their disruptive emotions and adapt responses to meet the needs of each situation.
- Motivation: Leaders are motivated to go beyond expectations, and persevere in the face of adversity.
- Empathy: Being able to understand and share the feelings of others, adaptive leaders are adept at considering employees' perspectives and crafting responses that address their concerns and needs.
- Social Skills: Effective in managing relationships to move people in desired directions, whether it’s handling a negotiation, a team conflict, or leading a major organizational change.
3. Development
Adaptive leadership is about encouraging continuous growth within the organization to better face future challenges. It involves:
- Personal and Professional Growth: Leaders commit to enhancing the abilities of their team through training, mentorship, and career opportunities.
- Learning from Experience: They champion learning from both successes and failures, and encourage constant reflection from their teams.
- Encouraging Innovation: Adaptive leaders cultivate an environment open to innovation and creative problem-solving.
4. Character
Adaptive leaders are defined by integrity, ethical behavior, and strong moral foundations.
- Integrity: They practice what they preach; all actions are consistent with the values they communicate.
- Courage: Courage to tackle tough issues, make difficult decisions, and stand up for what they believe is right, even when it’s unpopular.
- Accountability: Adaptive leaders take responsibility for their actions and the outcomes of their decisions, and also hold others accountable.
- Respect for Others: They show genuine respect for others' contributions and value diverse viewpoints, which enhances team cohesion and collaboration.
Strategies for Implementing Adaptive Leadership
1. Being Visionary
The ability to see the bigger picture and anticipate future trends allows adaptive leaders to prepare for uncertainties. Here’s how:
- Understand your company’s strategy. Engage with senior leaders to deepen your understanding of your organization.
- Know your industry. Key in on competitor news, industry trends, and customer habits.
- Allocate time for strategic thinking. Set time aside to think about the bigger picture - even just an hour or two per week. This can help you stay future-focused and strategically plan. Delegate tasks to free up time if needed!
- Set a North Star. Set a “North Star” or vision of what you want to achieve. Write this down and use it as an anchor to guide your work.
2. Facilitate Group Discussions
This is a foundational part of adaptive leadership. Here’s a step-by-step guide to facilitate a productive group discussion:
- Align meeting goals. Make sure all attendees are aligned on the goals of the meeting. Present desired outcomes for this discussion.
- Understand the reality. Ask questions to help the group understand the situation before coming up with solutions. You could ask things like: “What are the different elements of the decision we’re trying to make?” or “What are the facts, and what data do we have?”
- Discuss options. Encourage everyone to suggest ideas, and add them to a shared document or whiteboard. Explore possibilities without constraints of resources, time, or money, and consider different perspectives (customer, business, strategic).
- Decide the way forward. By now, your team should have a strong list of ideas to test. Decide which of them are best to move forward with.
3. Making Decisions in a Collaborative Environment
When multiple people are involved in brainstorming and making decisions, having a structured decision making framework can be helpful. One of them is the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework. Here’s how it works:
- Define the problem: Clearly state the decision that needs to be made and its objectives.
- Establish the decision criteria: Determine the relevant criteria or factors that will be used to evaluate the options. These criteria should be measurable and aligned with the decision's objectives.
- Assign weights to the criteria: Determine the relative importance of each criterion by assigning weights. This can be done through techniques like pairwise comparisons or direct rating methods.
- Evaluate each alternative: For each option, see how well it meets each of the decision criteria. This can involve using numbers, descriptions, or a mix of both to rate each option.
- Calculate the overall score for each alternative: Combine the weighted scores for each alternative by multiplying the criterion score by its assigned weight and summing across all criteria. This gives an overall score or value for each alternative.
- Rank the alternatives: Rank the alternatives based on their overall scores, with the highest score representing the preferred option.
Here’s how MCDA can be applied at work:
Say your organization has decided to move and they’re choosing a new office location. Here’s how they can use the MCDA framework to facilitate the decision-making process.
- Define the problem. The problem is to select the best office location from several available options (that you have obtained from group discussions). The objective is to find a location that fits all the criteria.
- Establish the decision criteria. Identify key factors, such as cost, commute time, facilities, location, or space for future expansion.
- Assign weights to the criteria. Which criterion are more important and which are less? In this case, cost could be 40%, commute time is 25%, facilities is 10%, location is 15%, and expansion is 10%.
- Evaluate the alternatives against each criterion. Rate each office location on how well it meets each criterion. You may need a group discussion to rate them. For simplicity sake here, we’ll use a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is poor and 5 is excellent.
- Calculate the overall score for each alternative. Multiply each rating by the weight of the criterion and calculate sum the results for each location.
- Rank the options. Based on the total scores, rank the office locations. In this case.
- Lexington: 3.75
- Bowery: 3.45
- Madison: 3.2
In case of two or more options weigh equally, you can add another criteria or discuss further about each option.
4. Responding with Empathy
During discussions, it’s important that people feel heard and understood. Here’s our 4-point structure of being empathetic:
- State the truth in what the other person is saying, even if it seems totally unreasonable. There’s always an element of truth you can get behind. Remember, no one is wrong to feel a certain way.
- Summarize briefly what they’ve just said, and repeat their comments back to them. This helps others feel heard.
- Acknowledge their feelings. Use a feeling word they’ve used to reflect back to them. Something like “You must be feeling so frustrated by that!” or “I can see you’re feeling really hurt by what happened”.
- Ask a question gently to learn more about their situation. This is not a fix-it question. “So what are you going to do about it?” is not what to do here. Something like, “So tell me more about what happened.”
Applications of Adaptive Leadership
Here are anecdotes from two coaching clients who have successfully implemented adaptive leadership strategies to tackle specific challenges.
Case Study 1
A CEO of a B2B software company faced a challenge when an engagement survey revealed that decision-making within the company was overly top-down and lacked transparency. To address this, he restructured the leadership meetings by establishing department-specific groups. Previously, decisions were made in a single, centralized leadership meeting, but under the new system, a representative from each department was required to attend these focused group meetings. This shift made decision-making more transparent and helped everyone feel heard and involved.
To maintain order and prevent these meetings from becoming chaotic, the CEO emphasized strategic alignment and clear communication of the company's goals and key performance metrics. This approach made sure that decisions were made efficiently and effectively, with all members well-informed and aligned with company objectives.
As a result, the changes led to more informed decision-making and a more inclusive environment where employees felt their voices mattered.
Case Study 2
One of my clients in the AI tech industry wanted to better understand their employee learning preferences and where they find the most value in training. To achieve that, we conducted interviews with 20 team members. These insights helped leadership completely overhaul their training programs to tailor them more closely to employee needs.
The new approach emphasized peer learning. We organized diverse panels featuring senior leaders who participated in Q&A-style sessions, introducing a variety of learning formats to keep engagement high. The redesigned training sessions included an hour of workshop followed by discussions and spotlights on specific topics, using real-life case studies relevant to the company.
