Written by: Vanessa Giannos, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
In the first article in this series, I spoke about how a crisis like COVID-19 defines you as a leader. Take some time to reflect on how you reacted or responded to the challenge COVID-19 presented your business and leadership.
I wonder, what would your employees say about the way you lead in the first three months of COVID lockdowns? What would they say now? Have you asked? And when I say have you asked, I don’t mean a pulse or engagement survey, I mean an in-depth face-to-face crucial conversation about your personal leadership style or an in-depth 360.
As a side note: Engagement and pulse surveys are super valuable if, indeed, you are continuously taking actions to adapt and improve. Constant surveys without systemic action create complacent answers, low response rates (<85%), and increases cynicism, all of which destroy trust and confidence.
What did you do (be, act) differently in COVID? What/how did you innovate? How did you improve that innovation to optimal efficiency and effectiveness? Have you now become complacent? Are you ready for the next left-field crisis? What would you do differently next time?
Now take some time to think about your own leader, if you have one. How would you assess their leadership through COVID? Were they vulnerable, authentic, collaborative, bringing teams together to solve the business issues and innovate on the fly? How often did they communicate? How did they help you manage stress, anxiety, and uncertainty? How supported did you feel? How much did they learn about your personal circumstances, concerns, worries, and fears? What did they personally do to assist you through this time? What did they do to make you feel empowered, engaged, involved, heard, and seen? Then ask yourself the same questions about how your team might have experienced you. Better still, if your team has high trust in you, then ask each of them to reflect on their answers and feedback to you.
So you might be thinking, what the heck is Adaptive Leadership?
The concept of adaptive leadership seems deceptively simple. But trust me, it is not! So, let’s start with what it is not. I’ve worked with thousands of leaders and business owners around the globe in most industries. Most have faced adaptive challenges, and there are a few key themes that run through these experiences to demonstrate what adaptive leadership is not:
Most leaders operate out of survival mode. This is a natural human evolutionary reaction but may not be the best response in the circumstances;
Most leaders have not taken the opportunity, time, or space to really develop their leadership competence to the highest standard required by adaptive leadership;
Most leaders rely on their past results or technical/industry know-how
Most leaders do not operate in a mindful way, instead, they act in autopilot mode;
Most leaders do not realize that they have to unlearn deep unconscious programs in order to be the best leader they can be;
Most leaders try to use technical skills to resolve and adapt problems;
Many leadership teams have a level of dysfunction that prevents them from having real conversations and collaboratively using their bench strength to solve adaptive problems.
Most leaders have an unconscious belief that they have a right to be a leader, associate it with a job or job title, as opposed to the privilege of leading others (see later articles)
Why is any of that important? It is argued that as leaders, we will face more adaptive problems. In fact, we are likely to face mainly adaptive challenges as technology thrust us into the future at G force. It has already started – just think about conflicts, sustainability, thriving on the planet, COVID-19, to name a few of the current challenges we face. The key point is, with constant disruption, companies and leaders that survive in the future are different from that of yesteryear. And when I say the future, I mean now!
Adapt or not to adapt – That is the true leadership Question!
Over this series of articles, I will explore these issues in more detail and, along the way, provide key tips on how to improve your leadership style. PS, if you read the last sentence and thought, I don’t need to develop my style – then this is a warning. You are heading for the leadership dinosaur pile – adapt-innovate-evolve or don’t and be left behind.
Let’s start with a pragmatic definition of adaptive leadership: Adaptive leaders lead from the front, bringing diverse talents together to solve ever more complex, adaptive problems. It is one of the highest forms of leadership. It requires leader exceptional skills, exceptional emotional intelligence, mindfulness, courage, strong interpersonal neurobiology, and above all, the ability to be vulnerable and inspire others to extraordinary commitment, engagement, and performance. I’ll cover competencies and how to develop this capacity later in this series.
Adaptive leaders spend a fair amount of time reflecting on their own behavior and how they impact others (or experienced by others), being very mindful of their leadership style and their reactive tendencies, what needs to be challenged, what are the unique competencies of the business, how to leverage them, where to focus strategic effort and of course, how to solve wickedly complex problems creatively.
The adaptive model (originated by Harvard’s Dr. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky) suggests there are two types of problems requiring two different skillsets. The standard problem, or technical problem, where your skills, technical knowledge, systems, protocols, or process can solve the problem. Adaptive challenges are more dynamic, people-focused, or VUCA and require us to tap into our collective creative strengths to solve them, to go where we have not been, and to peek into the future and see ‘around corners’! Distinguishing between the two is often the first failure of the leadership team. The second is trying to solve an adaptive problem with a technical response.
The Model Outlines 5 Essential Principles or Functions of Adaptive Leadership
1. Recognise adaptive challenges and treat them as such, rather than a technical ones. An adaptive approach requires changes to what we do or how we do it, a change of mindset or behavior, and sometimes even questions why we do what we do. The point is, adaptive change means that the old ‘tried and tested models’ do not work. That’s why so many businesses and leaders fail to meet the challenges of a VUCA environment.
2. Differentiate what is working well and leverage it, and that which is no longer relevant should be discarded quickly, effectively, and efficiently. So often, when I go to consult in an organization, I find they have systems and processes that are decades old and outdated, with people coming up with all sorts of wonderful workarounds. “Some of these are core to their business model, yet leadership team after leadership team has band-aided their way through.”
It is incumbent on leaders to innovate, continually improve, and raise the efficiency, effectiveness, and performance of their team and business. The trick is to adapt ahead of the curve. To know what your customers or potential customers want next. To know where disruption will come from? To not end up “kodak.”
Were you caught out managing a team remotely on a moments’ notice?
Or were you 100% ready to deploy with the highest level of service & efficiency?
Did each team member know exactly what to do and just beautifully executed?
If not, chances are you and your leadership team have work to do! During adaptation, there is no luxury of time to undertake a proper “change management program,” getting the business ready and resolving resistance factors. It’s do or die!
COVID-19 was our first true test of your leadership and the level of adaptiveness of your business and your leadership style. Every CEO and leadership team should have conversations with their front line and already assessed:
How did we do?
Did we ease in naturally or scramble? Are we still scrambling?
To what extent were we prepared?
What did we learn?
Where did we innovate? Where to need to focus?
What do we need to do to stay ahead of the curve?
Therefore, VUCA environments and adaptive challenges make you get super clear on your company vision, purpose, values, and how you want to be known. It is about valuing what is great and unique about your business and focusing your change efforts on mission-critical change.
3. Encourage experiments. This requires a culture of trust, empowerment, responsibility, and accountability. It also helps if you operate in an agile way, with an agile performance approach. Failure must be seen as learning forward. If people feel like they cannot make mistakes or learn by doing, then this has little chance of working. So, address culture first.
If your culture is supportive, start with small, low-risk experiments, foster rapid learning and quick adjustment that are required in a volatile and uncertain environment. Experiments are conducted with the motivation of explorers and the rigor of scientists. They are used to analyze and understand the factors of survival and success in the new world. The adaptive leader is there to provide the necessary time, space, and resources, encourage these experiments, develop a true learning organization and harness the collective creative capacity of the team/business.
4. Ask the right questions. In times of uncertainty, answers are hard to come by and can change overnight. The role of a leader in such volatile situations is to find the right questions to spark and inform meaningful experiments. Becoming a skilled questioner takes mindfulness, deep observation, thought experimentation, exceptional active listening, and asking powerful adaptive questions.
5. Distribute authority. Adaptive leadership recognizes that the leader does not have to know but needs to harness the team and collective creativity of the business to answer the unknown. To respond to rapid change, people need to be provided with the power to act and be crystal clear on the business vision and mission. They also need to know what is and isn’t acceptable (behaviors and values). It means organization structures need to empower delegated authority matching what is required. It also means planning for the right skills, competencies, and capabilities for the future, including learning on the fly, adaptive complex problem solving strong judgment, and decision making. Where appropriate, self-managing teams are empowered to experiment and make pre-emptive decisions.
These functions help to engender trust by balancing stability and change, which indicates for people care and concern about their past efforts. It also dedicates time to experiments to make sure any investment in modifications will not be wasting their time in the future. In this way, adaptive leadership is respectful and considered. However, adaptive leadership is also courageous.
Adaptive Leadership Is Courageous
It takes a brave leader to admit that they don't know something. Often, leaders got promoted because they had all the technical answers. But ever more complex VUCA environments, your technical expertise will mean little. It will be your leadership capacity and capability that will be required. So the old adage, what got you here, will not get you there, is an adaptive challenge. Soon being technically competent will be the bare minimum required of leaders at all levels.
Distribution of authority also creates vulnerability (there is always the risk of mutiny. Taking the path of adaptive leadership can also feel risky, especially if the team around you only wants answers and a set plan. Not everyone is ready to hear the critical questions or is confident enough to experiment. That is why getting every person engaged and inspired by the company vision, purpose, mission, and values is critical for trust and leadership today. Every single person needs to be able to not only articulate this but know what adaptive capacity they are expected to demonstrate and what their contribution to the whole is.
And unfortunately, this is why so many leaders and businesses are falling short or failed at our first major VUCA challenge. If you think there won’t be others soon, you are in for a bit of a reality check.
Adaptive leaders are, therefore, highly competent, highly aware, can tolerate the ambiguity and uncertainty with ease, can mobilize the team around the right actions, can inspire the highest of engagement and commitment, and can put significant emotional and cognitive efforts into observation, foreseeing, enquiry and experimentation. This also means knowing and adapting our automatic programs, are ego messaging, and working to reprogram those reactive tendencies. Above all, adaptive leadership requires high levels of self-awareness and knowing how to skillfully help others adapt. As you can see, it really is no mean feat. And no one becomes an adaptive leader overnight. In fact, some leaders have not achieved this capacity even after decades as a leader! This is your challenge!
So, how are you being defined?
The way you respond to this crisis will define you. It will signal to those around you whether you are flexible enough to shift your leadership to meet the situation's needs and the challenges ahead. And it will show whether you have enough self-awareness, emotional intelligence, capability, courage, authenticity, and compassion for yourself and others to deal with the risks and vulnerabilities inherently needed at this time.
I don't know the organizational context you are operating in, but I know that if you are in a leadership position right now, your staff, your customers, and your stakeholders are all trusting you to do what is best. And doing your best in this crisis means helping the organization not only adapt and survive but to thrive! That is the challenge that faces us all.
We’re running out of time. VUCA is speeding up, and we are dragging our heels. Not only do we need deeply skilled adaptive leaders now, but we also need to be developing those leaders for the even higher challenge of universal leadership ahead!
Next time I will discuss some key competency areas.
Where To Get More Information
If you would like more information on how to adapt and thrive, get in touch with The HR Experts International. We are Australia’s leading HR, Coaching & Training Consultancies. We specialize in developing leveraged solutions to achieve outstanding results. We help businesses and leaders grow, become more agile and adaptive, create amazing engaged cultures, and become talent magnets. We work with you to develop your Employer Brand, build your reputation, create a community of engaged employees and rave customer fans.
We are here to help to support your journey. Book your free consultation today.
This article is intended to provide commentary and general information only. It should not be relied upon as comprehensive or advice. Formal advice may be necessary for particular transactions or on matters of interest arising from this article. The HR Experts International is not responsible for the results of any actions or inactions taken based on information in this article, nor for any error or omission in this article.
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Vanessa Giannos, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Vanessa is an International Master Behavioral/Neuroscience Coach and Master-qualified Human Resources and Organisational Transformational Expert. Vanessa has strong demonstrable success from 25 years of local and global experience in senior HR and Executive leadership roles in a breadth of industries and sizes of companies. Vanessa’s helped thousands of people develop their careers, skills, competence, and leadership capability. Vanessa’s passion is to assist individuals and organizations in growing, thrive, and transform to achieve their highest potential and goals. Vanessa is a certified DISC and Leadership Circle 360 Facilitator. Vanessa also specializes in Organisational Culture, Change Management, Communication & Influencing, Human Organisational Design & Development, Merger & Acquisitions, Performance and People Management, Employee Engagement, Customer Experience, Strategic and Operational Planning, Team Building, Management & Leadership Training.
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