Conquering Change with Adaptive Leadership

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What is Adaptive Leadership?

This week we learned about a new leadership style known as adaptive leadership. Overall, I found this leadership style to be interesting. I like that its focused on building and developing followers to be able to take on challenges and changes when they occur. I also think it's safe to say that all leaders at some point will have to endure changes or challenges, so any leader who learns some of these traits can only benefit in my opinion! Let's dive in with what exactly is Adaptive Leadership?

According to Northouse (2019), adaptive leadership takes place when a leader encourages and prepares their team to deal with change. Adaptive leaders think creatively, communicate openly, and are ready to adapt when plans or environments change. These leaders inspire and motivate their followers to embrace change and give them the many tools they need to be successful when change happens.

Unlike other leadership styles that primarily focus on the characteristics of the leaders, adaptive leadership stresses the activities of the leader when facing problems, challenges, and changes. Although this leadership style requires the leader to be somewhat direct, they are able to get results with their followers by inspiring, encouraging, and motivating them to tackle tough challenges head on and work as a team to achieve their goals.

To further define this unique leadership style, lets look next at five principles of adaptive leadership, and six components of adaptive leadership.

5 Principles of Adaptive Leadership:

1. Organizational Justice: treat your team with respect. Develop trust by open and honest communication and by treating people fairly.

2. Transparency: Take accountability, be honest and open with your team, admit mistakes, discuss goals and game plans, and be supportive and empathetic while leading your team.

3. Emotional Intelligence: Lead with empathy and kindness, be self-aware and know how to communicate respectfully. Success happens when there is trust and teamwork amongst the group.

4. Development: Keep learning. Always be willing to have an open mind, try new ideas and approaches, listen to others and build their confidence by trying new techniques.

5. Mobilization: Be able to motivate and inspire your team to keep tackling challenges and come together when times get tough or when there are moments of immense change.

   
   

6 Components of Adaptive Leadership:

1. Get on the balcony-- take a step back and be able to see the entire picture.

2. Identify the Adaptive challenge-- recognize the challenge ahead and know that it may not be a technical challenge.

3. Regulate distress-- Create a safe space for everyone to learn and grow and face challenges together.

4. Maintain disciplined attention-- Don't let followers get distracted or stray from the hard challenges they need to tackle.

5. Give the work back to the people-- Empower others to think for themselves, come up with creative ideas to challenges or changes, and inspire them and boost confidence.

6. Protect leadership voices from below-- Lift others by listening and being accepting and practicing open and honest communication.

Self-assessment of the Leadership Questionnaire.

Until this week I hadn't heard of this leadership style before. I learned a lot from the readings as well as the questionnaire. As far as my results from the questionnaire, I scored high or moderately high in all categories except for ability to identify the adaptive challenge, which I scored moderately low range for this category. I guess this makes sense considering this was all pretty new content to me and as a new leader I sometimes struggle to tackle the challenges at hand with an adaptive approach. I think this gives me a good place to work on my leadership skills, and overall, it was very fun learning about a new leadership strategy.

References:

Five Principles of Adaptive Leadership. Eliot Partnership. (2022, January 25). https://eliotpartnership.com/news-insights/five-principles-of-adaptive-leadership/

Folk, G. (2023). What is adaptive leadership?

Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and practice. (8th ed.). Sage.