Adaptive Leadership

In an adaptive organisation, the leader’s job is “to create the conditions under which the people closest to the work can find the answers themselves”. Adaptive leadership is the practice of creating the conditions in which the other three dimensions become possible, and then resisting the urge to control them. It is a practice, not a position, a style or a personality trait.

Leadership Emerges Leadership shows up whenever someone surfaces a risk, challenges a decision or reframes a question, and “none of these people needs a title.” The formal leader’s task is to make sure that this kind of leadership emerges reliably, so that the organisation’s leadership capacity grows with every person willing to take it up.

From Directing to Enabling Directive leadership is limited by the capacity of the leader; enabling leadership is limited only by the capacity of the system. Enabling is far from passive. It means asking questions instead of handing out answers, and holding paradoxes such as stability and change, or accountability and tolerance for failure. These tensions cannot be resolved. They can only be held.

Go and See Every layer of reporting distorts what is actually happening. Adaptive leaders go where the work is done. This shows respect and keeps information honest, and it protects them from governing an abstraction made of metrics and slides.

Teams and the Leadership Team A group of people with the same manager is not yet a team. High-performing teams grow through shared purpose, practice and trust. The leadership team sets the ceiling for the whole organisation, yet “most leadership teams are committees, not teams.” Adaptive leaders work on the system, not only in it, and they take part visibly in change instead of merely sponsoring it.

The Ceiling and the Foundation Leaders who hoard authority, punish feedback or cannot tolerate ambiguity limit what the organisation can become. Leaders who go and see, build teams and develop others lay its foundation. Leadership is never acquired once and for all; it develops through daily practice.

Part of a Bigger Picture Adaptive leadership is one of the four dimensions of an adaptive organisation, together with Fast Improvement Cycles, Organisational Multidexterity and Solution Orientation. The dimensions are a lens, not a methodology. Adaptivity emerges from two foundations, structures that enable fast change and healthy relationships between people, teams and the systems that connect them, and it rests on twelve principles. Our book Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity sets all of this out; this dimension is the subject of chapter 8.