Sublime

Adaptive leadership is specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive.

Adaptive change results in casualties: people in the organization who lose something they value, whether it is a familiar way of doing things, status, jobs, or in the military, their lives. If you are trying to exercise adaptive leadership, you will need to shoulder responsibility for these inevitable casualties.

a director in a theater production must exercise both the functions of authority—maintaining equilibrium within the social group—and the practice of leadership—mobilizing the social system to create a new reality.

A Basic Diagnostic Framework

People have long confused the notion of leadership with authority, power, and influence. We find it extremely useful to see leadership as a practice, an activity that some people do some of the time. We view leadership as a verb, not a job.

Too many people in authority work to make those under them dependent on them. The more dependent the followers, the more indispensable the authority figure feels. Your job in exercising adaptive leadership is to make yourself dispensable.

Adaptation relies on diversity.

Adaptive challenges are typically grounded in the complexity of values, beliefs, and loyalties rather than technical complexity and stir up intense emotions rather than dispassionate analysis.

Yet a general bias toward inclusion builds adaptive capacity for the long run. Inclusion stresses that people in the network of relationships respect one another and gives you more options for future crises because you have established a firm relationship with people who have struggled through something difficult together.