September 7, 2020
by Michael Callier.
I recently completed a two-year stint as in-house counsel for a a multi-billion dollar company in the midst of enterprise-wide organizational change. I wore a few hats during my time there, including taking on General Counsel duties for the better part of a year. A crucial part of my remit was to better integrate the legal function with the business so that we could get in front of legal issues rather than playing catch-up. To achieve that integration, we deployed training and legal operations systems but, more importantly, we developed stronger relationships with business stakeholders and a deeper understanding of their needs. I leveraged Adaptive Leadership throughout our change effort. Adaptive Leadership is an approach that helps organizations and individuals adapt and thrive during change initiatives. It emerged from more than thirty years of research at Harvard University by Dr. Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, co-authors of Leadership on the Line and The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Adaptive Leadership has helped me tremendously and so I have provided a brief overview and resources to learn more with the hope that it will help you too.
I also created a short, 3-minute about Adaptive Leadership (above). Please check it out and let me know your thoughts.
Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges. Adaptive leadership distinguishes technical challenges from adaptive challenges. Technical challenges are clearly defined and can be resolved through exercise of positional authority or subject-matter expertise, like a smart and experienced attorney drafting a contract. Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, have unclear problem definitions, unclear solutions and can only be resolved through comprehensive stakeholder engagement and teamwork. Figuring out how to outsource a company’s legal function without displacing valued employees would be an adaptive challenge. To solve the problem, stakeholder priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties must be addressed and sometimes rearranged. As a part of the process, adaptive leaders mobilize units of people to engage in collective learning, tolerate the loss that comes with change and generate the capacity to recover and thrive.
Elements to Adaptive Change. To successfully deploy this framework, adaptive leaders must:
- Build on and honor the past while looking to the future. Many times, change implementors blame the past in order to support the narrative for change. That technique inevitably blames people too. When people feel blamed, they disengage and resist change, reducing the likelihood of overall success.
- Encourage experimentation and the mindset that goes with it. Doing so requires that we put a positive spin on failure and re-frame it as a valuable learning opportunity.
- Value diversity of people and thought by engaging opposing perspectives and creating an environment for dialogue.
- Recognize and show empathy for those experiencing the loss associated with change and make time for mourning.
- Exercise and encourage patience because adaptive challenges take time and require stamina to cross the finish line.
Core Competencies. Adaptive Leadership calls for four key competencies:
- Scoping the situation to distinguish between technical and adaptive challenges. Scoping requires that leaders navigate emotionally charged situations grounded in competing values, beliefs and loyalties. A hallmark sign of an adaptive challenges is that experts and traditional problem-solving methods have repeatedly tried but failed to solve the problem.
- Diagnosing the environment to identify and understand systems and subsystems of people, process and technology, the status quo, and the factions that benefit from and will defend the status quo. This includes taking steps to understand an environment’s cultural norms, folklore and rituals. Diagnosing the environment is a precursor to diagnosing the adaptive challenge. Similar to the medical field, diagnosis comes before the cure.
- Mobilizing organizations and communities to action. Doing so requires that leaders understand how stakeholders interpret the challenge, design effective interventions to educate stakeholders, act politically – including protecting and engaging voices of dissent – orchestrate productive conflicts and build an adaptive culture.
- Evaluating the results of change initiatives in order to continuously learn, innovate and pivot when necessary.
Tools. The Adaptive Leadership framework offers a number of different tools to navigate adaptive challenges. Some of my favorites are related to container building. Containers are the social environments where stakeholders and organizations engage in collective learning, decision-making and problem-solving. Working agreements – written standards that reflect the group’s operating procedures, values and vision – are great tools to keep the container on track. Self-management within a container is also crucial so adaptive leaders utilize and encourage tools like reflection, re-framing and meditation.
You can learn more about Adaptive Leadership from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009) by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow.