Adaptive Leadership: A model for meeting the most difficult challenges

1. Adaptive Leadership:A model for meeting the most difficult challenges From Adaptive Leadership: Heifetz and Linsky

2. The Need for New, Adaptive Leadership • Complex, Significant Challenges • Myth that Better Execution and Improving Operations Alone will Accomplish Needed Results

3. Leadership Level and Associated Tasks Facing adaptive challenge, creating meaning. Innovation, change, dealing with paradigm shifts Wholistically framing issues, creating context for dialogue, managing creative conflict and tension. Stimulating/consolidating organizational learning Adaptive Leadership, Relational Dialogue Social Leadership Leadership Level III Inter-Personal Influence Relationship-Based Leadership Leadership Level II Creating commitment, alignment, motivation, spirit, teamwork, and political skill Personal Dominance Leader-Based Leadership Leadership Level I Setting direction, priorities, mission, vision, goals, purpose and taking immediate action Adapted from Drath and Heifetz

4. Adaptive Leadership Challenges “challenges for which there are no simple, painless solutions-problems that require us to learn new ways… uncompetitive industry, drug abuse, poverty, poor public education, environmental hazards…” Leadership Without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz, p. 2

5. Adaptive Leadership Challenges… • “Making progress on these problems demands not just someone who provides answers on high, but changes in our attitudes, behavior, and values. To meet challenges such as these, we need a different idea of leadership and a new social contract that promote our adaptive capacities, rather than inappropriate expectations of authority.” Leadership Without Easy Answers, p. 2

6. Comfortable Authoritarian “Equilibrium” Power and trust given to an authority in return for services that maintain tolerable levels of stress: • Protection • Safety • Order • Position, roles, belonging, norms, conflict • Direction • Group and individual activity, needs met

7. vs. The leadership challenges are complex: there is no one “right” answer Real risk must be balanced against reward The leader does not impose a solution: the final solution emerges from the dialogue of all the parties All parties learn from one another—and learn more about the situation in the process Everyone must adapt their perspective in order for a solution to emerge

8. Adaptive vs. Technical Challenge Problem/Definition Solution Solver Technical clear Known/Clear Expert Mixed clear Partially known Expert+group Adaptive Unclear Unknown All, but > group

9. Adaptive Learning Adaptive challenge Too hot! Limit of tolerance } Productive distress Disequilibrium Threshold of learning Work avoidance Technicalproblem Time Source: Heifetz & Linsky: Leadership on the Line, 2002

10. Center for Creative Leadership Research on Problem Types • Technical Challenges: 43% -solvable using current techniques • Adaptive Challenges: 37% -solvable only by collectively developing significantly different perspectives and approaches • Critical Challenges: 10% -in which crisis response is demanded

11. Albert O. Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction: Conditions versus Problems • Leadership challenge to convert perception of immutable, “Intractable Conditions” that cannot be modified (the poor will always be with us) to “Actionable Problems” that have more palpable, definable, attackable characteristics.

12. Diagnosing the Challenge • The System: Structure, Culture, Processes • The Challenge: Cycle of Failure, Dependency on Authority, Listen Underneath, Examine Archetypes • Diagnose the Political Landscape: Values, Loyalties, Who will Loose, Where are the Alliances.

13. Adaptive Leadership Tasks • Discern Adaptive vs Technical Challenges • Identify and “Tag” the Adaptive Challenge • Focus and Discipline Attention • Develop/Share Responsibility • Regulate Disequilibrium • Infuse the Work with Meaning and Promise • Pass It On; Teach a Culture of Adaptive Leadership, Build Adaptive Capacity

14. Leadership On the Line: Pain of Change • “The dangers of exercising leadership derive from the nature of the problems for which leadership is necessary. Adaptive change stimulates resistance- it challenges people’s habits, beliefs, and values. It asks them to take a loss, experience uncertainty, and even express disloyalty to people and cultures… loss, disloyalty, feeling incompetent… No wonder people resist.”

15. The Dangers Adaptive Leaders Face • Marginalization • Diversion • Attack • Seduction • Loss

16. Adaptive Leadership Strategies • Get on the balcony • Think politically • Maintain “sacred heart” • Orchestrate the process • Anchor yourself • Hold steady • Manage • your hungers

17. “Getting on the Balcony” Gain a wholistic perspective Systems thinking Technical vs. Adaptive Work Simultaneously on the dance floor and above it on the balcony Observe patterns and people Discern true meanings and feelings, particularly of authority figures; “song beneath the words” Personal reflection

18. “Thinking Politically” Dance the relationship dance Encourage supporters Stay close to opponents Court the undecided Acknowledge the loss- uncertainty, disloyalty, and incompetence- change brings Allow time for transition but leave behind those that cannot make the change

19. “Orchestrating the Process, Particularly Conflict” Establish safe, stress-ful holding environment, like a pressure cooker Moderate temperature to pace work progress Let issues ripen when needed Balance pain of loss with positive possibility of change for their future Give the work back to the people Make interventions short and simple Don’t take personal attacks personally

20. “Hold Steady!” • Take the heat • Patiently let issues ripen • Focus attention on the issues • Ask lots of real tough questions • Suspend your reality • ENCOURAGE RISK AND EXPERIMENTATION • Do you have a domestic strength or industrial strength pressure cooker in your community, organization, your team, your family, or your own ego?

21. “Manage Your Hungers” Respect the ready availability of and need for power, control, affirmation and importance Intimacy and delight needs must be met appropriately Manage your grandiosity remembering people see you more in your role than as a human person Use transitional rituals to demarcate your roles

22. “Anchor Yourself” Don’t confuse one’s self with one’s professional role Identify a truly trustworthy confidant who can really tell you what you need to hear Do not use allies as confidants Find a sanctuary for retreat, rejuvenation, and personal reflection Put yourself on the line in leading again!

23. Maintaining “Sacred Heart” Quality of Heart Becomes Dressed Up As: Innocence Cynicism Realism Curiosity Arrogance Authoritative Knowledge Compassion Callousness The “thick skin” of experience

24. Learning Methods for Adaptive Leadership • “Case in point” • Classroom as “studio laboratory” • Success and failure stories sharing and analysis • Owning up to your part of the mess • “Empathic Imagination” and compassion development • Intense monitoring of feelings and reflection • Journaling • Simulations • Personal Assessments- 360 degree feedback • Coaching • Leadership Development Planning • Current situation challenge, support, re-assessment • “The Fog” and other metaphors

25. Your Adaptive Leadership Challenges • What are two adaptive leadership challenges you face and what is your role in catalyzing relational dialogue and adaptive learning to solve them?

26. Sentinel Leadership Texts: Adaptive Learning and Dialogue • The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Alexander Grashow 2009 • Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, 2002 • Leadership Without Easy Answers, by Ronald Heifetz, 1994- 13TH Printing, multiple languages • The Deep Blue Sea: Rethinking the Source of Leadership, by Wilfred Drath, 2001 • Leadership Can be Taught, by Daloz Parks, 2005 • Real Leadership, Dean Williams, 2005.