Adaptive Leadership and Followership: Effectively Navigating a Changing Workplace Environment
By Zach Bishop
Graduate Student | MA in Organizational Leadership Program
As leaders, we are often asked to guide teams or organizations through challenges big and small. Sometimes, these challenges are clearly defined by stakeholders with known solutions that can be implemented through established organizational procedures. Let me provide an example. I’m a proposal writer and analyst for ed-tech start-up Apptegy, and that means I manage the process of receiving and responding to Requests for Proposals (RFPs). When I run into requirements from an RFP that I can’t answer on my own, I seek understanding from subject matter experts and other leaders within the organization via the normal organizational processes set in place.
Of course, there are occasionally challenges not easily solved using our standard processes, and these moments sometimes require changes in our priorities, beliefs, roles, and values. These are the types of challenges that often leave us feeling unprepared to navigate. Leadership theorist and author Ronald Heifetz calls them Adaptive Challenges. Here are some examples of adaptive challenges I have recently experienced:
Resolving disagreements over restructuring a well-established but inefficient work process
Being told to do my work faster and more efficiently to meet financial/production goals, right after the loss of the highest two performers on my team
Being asked, after only a few months on the job, to step into a role previously filled by a highly regarded leader who abruptly exited, and learning to manage the role’s new expectations and increased responsibility.
I’d like to share what I have learned as I’ve navigated these adaptive challenges. My approach, and this article, is heavily influenced by Heifetz, who developed the Adaptive Leadership Process in his classic text Leadership Without Easy Answers.
Helpful for workplaces in constant change, like the start-up space we might find ourselves in, the Adaptive Leadership process is focused on the leader’s behavior of mobilizing people to address necessary changes. While a leader’s role in this process is important, I believe these principles can be equally helpful for followers to understand as well, because the goal is the same for everyone: adapt. I often find myself navigating both leadership and followership roles, and learning to adapt intentionally has been useful for me.
Adaptive Challenges – What Are They, and How to Solve Them?
Coined by Heifetz, adaptive challenges are defined by their ambiguity – they are not clear cut, and solutions are not easy to identify. These problems cannot be solved by a leader’s authority or expertise. As humans, our natural tendency is to want to be in control, and therefore a lack of control is hard to accept. But as leaders navigate these adaptive challenges, we are required to put aside our desire to control, and ultimately offer our team members agency and choice. In other words, a single leader cannot define and decide the outcome of an adaptive challenge. Instead, the leader offers the team agency and access to the challenge and then encourages that team to define the challenge and offer solutions.
The Adaptive Leadership Process: Leadership Behaviors That Mobilize
It is important to remember that the goal of adaptive leadership is to encourage others to change and to learn new behaviors so that they may effectively meet their challenges and grow in the process (Heifetz, 1994; Northouse, 2021). With that said, I’d like to focus on four of Heifetz’s leadership behaviors necessary to adaptive leadership that are serving me well:
“Getting on the Balcony”
We’ve all been witness to a heated team discussion with tempers flaring and harsh opinions and negativity clouding up the room. In the adaptive leadership model, these moments are when the leader must take a trip to the balcony, to step away mentally or physically in order to gain perspective. A little distance helps us read a room, pay attention to body language, and hear the questions not being asked. Taking time to see the big picture before engaging further helps the leader and followers move forward with clarity. Sometimes, this can happen multiple times a day, but it always begins with pausing. We have to stop our work for a moment and consider a wider perspective before reengaging.
Identify the Adaptive Challenge
Determining if the challenge is an adaptive one requires us to determine whether it strikes at the core feelings and thoughts of others. In other words, we must have the insight and awareness to recognize when something is not right. A popular archetype of an adaptive challenge is a gap between espoused values and actual behavior. An amusing metaphor of this is the “Animal Kingdom Dad.” This guy walks around Disney’s Animal Kingdom. He’s red in the face, shouting at his kids, angry at his wife, complaining about crowds – all while sporting a bright red shirt that says “Hakuna Matata! No Worries!” His shirt communicates one value, while his behavior expresses something quite different. While the example is funny, I’ve seen very similar instances of that disconnect where the effect is a confused and disgruntled team rather than an unhappy family. Identifying those disconnects is essential for successful navigation of an adaptive challenge.
Regulate Distress
We all have a psychological need for consistency – this is why even a good change like a big family move to an exciting new place is so stressful and emotionally fraught. Where this becomes problematic is when there is an overload of stress, anxiety, or other stressors, to the point where feelings debilitate people. As professionals, we know when emotion becomes debilitating – for me, this manifests itself in a feeling of being frozen, and not knowing what to do next. As leaders, we shouldn’t shy away from calling out the need for change – this is a necessary first step. However, Heifetz recommends that we aim to regulate those negative emotions and feelings that naturally come with change. There are a couple of key ways to do this.
First, we must create a holding environment or a safe space for employees to work out solutions to tricky problems. For me, this is the office of a trusted supervisor at work. In that office, I feel safe to discuss challenges with my work and think about positive ways to move forward. Second, we should establish productive norms that work for us. As a young professional or anyone new to an organization knows, having conversations about unproductive norms is scary. Maybe those norms have been set by leaders in high authority, or maybe they are so deeply engrained in the culture that it’s hard to find the root of the issue. When we find ourselves in that situation, we should remember that we cannot fully understand the how if we cannot understand the why. Establishing a productive way forward helps regulate distress.
Maintain Disciplined Attention
Maintaining disciplined attention is all about staying focused on the change. This mean helping people address change, not avoid it, as is our natural tendency. Avoidance behaviors come in all shapes and sizes. We ignore the problem, blame leadership and teammates, attack anyone who actually wants to work on the problem, pretend (unsuccessfully) that the problem doesn’t exist, and work REALLY hard on everything else that is completely unrelated to that issue we are avoiding. Rather than maintaining disciplined attention on solving things, we create tasks and accomplish other really unhelpful work. When this occurs, the role of an adaptive leader is to turn people’s attention back to the problem at hand.
Followership: Doing The Adaptive Work
Where adaptive leadership behaviors set up an ideal environment in which to address adaptive challenges, adaptive work is the effort that followers must enact to bring about the needed change. As I’ve mentioned, I’m a young professional navigating multiple spaces ever changing from leading to following. The adaptive leadership model informs how I can both lead and follow and helps me to better understand my role in each situation. When I successfully “get on the balcony” and look at things with a new perspective, I am more successful. When I identify gaps in my values and behaviors and work to reduce those gaps, I am more successful. When I regulate my own emotions, I am more successful. When I maintain disciplined attention, I am more successful. In my role, being an effective team player looks like establishing productive norms within my team without shaming and blaming, and by imagining an ideal way forward for everyone involved.
