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How Adaptive Leadership Leads to Business Success

Last Updated January 16, 2020

A man standing at the end of a long board table with several co-workers sitting around it while he is holding some papers and giving a presentation beside a large whiteboard.

Adaptive leadership is the key to unlocking a company’s potential.

Business executives who want to excel as leaders can face many challenges in both setting ambitious goals and motivating employees to meet them.

Adaptive leadership offers a practical path to solving business issues while challenging the traditional systems that have dominated many organizations for decades.

Leaders who practice an adaptive style can learn to separate important aspects of a business operation from what can be discarded. By focusing on the value added to the business rather than traditional hierarchy, they learn to identify and capitalize on smart risks while avoiding wasteful distractions.

Key Points of Adaptive Leadership

The thinking behind adaptive leadership evolved over three decades of study at Harvard University by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky. The two researched the cutting edge of innovative management training and development.

The development of the practice focused on a business landscape that had become global in nature and where change proved both inevitable and rapid. The duo wanted a leadership management approach that equipped leaders to motivate workers to tackle tough challenges.

People who use adaptive leadership tend to see organizations not as mechanical, rigid structures but as systems where everyone constantly interacts and impacts each other. As the business climate changes, so must employees, business processes and leadership’s approach.

Adaptive Leadership vs. Traditional Methods

In practice, adaptive leadership focuses more on leadership as a practice than as a position. For a manager using adaptive leadership, situations constantly evolve and require both flexibility and innovation.

Here are some of the areas where adaptive leaderships differs in approach to more traditional management.

  • Job duties for employees remain broad-based, allowing for flexibility, as opposed to detailed, ironclad job duty lists.
  • Roles within an organization are fluid – for example, one person can fill in for another if a situation warrants. This approach differs from static job duties for employees.
  • Communications are open and employees are encouraged to form their own networks to facilitate better sharing of information, as opposed to controlled communication from the top down.
  • Policies encourage people to innovate and find solutions, as opposed to rules that provide strict guidelines on what employees can and cannot do.
  • Organizational structures are temporary and fluid to meet the immediate situation, as opposed to bureaucratic and regimented departments that work separately.
  • While a ranking structure is in place, influence is granted to people who demonstrate an ability to add value to a product or process, as opposed to top-down management structure.

Challenges and Successes

The challenge with adaptive leadership is that it often runs contrary to traditional thinking or the usual defined roles for leaders and employees. However, there have been success stories that can provide inspiration.

For example, Cheryl Biron, writing in Inc., shared how adaptive leadership helped her get the best performance from her employees. Biron is president and CEO of One Horn Transportation, a New Jersey-based freight brokerage that ships goods across the United States and Canada.

Noting that management strategies in the 1990s and early 2000s often involved fear and intimidation, Biron took a different approach when running her own company.

For example, Biron observed that some employees want to share personal information and become closer to co-workers, while others are all business. “I take my cues from each employee and manage them accordingly so that I can elicit their best performance,” Biron wrote.

Those who want interpersonal bonds “appreciate my genuine interest in their lives and successes. For the others who just want to get down to business, I do just that,” she wrote.

Travis Bradberry, author of “Emotional Intelligence 2.0,” wrote in Forbes that adaptive leaders show strong emotional intelligence such as that demonstrated by Biron. They also don’t shy away from hearing the truth, he wrote, which makes those who deliver the message feel respected and valued.

Adaptive leadership can provide chief executives and others in influential positions the opportunity to maximize the skills and potential of employees, as well as attain company goals.

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