Tracie recommends another HBR article:

HBR: Leadership in a (permanent) crisis

Tracie’s notes on Adaptive Leadership

Notes from HBR Special issue – Summer 2020 (originally published in July-August 2009)

https://hbr.org/2009/07/leadership-in-a-permanent-crisis

 

We are not just in a “rough spell.” Even after the economy recovers, we will still be in unfamiliar territory where many sectors and components of life that will be realigned.

There are two phases in crisis:

1.    Emergency phase

2.    Adaptive phase

NEWS FLASH: We are now out of the emergency phase and well into the adaptive phase. Is your head out of the emergency phase?

The dual goal of adaptive leadership: tackling the current challenge and building adaptability. Adaptability comes not from some sweeping new initiative dreamed up at headquarters but from the accumulation of micro-adaptations originating throughout the organization in response to its many micro-environments.

Some people in the adaptive phase will put enormous pressure on their leaders to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t. People clamor for direction, but they too must make their own adaptive changes in behavior and trajectory. Such is the twisty path of uncertainty.

Key skills of adaptive leaders:

1.    Foster adaptation. Develop “next practices” while excelling at today’s best practices. Confront loyalty to legacy practice and understand that your desire to change them makes you the target of attack.

2.    Embrace disequilibrium. Keeping people in a state that creates enough discomfort to induce change but not so much that they fight, flee, or freeze.

3.    Generate leadership. Giving people at all levels of the organization the opportunity to lead experiments that will help it adapt to changing times.

4.    Self-care. You won’t achieve your leadership aims if you sacrifice yourself by neglecting your needs.

a.    Give yourself permission to be both optimistic and realistic

b.    Find sanctuaries where you can reflect on events and regain perspective

c.    Reach out to confidants with whom you can debrief your workdays and articulate your reasons for taking certain actions.

d.    Bring more of your emotional self to the workplace

e.    Don’t lose yourself in your role

Distinguish the essential from the expendable. What, even if valued by many, must be left behind in order to move forward?

Because you don’t know quite where you’re headed as you build an organization’s adaptability, it’s prudent to avoid grand and detailed strategic plans. **Instead, run numerous experiments.** The zigzagging path of failure and learning will be emblematic of our ability to discover better products and processes.

The need for urgency and the dangers of hunkering down

Short-term fixes – like tightening control, across the board cuts, restructuring – might alleviate short-term fears but drawing on familiar expertise to weather the storm will NOT be enough. Adaptive leaders don’t hunker down. They use turbulence of the present as an opportunity to hit the reset button, change the rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the work people do.

An organization cannot depend solely on its senior management to deal with the challenges. “Fixing” everything for the staff inadvertently lets them off the hook for changing their lives to thrive in the long-term. High stakes and uncertainty remain, but the diminished sense of urgency keeps most patients from focusing the need to adapt. Heart attack example: most cardiac surgery patients resume their old damaging ways after they recover from the urgency of surgery.

A certain amount of disequilibrium is necessary. Without urgency, difficult change becomes far less likely. Too much urgency and they will fight, flee or freeze. The art of leadership in today’s world involves orchestrating the inevitable conflict, chaos and confusion of change so that the disturbance is productive rather than destructive. Sometimes this involves forcing people to confront the disastrous consequences of maintaining the status quo. You must keep your hand on the thermostat of urgency.

 

In order to weather disequilibrium and urgency, we must create and maintain a culture of courageous conversations, distribute leadership responsibility and mobilize everyone to generate solutions.

 

How we deal with change differentiates the top performers from the laggards. But first we must know what should never change. We must grasp the difference between timeless principles and daily practice. Most sustainable change is not about change at all but about discerning and conserving what is previous and essential.

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