“Good leaders cultivate honest speech; they love advisors who tell them the truth.”
– Proverbs 16:13 (MSG)
Before we can have clarity on where we are going to get to solutions, we need to first be aware of where we are. As leaders, we can be problem solvers. But sometimes we need to stop and ask if we are solving the right problems. Sometimes we can just be addressing surface issues and not getting to root issues. When this happens nothing ever really gets solved.
Tom is a leader of a nonprofit organization. However, they have been struggling with growth. The number of people seeking their services is going down and so are contributions. Volunteers are apathetic and staff morale is low. Tom is an action-oriented leader. He keeps coming up with new programs to implement, but it is not creating movement. Tom may be addressing an adaptive challenge with technical solutions, which is not working.
In the book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, the authors explain that there is a difference between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges have a clear problem and solutions and take authority to get it done. Whereas with adaptive challenges, the problem and solutions are not easily identified. It takes learning and involving others to get to the real problem and solutions. They provide four common patterns of adaptive challenges. Can you relate to any of these patterns?
Gap Between Espoused Values and Behavior
Sometimes we can say that we have a value, but our behavior shows otherwise. For example, an organization may say that it values collaboration, but then it rewards individual contributions of employees. Another example I often see is with people in a new leadership position. They say they value empowering their team, but their behaviors show that they are micromanaging. Our default is to do what brought us success in the past and so we easily fall into behaviors that have seemed to always work. But, new adaptive challenges may require a new value and new behavior with it.
Engage people one on one in your organization to discuss a change that needs to happen. From their perspective, why is the organization or even themselves not engaged in making the change happen?
Competing Commitments
Sometimes to move through an adaptive challenge, there can be numerous commitments, but not all of them can happen. Ultimately a decision must be made based on what is best for the overall mission of the organization. For example, each department head feels that they need more staff. Who should get the added hires? A church may be looking at keeping traditional parts of their worship services but also adding new elements. Because of sensing the conflict, an organization may not address it or seek to compromise without considering the bigger picture of the mission.
Bring your team together and acknowledge verbally any competing commitments. Keep focused on the commitments, not the people. How will the decision be made?
Speaking the Unspeakable
In meetings, there can be what is being said, but there can also be what people are thinking. Sometimes there are “elephants in the room” no one is willing to voice. When this happens, organizations don’t address important issues that could lead to their downfall. It takes risks to voice the unspeakable out loud. As a leader, do you create a safe place for this to happen? Or do you “kill the messenger” by shutting the person down either verbally or through your nonverbal actions?
In one organization, the CEO decided to do dedicated team development of their leadership team so that trust could be built. This resulted in being able to have candid conversations about their culture and led to a major boost in staff morale.
Can you have candid conversations and healthy conflict in your team? As a leader, your behavior and responses have a big impact on how willing people are to be open. Are you willing to seek and apply feedback about this?
Work Avoidance
Change can be uncomfortable, and so we can also work towards ways to avoid it. In one organization, I observed how they used sarcasm and jokes to avoid the real issue. Also, leadership was very good at delegating problems to employees who had no training or authority to deal with the issue. They also focused work time and energy on fixing technical issues where they had an expertise instead of addressing the real adaptive issue.
What work avoidance issues do you see in your team or organization?
Adaptive leadership takes courage. It can be easy to do what we have always done, not address anything that will bring conflict or require a hard decision, keep uncomfortable truths silent, or to keep busy with no real impact. We can all fall into the above patterns and sometimes not even recognize it. As a leader, I encourage you to step back and observe. How can you grow in adaptive leadership?