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Talent Management Perspectives

Published June 2009

Now’s the Time to Foster Adaptive Leadership

  Agatha Gilmore

It's easy enough to plan for the future when the future is discernible. But when times are tough and the outlook is cloudy, the best thing a leader can do is plan to be flexible.

"It's our view that the single most important capacity in people, particularly in the times in which we are living, is the capacity to adapt to new realities," said Marty Linsky, co-founder and principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates and co-author of the new book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.

"There's tremendous pressure in [organizations] to hunker down because we can live with the hope — which we would call the fantasy — that this will all blow over, and things will be OK," Linsky explained. "There's a lot of systemic pressure to live in that fantasy because it's very comforting to think we can return to what we know well and what has worked for us in the past. But the reality is, that's not the case."

Those leaders who will be successful will exhibit the following characteristics and behaviors, according to Linsky:

1.    A blend of optimism and realism: "We think one of the paradoxes of exercising leadership is you have to be both powerfully optimistic and brutally realistic at the same time," Linsky said. "Most people think you have to choose between those two, but we believe it's important for people in senior authority roles to hold those two together. The optimism prevents the realism from becoming cynical, and the realism prevents the optimism from becoming naive."

To demonstrate how these two qualities play out in a business context, Linsky cited recent actions by General Electric CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt. GE had prided itself on having not cut its dividend since 1938; yet, to preserve cash in the face of a prolonged recession, Immelt did just that.

"It was a huge risk and anxiety-provoking event," Linsky explained. "[But] the next day, he wrote a check for $50,000 of GE stock. What he was saying to people is that he believes in the future."

2.    Empathy: "Concentrate not just on executing well — which is OK when you have a sense of what the future is — but on adapting and helping people go through the process of adaptation," Linsky said. Leaders should be aware of their employees' needs and concerns and walk them through any organizational changes.

3.    An experimental mindset: "Instead of orienting — as most people in senior positions do — to solve problems, orient yourself to run experiments," Linsky explained. "Think about initiatives as experiments rather than solutions because that's what they really are: They're best guesses when the future is uncertain."

Adopting this approach could have deep bottom-line impact.

"If you can take an experimental mindset, that enables you to treat a lack of success as a learning opportunity, not as a failure, and make midcourse corrections," Linsky said. "If you treat it as a solution, you become overcommitted to it in uncertain and rapidly changing times. That's not a great idea."

4.    Trade autonomy for interdependence: "We live in a world — because of communications, because of technology — where preserving your own autonomy and the protection of information is no longer realistic," Linsky said. "So one of the chief behaviors we work with organizations to make part of their culture is to think more interdependently. Particularly now, we're working with organizations to work across silos and to create a much greater sense of shared responsibility in the organization as a whole."     

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