Adaptive Leadership Style
Adaptive leadership is a style of leadership that emphasizes the importance of each and every person and role within the company. Adaptive leadership views the organization as an ever-changing, living organization, where employees can learn, adapt, and grow. Adaptive leaders mobilize people towards a common goal and also have the courage to experiment with new ideas and approaches. Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing groups of people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. Learn how to adopt this style and how to become an adaptive leader!
What is Adaptive Leadership?
The term is derived from evolutionary biology and it means ‘getting adapted to the changes for survival’. All types of organizations are facing the need to survive in ever-increasingly complex environments. Adaptive leadership from an organization's context refers to shaping and shifting the organization to a form that is meaningful and relevant to a changing environment. An adaptive leader should be able to discard unnecessary elements, keep essential ones, and must create a new set of organizational elements that can empower the organization to deal with the change.
What is Adaptive Leadership Style?
The main aim of the Adaptive Leadership Style is to enable organizations to adapt to the external and internal pressures for change. It is the style with which this is achieved that makes the evolution of this approach relevant. Modern organizations are very complex and have their own leadership challenges. The competitive world in which they need to exist, survive and thrive in fast-changing due to globalization and rapid technological advances triggered by fast-developing economies all across the globe. To tackle modern leadership issues, we need an adaptive leadership style that draws on the experience and expertise of everyone in an organization to contribute to the survival of the organization. In a nutshell, it is the ability to take on the gradual but meaningful process of adaptation, and the leadership style to achieve this is known as Adaptive Leadership Style.
Principles of Adaptive Leadership:
The principles of adaptive leadership encourage the engagement of followers to help the organization adapt to its environment. Given below are the principles of adaptive management:
1. Vision & Purpose of Organization: The first principle is a clear understanding of the underlying purpose of the organization. An adaptive leader must articulate a clear vision of the organization to the employees aligning the values of the organization with the personal values of your employees. This helps create a shared sense of purpose that motivates employees by giving them an ideal mission to strive for.
2. The utilization of people skills/mix/experience in assisting with adaptation based on commitment and trust between the leader and followers. Adaptive leaders must involve employees in the decision-making process and provide them flexibility over how they perform their work.
3. Adaptive leaders must be able to tolerate ambiguity and provide directions, support, opportunities, coaching, mentoring training, and feedback to one’s followers. This allows your employees to grow professionally and achieve a sense of mastery in their work. It may also bolster their self-esteem and give them a renewed sense of purpose.
4. Adaptive leader provides the team members with the freedom to act. Such a leader rewards employees' for their success and achievements. Rewarding employees gives them a sense of accomplishment and makes them feel part of an organization that cares about them.
Characteristics of Adaptive Leaders:
- Leaders are capable of adapting to the changes in the internal atmosphere of an organization
- Leaders are flexible and capable of accommodating to the changing environment
- Leaders are aware of the contextual environment and make sure that their decisions are relevant with respect to the time and space
- Leaders provide clear direction with committed ambition
- Leaders are able to manage their lusts
- Leaders apply their perceptual knowledge in a given context to improve the productivity of their team
- Adaptive leadership formulates feasible alternatives for a problem and leads the team with a selected mode of action.
- Adaptive leadership considers multiple interpretations of a problem
- Adaptive leadership favors the self-directedness of employees so that they can solve their own problems
- Adaptive leaders thrive in never-been-done-before settings
- Leaders exert strategic influence on their environment
- Leaders are active in pursuing opportunities for the organization
- Leaders entertain diverse views and opinions
- Leaders are willing to experiment, take calculated risks
- Leaders encourage innovation
Advantages of Adaptive Leadership:
- This leadership style is highly effective in situations where the variables undergo continuous changes because traditional strategies become limited in these cases.
- This type of leadership takes up an algorithmic approach involving better policies to cope with every given situation and a combat-ready attitude towards changes.
- Adaptive leadership connects instability with core values and nourishes a culture that considers the changes as well as the difference in opinions within the subjects.
- This style requires great analytical flairs of the leader or members to set team goals and trace the ways to accomplish the same using the given infrastructure and within a given time limit.
Book to Reference:
“The Practice of Adaptive Leadership” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky (2009) is a great book for the learners who want to explore this approach further.
Adaptive leadership has a profound impact on the well-being and performance of the workforce. It is a style that helps to embed a Positive Workplace Culture into organizations.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
There are four characteristics of leadership that help us to understand the character of leadership as a concept. 1. Leadership is a process, 2. Leadership involves influence, 3. Leadership always occurs in a group context and 4. Leadership involves goal attainment. These are the four components that make up the character of the 'leadership' term and help us to define the leadership concept. All of these components of leadership have common characteristics.
-
The ten most important qualities that define a good leader are self-awareness, interpersonal and communication skills, ethical values, organizational consciousness, self-confidence, adaptability and flexibility, imagination and creativity, focus & result-orientation, continuous self-development and accountability and ownership for his actions. These ten qualities of leadership every good leader should possess to a certain extent and must continually strive to develop them.
-
Authoritarian Leadership Style
Although generally considered as a traditional, outdated, and non-preferred style of leadership, the autocratic style still can be used effectively in certain situations. It is a leadership style characterized by individual absolute control over a group. If you work for an autocratic leader, your job is usually to do what you're told. Learn more about this style and situations where this could be an effective style to use and when to avoid this type of approach. Analyze the characteristics of this style to evaluate if your followers consider you an authoritarian leader!
-
Power is the ability to exercise influence or control over others. Leadership involves authority and it is very important for leaders to understand what type of power they're using. The 5 Types of Power in Leadership are Coercive power, expert power, legitimate power, referent power, and reward power. Authority is the right to command and extract obedience from others. It comes from the organization and it allows the leader to use power.
-
Bureaucratic leadership relies on a clear chain of command and strict regulations. Bureaucratic leadership style is a very decent style for work involving serious safety risks, such as handling toxic substances, moving large objects. The focus is on compliance with rules and laid down procedures to make sure that the group is doing their job correctly and safely. Learn some advantages and disadvantages of this style and situations in which this style could prove to be effective.
-
Adaptive leadership is a style of leadership that emphasizes the importance of each and every person and role within the company. Adaptive leadership views the organization as an ever-changing, living organization, where employees can learn, adapt, and grow. Adaptive leaders mobilize people towards a common goal and also have the courage to experiment with new ideas and approaches. Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing groups of people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. Learn how to adopt this style and how to become an adaptive leader!
-
Leadership has been defined in different ways by different sets of scholars. In very simple terms leadership can be defined as the skill of a person to influence an individual or a group for achievement of a goal in a given situation. One can use different dimensions and perspectives to define leadership. Through the evolution of leadership thought, leadership has been defined in various ways discussed here.
-
We define Lean as the systematic elimination of waste through a continual effort to decrease inefficiency; the lean leader strives to create a more efficient organization. Lean leadership is a philosophy. It is a consistent way of thinking and being in your role as a leader. The focus of this approach is on raising new leaders and help their team embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Learn what we mean by lean leadership style and its principles.
-
Laissez-faire is a style of leadership that affords the group members a great deal of independence. Tasks are delegated to the group members and they are responsible to see the project through to fruition. Research has shown that this style of leadership leads to the lowest levels of productivity. This article explains this style and covers the implications of having a hands-off approach and the situations where this style could be effective.
-
Frederick Winslow Taylor started the “Scientific Management Movement”, and attempted to study the work process scientifically. Scientific management, also called Taylorism, was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. It is a system for increasing the efficiency of manpower to its maximum potential and streamlining production to improve efficiency. This article explores this theory in more detail.
