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!
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.
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.
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.
“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.
A good leadership style is something that every effective leader must have in order to succeed, but identifying what that entails or does not entails might be difficult to understand. Most of the research on leadership focuses on the exemplary, best practices, and positive attributes of effective and successful leaders. This article talks about a new approach to learn leadership using lessons from bad leadership. That is the lessons to be learned by examining leaders who have not effectively exercised their power, authority, or influence.
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.
Narcissistic leadership is a leadership style in which the leader is only interested in him. Narcissists are good for companies that need people with vision and the courage to take them in new directions. Such leaders sometime might be highly successful, but is it a style to be followed. Learn the various types of narcissistic leadership and the characteristics of such leaders.
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.
Facilitative Leadership is all about involving the employees in the decision-making process at all levels enhancing their sense of ownership, responsibility, and motivation. Facilitative leadership style uses a number of indirect communication patterns to help the group reach consensus and build commitment for the decision taken. To be effective in modern organizations, managers need to become facilitative leaders, learn what it means to be a one.
Charles Darwin had once commented that “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” Agility means the capability of rapidly and efficiently adapting to changes and recently, agility has been applied in the context of software development, agile enterprise, and agile leadership. Agile leaders play an important, even essential, role in scaling agility in an organization. Understand how being an agile leader helps in effectively catalyzing organizational change.
This style is characterized by leaders making decisions for others and expecting followers to follow instructions. The directive leader is adept at giving instructions, setting expectations, and establishing timelines and performance standards. However, it is possible for the same leaders to display both directive and supportive behavior as per the demands of the situation.
Have you ever resonated that there seem to be as many different ways to lead people as there have been great leaders? When we recall the success of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte to Steve Jobs and Jack Welch, we also notice that they all used different approaches that were suitable to their specific situations and circumstances. Over the last century, researchers and psychologists have developed simple ways to describe the “Styles of leadership” and in this section, we will explore these commonly known leadership styles.
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