The Importance of Adaptive Leadership in Current Times
Through various conversations with business leaders and colleagues shaping human resource strategies, I’ve observed the significance and impact of adaptive leadership in today’s challenging times. It has become a critical competency to build trust, encourage learning, contain fear, and facilitate continuous team evolution.
Uncertainty is Not an Enemy of Success
In difficult times, people don’t seek perfect leaders; they look for present, authentic, and committed leaders. Those who dare to walk with their teams even when the path isn’t clear.
Traditional leadership models, based on prediction, linear planning, and control, are no longer sufficient. Today, the difference between a team that withstands the storm and one that crumbles lies in leadership’s ability to adapt and strategically respond to change.
Critical Traits in a New Normal
In this new normal, adaptability, agility, and meaningful learning are critical. As McKinsey (2022) points out in their post-pandemic analyses, both individuals and leaders need not just intelligence but also emotional intelligence and adaptability as “must-haves” in developing competencies amidst the now commonplace uncertainty.
The Pressure of the Unexpected
With environmental volatility becoming a constant, organizations face simultaneous technological disruptions, social transformations, political tensions, and global economic changes that test their adaptability and survival capacity.
Leaders Under Pressure
In the face of an unpredictable environment, leaders encounter multiple challenges. Each factor directly influences organizational climate and internal/external perceptions of stability.
- Managing fear: Fear of the unknown paralyzes people and blocks creativity, commitment, and innovation.
- Organizational agility challenge: The speed at which a company can redefine priorities, adjust processes, or reinvent its offer is crucial for its continuity.
- Maintaining team cohesion: Keeping the team together amid ambiguity, pressure, and emotional wear and tear.
- Political and social environment: Introduces additional complexities like regulatory changes, social movements, institutional trust crises, and ideological polarization.
The Leader as a Psychological Safety Generator
In times of uncertainty, effective leadership isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about knowing how to ask the right questions and emotionally contain the team. This is where psychological safety comes into play.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard professor pioneering this field, in her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (2018), defines psychological safety as the shared belief that the team is a safe space to take interpersonal risks.
This means people can express ideas, doubts, and mistakes without fear of reprisal or judgment. A leader promoting this culture safeguards the team’s emotional well-being and unlocks their creative potential, resilience, and learning capacity.
Psychological safety is built through practices, not just words: active listening, leading with vulnerability, encouraging participation at all levels, recognizing effort beyond results, and consistently upholding values of inclusivity, respect, and collaboration.
The Power of Adaptive Leadership
The concept of adaptive leadership was developed by Ronald Heifetz, founder of the Public Leadership Center at Harvard. In his book Leadership on the Edge: How to Achieve Your Goals in an Uncertain World (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009), he proposes an approach centered on tackling complex challenges through learning, unlearning, and mobilizing others.
Unlike technical leadership that applies known solutions to known problems, adaptive leadership confronts unprecedented challenges, where there’s no clear solution or authority with all the answers. In these cases, the leader must involve their team in reflection, decision-making, and execution.
Five Crucial Behaviors of Adaptive Leadership
- Practice strategic listening: An adaptive leader listens more than they speak. They pay attention to the team’s emotions, market signals, and emerging trends, enabling them to act with greater empathy and foresight.
- Cultivate cognitive humility: Recognizing you don’t have absolute truth is a strength, not a weakness. An adaptive leader promotes critical thinking, celebrates curiosity, and admits when they need support. This attitude fosters continuous organizational learning.
- Encourage responsible experimentation: In uncertain environments, controlled risks are preferable to waiting for perfection. An adaptive leader promotes a culture of trial and error, where failure is learned from without punishment and learning is celebrated.
- Build meaningful narratives: Uncertainty generates anxiety when people don’t understand what’s happening. An adaptive leader communicates clearly, honestly, and humanely, constructing inspiring narratives that give meaning to change, align the team, and reinforce trust.
- Manage team emotional energy: An adaptive leader manages emotions alongside strategies and projects. A key behavior is monitoring emotional climate, intervening when stress exceeds healthy limits, and ensuring spaces for individual and collective recovery.
Essentially, adaptive leadership doesn’t aim to “save” the organization with heroic responses; instead, it focuses on creating conditions for harmonious, coordinated, and aligned evolution for everyone.
