This is the last in a series of blog posts on what many are calling The Great Reopening. To see the rest, keep scrolling!
We’re in the process of adapting to a new reality. Organizational leaders have important roles in this transition. Unfortunately, many leaders will adopt the wrong paradigm for understanding this role. They may feel they need to make the right assessment of the situation and then to make the right decision. But there is no right assessment, and there is no right decision. Instead, it’s a good time for leaders to consider Heifetz’ paradigm of adaptive leadership, as spelled out in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. In short, leaders should concern themselves with “getting people to clarify what matters most, in what balance, [and] with what trade-offs,” and create the right forums for the “inclusion of competing value perspectives.” Here are some key characteristics of an adaptive leadership process:
Transparent
Providing transparency into organizational decision-making communicates trust to members of an organization and makes it easier to hear and include their perspectives and ideas. Examples of transparent leader behaviors include publishing committee minutes, creating email addresses that allow people to provide input, and sending out emissaries to every level of the organization to find out facts and learn more about people’s interests and fears. It also involves communicating with the community on a regular basis, even if progress has been stymied or it seems as if there is no news. A colleague of mine was once stuck on a commuter rail that had mechanical difficulties. For long periods of time, there were no updates provided to passengers. He wisely told me that it would have been better for the conductor to go on the intercom on some regular basis, even if the only update was “there are no updates.” If you’re concerned about annoying your community with too many emails, create a system that allows people who prefer more frequent updates to subscribe to an email list that gets more communications.Collective
Many organizations give only high status individuals a seat at the table. Find ways of investing individuals from all levels of the organization with some measure of power over its fate. By doing so, you’ll come up with smarter solutions and you’ll have more buy in, as those that helped to craft the solution will also be interested in touting its benefits to their peers.Flexible
There is a strong tendency when there is a lot of unknowns to reach for simplified solutions that leave a lot of value on the table. It takes psychological strength to tolerate ambiguity, and patience to tailor make solutions that are flexible and sensitive to context, but it is worthwhile. Patiently pass by the impulse to make hamfisted, oversimplified solutions, and wait for more sophisticated and nuanced ideas to come forward. This means spending more time in the Neutral Zone, which is uncomfortable but necessary work.Iterative
Lewin, a pioneer of applied organizational psychology, coined the famous maxim “No research without action, no action without research.” It’s a mistake to try to design an ultimate and final solution to a dilemma your organization is facing and then irreversibly implement it. Instead, create pilot projects that experiment with different solutions. Learn from them, advance them, or discard them based on the results. Successful experiments will strengthen the proof of concept and create clusters of people that believe in and will advocate for the change.
“No research without action, no action without research. ”
Do you need help in adopting an adaptive leadership approach to helping your organization respond to The Great Reopening? Give me a call!