Three takeaways from attending the "Practice of Adaptive Leadership" training

Earlier this month, I was fortunate to attend an immersive three-day workshop on Adaptive Leadership based on the book “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership,” by Ronald A. Heifetz. The concept of adaptive leadership redefines leadership from a “position” someone holds to an “activity” someone does. It's about mobilizing systemic change with participation from the entire organization.

What I love about this style of leadership is that it's incredibly inclusive and requires shedding old beliefs and habits and adopting new attitudes, norms, and sometimes even values. It's a challenging, but beautiful process of transformation. Here are my top three takeaways from what I learned.

By reframing your work challenge, you can achieve long-term change

In adaptive leadership, you approach work challenges in one of two ways – technically or adaptively. When you frame a challenge as a technical problem, you quickly define the problem and identify a solution. For example, there aren’t enough offices for my team, so we need to expand our office space and add more workstations. But, if you approach that same challenge with an adaptive framework, you take a step back, observe, identify patterns, and engage the team. Through the process, you might find that a better solution is to offer a policy for a flexible work environment, which would not only solve the problem, but could increase employee satisfaction by giving them more autonomy of their work environment.

There's really no such thing as resistance to change

When a person resists during a time of change, what they are really resisting is the loss associated with that change, not the change itself. In adaptive leadership, we honor the loss by identifying and naming it, which helps people move forward. Leadership is about guiding people through that process.

Strong bonds often form where successful transformation happens

During the training, we were drawn out of our comfort zones, given seemingly impossible challenges to solve together, but with new skills to learn and practice. We did it all in three intense days with vulnerability and empathy. Through the process, we got to know each other on a deeper level. It was great to attend with my friend and colleague Lindsay-Rae McIntyre - I loved sharing this experience with you, Lindsay-Rae, and I look forward to collaborating as we put these learnings into practice with our teams! The training session was a small-scale, concentrated example of how tackling and successfully solving adaptive challenges together as a team leads to strong bonds, shared purpose, and deeper meaning - an excellent demonstration of the impact adaptive leadership can make within entire organizations.

While it can be difficult to fully disconnect from email, Teams, text and phone for several full days, I find that setting aside my workday FOMO to invest time, energy and focus into professional growth that will make me a stronger leader for my hardworking team is always more than worth the time away.

If you're familiar with adaptive leadership, what do you appreciate most about it?