OLS-57900 Week 12 - Adaptive Leadership Theory
Key Takeaway 1: Ingredients of executive presence: (1) Operate from a strong sense of your authentic self; (2) Lead with empathy coupled with emotional intelligence; (3) Overcome your own self-limiting beliefs; (4) Be clear about your purpose and values; and (5) Get to know and trust yourself (Anderson, 2023).
Key Takeaway 2: Delegation Transition Process: (1) Allow delegate to shadow you so they can learn the process; (2) Have delegate document the process to reflect learning and correct understanding; (3) Reserve Shadow to confirm the delegate is performing the delgated task to satisfaction; and (4) provide support and feedback throughout. (Anderson, 2023).
Key Takeaway 3: Adaptive Leadership is about how leaders encourage people to adapt in response to changing environments as seen in Exhibit 1. Thus adaptive leadership is more follower-centered with the focus to mobilize them, motivate them, organize them, orient them, and focus them on what's important (Northouse, 2019).
Exhibit 1: Model of Adaptive Leadership
Analysis: A lot of great insights this week. I'm always looking to improve my executive presence. I align with most of the ingredients but need to better overcome my own self-limiting beliefs. I do find delegation to be difficult. The argument people always use is that it takes longer to teach somebody than simply doing the task yourself. While true, it is a short-sighted perspective because of the time saved on the back-end of having the task out of your queue. The delegation transition process is pragmatic. It takes time and I think it should vary based on the complexity of the task, but overall it is solid. The documentation piece is often overlooked but is powerful in ensuring the delegate understands the task and allows the task to be repeatable for future delegations / transitions.
I had never heard of Adaptive Leadership until this week, but it makes complete sense. In my area of Digital Transformation, Adaptive Leadership is critical in bringing the people and culture along in the new way of doing things. I had often thought this was part of Servant Leadership, but it seems they are different. Servant leadership excels at building trust, empowering followers, and creating a sense of shared purpose. Adaptive leadership provides the framework for navigating complex challenges and driving necessary change (James, 2024).
Application: As a common and consistent theme, I need to work on overcoming my own self-limiting beliefs to strengthen my executive presence. New from this week is the application of Adaptive Leadership. When implementing digital transformations it is often the people and the culture that hold back. We need to mobilize them, motivate them, organize them, orient them, and focus them on what's important to the success of the organization and how the digital transformation helps get them there. I think this framework with the Leader Behaviors will be helpful and aligning the culture to the transformation.
References
Anderson, R. M. (2023). Leadership Mindset 2.0. Columbia: Executive Joy! https://rmichaelanderson.com/leadership-mindset-2-0/
James, S. (2024). When to Blend Adaptive Leadership with Servant Leadership. Accessed Apr 2024 from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/adaptable-leadership-2-blend-adaptive-servant-james-md-mba-global--jk7tc/.
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice 8th Edition. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.