Technical challenges are problems in the workplace or community that are clearly defined with known solutions that can be implemented through existing organizational rules and procedures. They are problems that can be solved by experts. For technical challenges, people look to the leader for a solution, and they accept the leader's authority to resolve the problem. For example, if employees at a tax accounting firm are frustrated about a newly adopted tax software program, the manager at the firm could assess the software issues, identify the weaknesses and problems with the software, contact the company that provided the software, and have the programs modified in accordance with the accountants' needs at the tax firm. In this example, the problem is identifiable, it has an achievable solution, and the manager at the tax firm has the authority to address it through the accepted structures and procedures of the organization. The employees look to the manager to solve the technical problem and accept her or his authority to do so.
technical and Adaptive challenges
Some challenges have both a technical and an adaptive dimension. In this case, the challenges are clearly defined but do not have distinct straightforward solutions within the existing organizational system. The responsibility of tackling this type of challenge is shared between the leader and the people. The leader may act as a resource for others and provide support, but the people need to do the work—they need to learn to change and adapt. For example, if an urban hospital with a traditional approach to care (i.e., providers are the experts, and patients are the visitors) wanted to establish a patient-centered culture, the goal could be clearly laid out. To reach the goal, the hospital leadership, through its hierarchical authority, could provide in-service training on how to involve patients in their own care. New rules could be designed to preserve patients' personal routines, to give them access to their own records, and to give them more control of their own treatment.
However, the staff, doctors, patients, and family members would need to accept the proposed change and learn how to implement it. Making the hospital a model of patient-centered care would require a lot of work and adaptation on the part of many different people.
Adaptive challenges
Central to the process of adaptive leadership are adaptive challenges. Adaptive challenges are problems that are not clear-cut or easy to identify. They cannot be solved by the leader's authority or expertise or through the normal ways of doing things in the organization. Adaptive challenges require that leaders encourage others, with their support, to define challenging situations and implement solutions. Not easy to tackle and often resisted, adaptive challenges are difficult because they usually require changes in people's assumptions, perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. An example of adaptive challenges would be the problems and concerns a family confronts when placing a parent in hospice care. In a hospice, there is a great deal of uncertainty for patients and families about how and when the patient will die and how to best comfort the patient during this time. While hospice workers can give support and informal feedback about the dying process, the patient and his or her family have to come to grips with how they want to approach the patient's final days. What does the impending loss mean? How can they prepare for it? How will they cope with the loss going forward? In this context, adaptive leadership is about mobilizing the patient and family members to address the many questions and concerns that surround the death of the family member. Hospice nurses, social workers, and staff all play an important role in helping families cope, but at the same time, it is the families that have to confront the complexities and concerns of the impending loss.
Leader Behaviors
As shown in the middle of Figure 11.1, six leader behaviors, or activities, play a pivotal role in the process of adaptive leadership. Based on the work of Heifetz and his colleagues (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Laurie, 1997), these behaviors are general prescriptions for leaders when helping others confront difficult challenges and the inevitable changes that accompany them.
Although there is a general order as to which leader behavior comes first in the adaptive leadership process, many of these behaviors overlap with each other and should be demonstrated by leaders at the same time. Taken together, these leader behaviors suggest a kind of recipe for being an adaptive leader.
1. Get on the Balcony
A prerequisite for the other adaptive leader behaviors, "getting on the balcony" is a metaphor for stepping out of the fray and finding perspective in the midst of a challenging situation. It is an allusion to a dance floor and that one needs to be above the dancing to understand what's going on below. Being on the balcony enables the leader to see the big picture—what is really happening. On the balcony, the leader is momentarily away from the noise, activity, and chaos of a situation, allowing him or her to gain a clearer view of reality. It allows the leader to identify value and power conflicts among people, ways they may be avoiding work, and other dysfunctional reactions to change (Heifetz & Laurie, 1997). Getting on the balcony can include such things as taking some quiet time, forming a group of unofficial advisers for alternative discussions about organizational issues, or simply attending meetings as an observer. In the model, the adaptive leader is urged to step away from the conflict in order to see it fully, but never to dissociate entirely from the conflict. Effective leaders are able to move back and forth as a participant and observer between the struggles of their people and the intentions of the group, organization, or community.
To understand what it means to stand on the balcony, imagine yourself as the principal of an elementary school. From the balcony, you see all the pieces that go into educating your students: federal and state requirements, teachers and staff, budgets, teacher evaluations, parents and discipline, not to mention the children themselves. From above, you can see how these issues relate to and affect one another, and who is dancing with which partners, all while working toward the common goal of educating children.
Another example would be a chief union negotiator, who in the midst of difficult labor talks steps away from the table for a moment to separate from the emotion and intensity and reflect on the goals of the talks. Once this leader feels she again has a grasp of the issues at hand, she dives directly back into negotiations. In both of these examples, the leader takes time to see the "big" picture as an observer but also stays engaged as a participant with the challenges his or her people are confronting.
2. identify Adaptive challenges
In addition to getting on the balcony and observing the dynamics of the complex situations people face, leaders must analyze and diagnose these challenges. Central to this process is differentiating between technical and adaptive challenges. Failures in leadership often occur because leaders fail to diagnose challenges correctly. The adaptive leadership process suggests that leaders are most effective using adaptive leadership behaviors for adaptive challenges and technical leadership for technical challenges. Treating challenges with the wrong kind of leadership is maladaptive.
If challenges are technical in nature, leaders can fix the problem with their own expertise. For example, in a manufacturing environment, problems that arise in scheduling, product sales quotas, facility expansion, or raising the minimum wage are all problems the leader can use his or her authority to resolve. However, it is essential that a leader also know when his or her authority is not sufficient or appropriate to address a particular challenge.
When people's beliefs, attitudes, and values are affected by a problem, leaders need to take an adaptive approach. How a leader decides if he or she faces an adaptive challenge is to determine whether or not the challenge strikes at the core feelings and thoughts of others. Adaptive challenges are usually value laden and stir up people's emotions. Furthermore, if challenges require that people learn new ways of coping, they are adaptive. Take the manufacturing environment that was discussed earlier. If another company buys that manufacturing facility and the new owners implement production procedures and standards that the facility's workers are unfamiliar with, these changes would create adaptive challenges for the workers. Identifying adaptive challenges means leaders need to focus their attention on problems Member expertise they cannot solve themselves and that demand collaboration between the leader and followers. For adaptive challenges, leaders do what is necessary (e.g., give support, challenge, or even take themselves out of the picture) to mobilize others to do the work they need to do.
To more easily identify complex adaptive challenges and also distinguish them from technical challenges, there are four archetypes or basic patterns of adaptive change to consider (Heifetz et al., 2009).
Archetype 1: Gap Between Espoused Values and Behavior. This archetype is present when an organization espouses, or claims, to adhere to values that it doesn't in reality support by its actions. For example, a company that promotes itself as a family-friendly place to work but does not have a flexible-hour work policy, an extended maternity leave policy, or in-house child care doesn't have behaviors that match the family-friendly image it promotes itself as having.
Archetype 2: Competing Commitments. When an organization has numerous commitments and some come into conflict with each other, this archetype is in play. For example, a health and fitness center wants to grow and expand its services but at the same time sees the best way to reduce costs is by trim-ming the number of trainers and staff it employs.
Archetype 3: Speaking the Unspeakable. The phrases "sacred cow" and "elephant in the room" are examples of this archetype—when there are radical ideas, unpopular issues, or conflicting perspectives that people don't dare address because of their sensitive or controversial nature. Speaking out about these is seen as "risky." Consider an organization with a well-liked, established owner who is perceived by the employees as "over the hill" and not in touch with the current business climate, but no one is willing to discuss the matter. It is easier to suffer the consequences of the owner's dated leadership than confront the man and risk hurting him.
Archetype 4: Work Avoidance. This archetype represents a situation where people avoid addressing difficult issues by staying within their "comfort zone" or by using diversionary methods. For example, coworkers at a company refuse to confront or discuss a very skilled employee who is not participating in organizational planning because he feels the company suffers from institutional racism. It is easier to continue to do the same things and avoid the concerns of the disgruntled employee. Another example would be an ad agency that has a graphic designer who is not able to produce the quality of creative work needed, so, rather than address the problem directly, that designer is assigned menial jobs that are essentially busy work. The agency then hires a second graphic designer to do the more creative work despite the cost and the fact that the agency doesn't have enough work to justify two designers.
These four archetypes are representative of some of the common challenges that require adaptive change. Although they do not describe every possible type of adaptive change, they are useful as frames of reference when trying to identify adaptive challenges in a particular organizational setting.
3. regulate Distress
A third behavior, or activity, important for adaptive leaders is to regulate distress (Figure 11.1). Psychologically, we all have a need for consistency—to keep our beliefs, attitudes, and values the same. In fact, it is quite natural for individuals to be more comfortable when things are predictable and their way of doing things stays the same. But adaptive challenges create the need to change, and the process of change creates uncertainty and distress for people.