Adaptive Leadership and Cultures

Our Real Work, Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

I could easily put every single Jennifer Garvey-Berger post in here. She shares openly, beautifully and with great care. If you don't follow her, then DO SO IMMEDIATELY!

Two really interesting points that resonated with my own experience:

1. The ease at which we can identify other people's adaptive challenges, but the difficult we have in recognising our own

2. The extension of this, which links strongly to some of my own big assumptions (immunity to change) is expecting myself to get on with it, solve it and be pretty unkind to myself for not. Jennifer reinforces the importance of being more gentle with ourselves once we do recognise an adaptive challenge and applying the practices (i.e. experimenting) to respond accordingly. Good opportunities to reframe....

A brief overview of the three conditions that enable vertical development.

I've been fortunate over the last two years to have worked closely with a leadership team. When the team formed, the Executive GM reinforced that the primary responsibility of team members was their role on the leadership team. Their job title (technical role) was secondary to the work they would do on the leadership team, being to build the capacity of the function to deliver, adapt and grow. This was a powerful platform.

Rather than a separate leadership program, we have used the work of the team, as the foundation for vertical development. Learning as part of Working. I introduced the concept of heat and the team came up with the idea of 'hard chats' as a simple way to open up tough conversations to enable/support productive discomfort and encourage multiple perspectives. I have used a range of adaptive facilitation techniques as well - Case in Point, Balcony and Dancefloor (or for the Australian/NZ context, Coach's Box and Playing Field), Immunity To Change and in the moment reflection (i.e. what did we observe in that discussion).

We certainly haven't nailed it, but it has been rewarding to see development really be the work of the team, rather than something separate/extra; developing and implementing strategy, responding to business challenges, diagnosing the culture and implementing a plan for building capacity (evolving culture). There has been a significant shift in the way the team operates.

I have also had to be conscious of how I need to show up, if, when and how to intervene and to hold the work lightly. This process has been as much about my development as it has been the team's.