Adaptive Leadership and Cultures

An interview with Jennifer Garvey Berger exploring the imperative for adaptive leaders and opportunities for personal growth. 

“Who am I being right now and is that the person I want to be?” 

"Our lives are living out answers to questions we don’t notice that we’re asking. Asking different questions helps us lead different lives".

Technical vs. Adaptive challenges and Authority vs. Leadership

A short, but insightful article about the reality of leadership in a time of speed and complexity. More tools won't help leaders, but a different mind will - adaptive leadership and vertical development. 

Unprecedented 21st century leadership challenges can not be addressed by a 20th century management toolkit....

The Adaptive Cultures community have created this important guide for leaders who are grappling with emergence from crisis and navigating the complexity that will inevitably unfold through this journey. The guide takes us through these various stages, exploring the following key themes:

1. Making sense of our emerging world
• How do we best make sense of the emerging world?
• How can we build insight and capability to continue to evolve our businesses, organisations and institutions in the face of current and emerging challenges?

2. Enabling deeper learning
• How can we balance the focus on business and organisational continuity with organisational reinvention, regeneration, adaptation and evolution?
• What new community and customer needs may emerge and how can we be at the forefront to co-create new ideas and solutions?

3. Embracing disruption
• How can we lean into disruption as an opportunity for evolution and co-creation, letting go of things that no longer serve us?
• What (authentic) acts of caring and service to our clients and community and support for our suppliers at this time may generate deeper trust and more strategic partnerships into the future?

4. Evolving new patterns of leadership
• What new kind of leadership is the world calling for? What new levels of thinking and being are necessary? How has the crisis amplified this calling?
• After the crisis has peaked, how can we continue to lead from a higher level of consciousness, rather than reverting to old ways?

5. Leading from purpose
• How can we amplify our sense of purpose and use it as a guiding light?
• How could sensing into our emerging world and possible futures illuminate a more expansive purpose?

6. Overcome forces of reversion
• How can we establish new adaptive practices and processes that enable us to continually evolve?
• How can we pay attention to the forces of reversion, and recalibrate towards ongoing progress and evolution?

A sample of how Nordea is working to build adaptive capacity as part of enabling transformation

Some practical examples and guidance for learning from the balcony and the dance floor. This skillset is part of helping build capacity (i.e. vertical development) and offers me a new term - Complex Adaptive Leaders (CAL).

CAL capacity 2 - Courage to take sensible risks and to lead others to do so is available here - 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cal-capacity-2-courage-take-sensible-risks-lead-do-so-garvey-berger/

What is the difference between technical and adaptive leadership? Key principles for leading adaptive work:

1. ‘Getting on the balcony’

2. Identifying the adaptive challenge

3. Regulating distress

4. Maintaining disciplined attention

5. Giving work back to people

6. Protecting voices of leadership from below