Leading Change, the Agile Leader
There are few things as evident in the study of leadership during the 2020 pandemic than the importance of leadership in managing change. The pre-pandemic world already embraced adaptability in most facets of business and life, but the efficacy of leadership in adapting to change and leading communities through this change has never been more evident. N-step change processes (either dynamic or one of), organizational changes, and reactionary changes, regardless to the pros and cons so far discussed, are all managed and led by management and leaders. The skill sets and characteristics of an effective change agent—discussed later—are just as crucial to change leadership as is the steps taken to effect the change. In today’s world, there is an expectation that leaders of organizations, companies, countries, and conglomerates are quick to act, transformative in their action, transparent in their aim and ultimate goals, and openly vulnerable when mistakes are made. In previous decades, slower communication realities allowed some leaders to “hide” when change was either imminent or had been conducted badly. Today, on an almost instantaneous level, leaders are held accountable by customers, middle management, and employees alike. As such, agility has become the most valuable of traits in leadership. How quickly can one pivot? In pivoting, can one communicate the reason for the pivot and articulate to all constituencies how the change will benefit or affect them? Is the CEO’s vision and direction embraced by middle management and thereby communicated down the organization to frontline employees? And to what degree is the leader willing to be answerable and available for everything from answering questions to being answerable for failures? The CEO even in an established business is in a difficult position today, and the CEO responsible for adding change to the system is even harder to find.
Adaptive leaders such as the founder and CEO of Zoom, Eric S. Yuan, have reflected on how adaptability and using change as an opportunity has helped him pivot in a vastly changing marketplace (Nazar 2021). For the company that has arguably been on the spearhead of surviving and thriving in the pandemic, his philosophy has been singular—to communicate well with your teams, be involved in hiring practices, and engendering an environment of risk-taking, all of which is embodied in his attitude of leading by example. These leadership traits can be seen to stretch across other successful CEOs such as Richard Branson of the Virgin Group and Howard Schultz of Starbucks. For all the three leaders, adaptability has been a guiding force in decision making, communication, and strategic direction.
Similarly, Jeff Bezos of Amazon has led with adaptability as a central focus in everything his leadership team and managers do, for taking risks to encouraging employees to think as if they were owners of the company (Sattar 2020). Bezos has engendered a culture of embracing new experiences as often as possible, a leadership trait that permeates the company culture. As we will see in the next section, characteristics such as these result in building an adaptive culture only if the leader is able to communicate values, beliefs, and guiding principles deep into the organization at large, making communication a central part of any adaptive leader’s success. As observed by Keating (2021),
For leaders, adaptability is about having ready access to different ways of thinking, enabling leaders to shift and experiment as things change. Having an elastic cognitive approach allows leaders to use different thinking strategies and mental frameworks. Deepening awareness and perspective help leaders to understand how they think, how their team thinks, and how their customers think.
To fully appreciate adaptive leadership, it is important to also appropriately define adaptability in a business context.
Adaptability is a soft skill that means being able to rapidly learn new skills and behaviors in response to changing circumstances. Employers usually look for adaptability when hiring new staff and the skill is often included in job descriptions because of its importance for growth within a role. Someone demonstrating adaptability in the workplace is flexible and has the ability to respond effectively to their working conditions—even if things don’t go as planned. They usually work well on their own and with team members. People in leadership positions are often expected to manage unusual situations without explicit instruction. An adaptable leader must be able to solve problems in a fast-paced environment and trust their judgment when making difficult decisions, while still recognizing that what worked before is not necessarily the answer.
In fact, of the variety of leadership characteristics that a leader can possess, it can be argued that adaptability in our current world context is easily the most important facet of a successful leader. While leadership characteristics often bring to mind definition such as confidence, compassion, and communication, an underrated trait is fearlessness and change management, both of which are features of an adaptive leader (Capece 2019). Capece goes on to reflect on how an adaptive leader has an influence on long-term strategic planning. Most often, leaders that are not adaptive are unlikely to create strategic plans that offer flexibility and adaptation to market circumstances in the future. A classic example of this is the lack of adaptive anticipatory planning on the part of Yahoo. As observed by Dwoskin (2016),
…the company failed to adapt quickly enough to the two major trends of the consumer Internet: the rise of social networks and the exploding popularity of mobile devices. The latter was perhaps the most brutal for Yahoo. Display ads do not translate well on small screens, and consumers spend much more time on apps than they do surfing the mobile Web. Yet, with the exception of Yahoo Mail, Yahoo’s mobile apps never became big hits for iPhone or Android users. Today, despite substantial investments in mobile products by Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer, the company’s apps do not rank among the top 50 in Apple’s app store in the United States, according to analytics company App Annie. By comparison, Google and Facebook together own eight of the top apps in the United States. In addition, mobile advertising generated just $250 million in revenue for Yahoo in the past quarter. Facebook made $4.5 billion from mobile ads in the last three months of 2015.
Actions, Principles, and Traits of an Adaptive Leader
As with most leadership traits, leading by example and embracing the tenets that a leader preaches is the most effective means of penetrating that style into the greater organization. Leaders who preach innovation yet squelch risk-taking will best create a misunderstanding and at worst create unrealistic expectations for the company bottom line. For example, leaders who preach research and development but do not fund those activities will only be adaptive in talk and not in practice. Further, other than just embracing adaptability on their own, leaders need to impart the same attitude to other managers and leaders throughout the organization.
However, in order to get to this point, leaders themselves need some core tenets to use in order to become innovative and pass on this innovation to their own teams. As observed by Hamel and Tennant (2015),
…it makes little sense to hold leaders accountable for innovation if they haven’t been trained and coached to encourage innovation within their own teams. For a leader, this means:
• Being adept at using innovation tools.
• Creating frequent opportunities for blue-sky thinking.
• Avoiding premature judgments when evaluating new options.
• Demonstrating an appetite for unconventional ideas.
• Recognizing innovators and celebrating “smart failures.”
• Personally mentoring innovation teams.
• Freeing up time and money for innovation.
• Hiring and promoting for creativity.
• Working to eliminate bureaucratic impediments to innovation.
• Understanding and applying the principles of rapid prototyping and low-cost experimentation.
In our experience, most leadership development programs give scant attention to these innovation-enabling attitudes and behaviors. Through selection, training, and feedback, companies must work hard to create a cadre of leaders who are as adept at fostering innovation as they are at running the business.
Hammel and Tennent’s aforementioned list provides a good set of actions for an adaptive leader to embody and disseminate throughout the organization. The characteristics, however, of an adaptive leader are decidedly different. While certain characteristics can be developed, other characteristics are sometimes inherent to leaders, especially when they come on board a new to an organization. There is an incredible amount of literature on leadership characteristics in general. Characteristics specifically around adaptability are more specific and pointed.
A frequently referenced body of work on adaptive leadership can be found in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Heifetz, Linsky, and Grashow 2009). In their work, Heifetz et al. define four foundation principles of effective adaptive leadership, as summarized by Indeed (2021):
So how does a leader actively utilize these traits in a situational or case setting? Heifetz et al. (2009) provide a three-step iterative process involving the following in order:
1. Observe
2. Interpret
3. Intervene
They have found that these steps, practiced appropriately, allows leaders to maintain an adaptive outlook on both micro- and macro-based challenges. Heifetz et al. cautioned that observation can quickly become a subjective matter, with individuals looking at the same problem in different ways. In order to be successful in observation as an adaptive leader, it is important to be as objective as possible. They encourage a high-level review of what is presented. For example, a ground-level understanding of conflict within a team would involve interviewing and understanding what the challenges are between team members. An observational approach by an adaptive leader instead takes a higher-level point of view—what is going on with the team at large and how are other systems contributing to the current challenges within the team.
Table 6.1 Adaptive Leadership Attributes
Organizational justice | Organizational justice in adaptive leadership could be described as an open-door policy. It is about keeping open and honest lines of communication with all employees and taking a genuine interest in their questions, concerns, and even criticisms. |
Emotional intelligence | Starting from the bottom, emotional intelligence is perhaps the most important characteristic an adaptive leader must possess. Sometimes referred to as emotional quotient (“EQ,” for example, as a counterpart to one’s “IQ”), emotional intelligence is basically a combination of being both highly self-aware and be aware of others. It is the ability to regulate one’s own emotions and also regulate the way one reacts to others’ emotions. Leaders with strong emotional intelligence are empathetic, calm, fair, and true team players. |
Development | The adaptive leadership model recognizes that organizations must adjust and adapt to stay relevant in a complex and ever-changing marketplace. Additionally, adaptive leaders recognize that developing individuals within the organization is just as important as organizationwide change. Adaptive leaders empower their colleagues and employees to learn and grow through the process of organizational change. |
Character | Adaptive leaders demonstrate ethical responsibility and morality. They are transparent in their communication style and hold themselves to the same standards to which they hold their team. |
Interpreting the situation on the other hand presents a different set of challenges beyond observation. As the word would imply, interpretation requires considering data from a variety of sources, not just the first set of details a leader receives. Similar to considering different viewpoints on a particular subject, an adaptive leader is open and agile enough to consider different assessments of a situation at hand even if the considerations are seemingly contradictory. It is the practice of seeing these different viewpoints and using them regularly to make decisions that leads to adaptability. As noted by Heifetz et al. (2009),
…if you are skilled at adaptive leadership, you might find yourself actively holding more than one interpretation about a particular observation open at any moment, even mutually exclusive ones, like your and your colleague’s interpretation of the soft-spoken woman’s difficulty getting heard in the conversation in the example above. Holding multiple interpretations in your head simultaneously is taxing, because our natural tendency is to always search for the one “right” answer. This mental balancing act requires the ability to view the same set of data from several different perspectives. An interpretation is only a guess, although the more you practice this activity, the better your guesses will be. Making your interpretation public is itself an intervention and often a provocative one. Making it tentatively, experimentally, and then watching (and then interpreting) the reaction can help you gauge how close to the mark you came.
If a leader has practiced the actions listed earlier as well as embrace the four dimensions of adaptive leadership, what kind of leadership traits can be expected of them? Adaptive leaders who have practiced their skill sets tend to have a fluency in connecting everyday work and initiatives with the core values and objectives of the overall organization. Other than just encouraging calculated risk-taking, adaptive leaders also have the emotional empathy to understand that change takes time, requires commitment, and is faced with occasional bumps and scrapes. That same emotional acuity allows an adaptive leader to embrace mistakes both made by themselves and by team members. And when dealing with macro level experiences, adaptive leaders understand that large-scale change is different from medium-scale change, which in turn is different from day-to-day change initiatives. But above all, adaptive leaders foster an environment where change is a part of daily activity (Corporate Finance Institute 2018).
Essential Traits of Effective Change Agents
There are many views on what is needed to effectively lead change. This section is our compilation of some of the key attributes based on the experiences of the leaders we interviewed and our research from our book LeaderocityTM: Leading at the Speed of Now (Dool 2021). It is not meant to be an exhaustive list but more of a set of foundational (core) attributes that each leader can leverage to enhance or extend their change agency competency.
There is a difference between “traditional leaders” and the “collaborative leaders” need in this era (“the speed of now”). The themes of teaming, communication, collaboration, and facilitation weave and intersect in the collaborate leadership style. We propose that this collaborative style is more effective for leaders to be effective change agents.
Team-B (2015) offered this comparison. Figure 6.1 highlights some of the differences between traditional leadership practices and the move towards a more collaborative approach.
Research and experience offer a set of personal traits that effective change leaders seem to embody. Table 6.2 highlights some essential personal leadership traits needed to be an effective change leader in this chaotic environment.
Sinek (2019) notes that if we approach change with a “infinite” mindset, in other words, as an event or program, it will lead to all kinds of potential dysfunctions including a decline in trust, collaboration, and innovation. He argues that in times of continuous change (the infinite game), leading with an infinite mindset will move the organization in a better direction. He makes the point that an infinite mindset will help a company thrive in good times and survive tougher times by infusing resilience into the organizational DNA. Leaders with an infinite mindset want to build an organization that embraces surprises and adapts with them.
Montague and Ryan from co:collective offer an approach to communicating change which they call “StoryDoing” (Kelley 2016).
They argue that having a clear and distinctive change story is critical in the dynamic environment facing leaders today. They make the point that is not enough to have the story and communicating it, leaders also have to live it.
They posit that “StoryDoing” is essential, placing the change story at the center of the organization and organizing around it will make the difference between a good organization and a great one.
They offer these elements for “StoryDoing”:
Figure 6.1 Leadership evolving to a more collaborative style
• Start with a Quest
A good quest defines the ambition for the organization, it captures the narrative and purpose of the organization. It is something everyone in the organization can rally around and adopt.
Table 6.2 Essential personal traits for effective change leaders
Essential Personal Traits | |
Courageous | Change can be hard and leaders need to have courage of conviction to see it through. They need backbone and a willingness to go first and navigate the naysayers who inevitably surface. Embarking on change means choosing at times uncertainty and discomfort. As a change agent, you’re also creating those conditions for others, which might not be popular. It takes courage to break out of the norm and to speak out to people who may not want to hear the truth. |
Optimistic | Change creates stress and natural inertia will seek to fight it. Leaders need to be present change in a positive light, “we can do this” but also be grounded with doses of realism and pragmatism. |
Patient | Change usually takes longer than expected and one of the main reasons for change “failures” is leadership impatience. Leaders need to be patient to see the change through and to fully embed it. They need to avoid the “serial change” syndrome by shifting too quickly. |
Resilient | Virtually, no change initiative will go as planned; they is always some drift as conditions change or some highs and lows as the change is manifested. Leaders need to stay the course and not overreact to the inevitable highs and lows. Effective change agents don’t take the lows or resistance personally. Instead, they bounce back and don’t quit when they hear “no.” Resilience enables the persistence required to drive change. |
Deliberate | Change leaders need to be strategic, intentional, and deliberate. Change is a leader-led process. to influence change, you must deliberately choose the words and actions that break the patterns so change can happen. Change leaders need to take on a persona of being calm, confident, and in control. |
Empathetic | Change agents must be able to put themselves in other people’s shoes to understand their experience. You must predict how people will feel about change even if you don’t feel that way. Empathy stops you from judging people for resisting change, so you can recognize that their response to change is normal and valid. Effective change agents help employees understand what’s in it for them and use that to drive buy-in. |
Grit | Angela Duckworth argues that an individual’s grit is a better predictor of long-term success, more than talent or IQ. Grit is a combination of passion and perseverance for long-term goals. She notes, “I do mean hard work and not quitting things when they’re hard, but I also mean passion.” Change leaders need to have some grit to overcome the obstacles that likely will emerge. Dweck (2016) defined it as a growth mindset, the resilience that makes a leader determined to bounce back from failures and setbacks. |
Flexible | We call this “focused flexibility,” meaning that leaders need to stick to the change vision and plan, but also be flexible enough to adapt as conditions warrant. They have to be committed to their change vision but too much in love with it. They have to actively monitor the change initiative and be willing shift when it warrants—shifting both too early or too late can have unintended consequences. |
Employees will not fully commit to a quest unless they sense the full commitment of the leadership team. The senior leaders must champion and live the quest consistently. Gary Hamel noted: “Today, no leader can afford to be indifferent to the challenge of engaging employees in the work of creating the future. Engagement may have been optional in the past, but it is the whole game today” (Kelley 2016).
• Organizations build their story into their culture
StoryDoing organizations don’t tell their story as much as live it. They express it through every action they take.
• Organizations are organized by shared purpose
They build their story into everything they do. They imagine their future based on their quest and this becomes the blueprint for organizing.
Adaptive Leadership Teams
While an adaptive leader embodying all the characteristics and traits that we described previously are critically important, in today’s modern corporate structure, leadership teams and team dynamics have an influence on corporate culture as well. Penetration of leadership attitudes through an entire organization is extremely critical to creating an adaptable organization. The best ways to communicate adaptable behavior is by modeling that behavior with the leadership team at large. While team dynamics can take a variety of forms, reviewed in the frame of adaptability, there are some clear team characteristics that engender an overall adaptive mindset. Some characteristics come about by the agenda set by the leader, namely, encouraging distributed leadership, picking the right members of the team and providing a clear direction to the team members on what needs to be achieved. On the other hand, something as elemental as trust needs to be built within the team and while it can be set in motion by the leader, it needs to be developed within the team itself (Torres and Rimmer 2011).
Torres and Rimmer (2011) continue their work to identify the five traits of the leadership team that are critical in maintaining an adaptable atmosphere. Specifically, they list the ability for teams to work with one voice, the ability to use multiple options to identify solutions to a problem, the ability to synthesize a considerable amount of data, a commitment to working within agreed-upon boundaries, and the ability to work between silos verticals and horizontals. Some of these traits overlap with those expected of the leader themselves. Conversely, is important to note that there are some of these traits that need to be developed over time and in group, thus reasserting the fact that a leader’s work is equal parts individual and group related. It is natural to conclude that in some ways, the traits of a leader and the traits of a leadership team overlap based on the characteristics mentioned in this and previous chapters. When leadership teams are in sync with the leader, the team itself can start to reflect a combined effort, focus, and voice that will reflect well across an organization. Leaders that have been able to bring their leadership teams along to this unified status are more likely to succeed with their agenda, direction, and overall cultural course setting for the company at large.
Challenges of Adaptive Leadership
While adaptable leadership is indeed a sought after and critical part of today’s business, there are some shortcomings, both in the ability to attain adaptability and issues with being adaptable in and of itself. Some of the root challenges for an adaptive leader can be found in the chapter in this book on organizational adaptability, namely, if a leader is adaptable but the organization is not in lockstep with that attitude, problems are likely to ensue. Consequently, adaptability leads to rapid change and if the organization at large is unable to acknowledge the need for these changes while also respecting the work that was done before, it is likely a leader will have a subset of employees that are unhappy with the change to status quo. Finally, as previously discussed, while distributed leadership sounds like a great idea, in practice, many organizations are not ready to make that leap. Organizational, cultural, individual, and social norms might contribute to an expectation that the leadership make all the decisions. Changing a culture to one that celebrates distributed decision making is a process best done with care and over time (Indeed 2021). All of this feeds into the overall theme that change is a heavily human and management reality, so for an adaptive leader to be effect, they must prioritize their employees and middle management. By bringing the people within an organization on board with the overall vision, allowing them say and participation in developing that vision, and then having the trust to distribute responsibility for change to others all are likely to be success factors in countering the challenges to adaptive leadership.