Adaptive Leadership Teams - Alignment, Perceive and Play

Adaptive leadership teams have total alignment. Just as a soccer team has a shared goal, the adaptive leadership team is completely aligned about the desired outcomes while respecting the diversity of experience, opinions, and perceptions within the team.

Information technology now allows adaptive leaders to read the signs (perceive) and react accordingly (play).

This organization has continuous learning embedded into its being.

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Karen's Conversations #42

Exploring project management success with Jeanette Cremor - Project Success Specialist.

We talked about the dynamic duo - project sponsor and project manager; common problems experienced on projects; solving the right problem at the right time; project success with the right people; and AAA organisations.

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Adaptive Leadership Teams

In this series of posts I am exploring Adaptive Leadership Teams.

Leadership is a team effort. Everyone has to lead and be adaptive.

The concept of Total Football encapsulates the concept of adaptive leadership teams.

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Adaptive Leadership - Timely Response and Expect Plans to Change

Making good and timely responses is at the crux of adaptive leadership. In a rapidly changing environment, the adaptive leader and their employees need to be ahead of the game. They need the capability to detect, filter, and decode signals so that they can anticipate what is coming and respond accordingly. 

Adaptive leaders teach and coach their employee that change is constant and the plans we made yesterday may have to change tomorrow. Employees feel a sense of calm when plans change because it was expected. 

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Adaptive Leadership - Constructive Conflict and Focus

Adaptive leaders encourage disagreement to ensure that assumptions are challenged. They encourage constructive conflict.

Adaptive leaders do this to keep employees open to new ideas, opinions, and potential solutions. They encourage everyone to contribute and they build an environment of mutual trust and respect so that employees feel safe to participate actively. 

Adaptive leaders know when to change the pace. In a world of relentless change, there can be increasing pressure from more and more demands. The adaptive leader knows when they need to focus on the ones that really matter.

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Adaptive Leadership - Diversity

Adaptive leadership cultivates a diversity of perspectives. The leader considers divergent and diverse options and views ideas from employees before making important decisions. It is acknowledged that the knowledge of the whole is more powerful that the knowledge of the leader. This enables complex challenges to be addressed with multifaceted solutions.

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Adaptive Leadership - Empathy and Empowerment

Adaptive leaders lead with empathy. They are able to see situations through the eyes of others. They are able to put themselves in another person’s shoes. The challenge for the leader is not to think about how they would feel in someone else’s shoes but how the other person feels in their own shoes. 

Adaptive leaders do not enforce rules and strict instructions on employees. When change is relentless and dynamic, we need a workforce that is empowered to make decisions and take action.

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Adaptive Leadership - The Adaptive Leader

Adaptive leadership is knowing what to do, when you don't know what to do. Adaptive leaders learn through experimentation and manage the context, not the instruction set. They cultivate a diversity of views to generate a wealth of options. They lead with trust and respect and provide autonomy.

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Give It Up. Productivity and Engagement

Increased productivity is a direct result of delegation and trust. Employees not trusted by their manager will be less productive and more likely to leave the organization. Employees who feel trusted are higher performers and go the extra mile to get things done.

Micromanaging employees will not result in engagement. Rather the opposite will occur. Disengagement is costly. Employees who are trusted and allowed to self-manage will be engaged. Employees need autonomy and support.

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Give It Up. Creativity, Passion and a Sense of Purpose

Delegation and trust sparks creativity. Creativity is vital for business growth.

Passion is an outcome of delegation and trust. Passion in the workplace is important because passionate workers strive to do better. 

When employees have distributed power, autonomy, clear objectives, and trust, they also have a sense of purpose. 

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Give It Up. Knowledge-based Leadership and Collaboration

When leaders delegate and trust, leadership becomes based on knowledge. Trust overcomes the tendency for people to keep knowledge to themselves believing that it gives them a position of power in the organisation and allows for the discovery and sharing of knowledge possessed by the whole of the organisation.

Giving up control fosters collaboration. It allows for collaborative innovation and experimentation. Information can be shared across collaborative networks in ways that wouldn’t work in hierarchical command and control environments. 

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