How do leaders adapt

Adaptability isn’t just a switch we flick. It’s an integrated set of thinking, learning and practical behaviors that help us change. It’s a skill and capability. We can break it down and learn it.

To support leaders and their teams, we need to provide them with this capability of adaptability.

12 capabilities of adaptability are:

1. Sensemaking
2. Listening
3. Learning
4. Collaborating
5. Facilitation
6. Visualization
7. Experimentation
8. Improvisation
9. Ingenuity
10. Empathy
11. Creativity
12. Curiosity

These are the more contemporary and impactful ways of thinking and being in today’s world of work.

I’m pleased to offer my new Leadership Adaptability Program: for leadership teams in business, community, not for profit and government.

Take one capability and then take them all. Integrate them into your existing organizational development schedule to refresh and update it. Or let’s launch a new initiative together that delivers leaders the skills, techniques and practices for the new ways of work.

Adaptability is the capability. 

How we confuse ourselves

In a meeting recently I saw a colleague write up more than 5 pages of notes. The next day they said how confused they felt about it all.

What were all the notes about then?

Sometimes we can capture content others are delivering, thinking we’re doing well, getting all of that information down. But it can end up meaning nothing to us later. We don’t seem to be able to find what the key points were or what the essence of it was.

As I chatted with my colleague later and we reviewed their notes, they were words, phrases, things underlined. These were the key things they heard. But later, none of it really made much sense. There was no synthesis, distilling, connections or conclusions. The notes were parts of sentences.

In sensemaking, it helps to pause, listen, make sense of what’s going on, and write that down. It is habit (and fear) that drives us to write it all down like a court reporter! But we don’t need to write it all.

So make sense as you go, capture information as it makes sense to you.

Go for distilling information rather than transcribing it!

Could you yield … rather than resist

Of all the skills we can learn and develop, what if we just focused on how we could become more adaptable… more willing to change?

Imagine how this one capability - a willingness to change - could impact our world and our lives.

Imagine how it might help a team learn new things and deliver better services.

The progress we would make, the ideas we would put out into the world, the conversations we’d have, what we’d find out and what could be possible.

The problems we’d solve instead of the additional ones we tend to create.

Imagine how less frustration there might be in the world if we were all a little more flexible, adaptable, changeable.

And imagine how we’d grow, individually and collectively, if we became more tolerable of change, looked for it, sought it out, welcomed it and 'went' with it. Adaptability is the capability.

What if we chose to yield… instead of resist? Look for opportunities to change and adapt; it gets easier.

Adaptability - one of the biggest capabilities of our time

I’m posting on ADAPTABILITY; one of the biggest capabilities of our time.

It's our capacity, willingness and ability to adjust to new conditions.

Here are 4 of 12 BIG ideas about adaptability:

1️⃣ Sensemaking We need to gather, sort, filter and process information rapidly. Without making sense we’re in the dark. It gives us insight so we can decide what to do next.

2️⃣ Listening We fail to listen; Hugh Mackay says we fear we will be changed if we listen. But by entertaining ideas, information and insights, we can become willing to adapt. Oscar Trimboli says deep listening is what's required... beyond words.

3️⃣ Learning Understanding and knowledge opens us to possibility. We mature. Try, trip, fail, learn. It’s the portal to even more skills and capabilities, yet so many of us think we already know it all.

4️⃣ Collaborating We can’t go it alone. Our future requires us to work with others, engage, listen, communicate, tolerate, include, invite, welcome. It takes work and doesn’t happen naturally for some. We need to collaborate to adapt, and adapt to be able to collaborate.

Up in the clouds... or down in the details

Up in the clouds... or down in the details. Author Jim Haudan suggests people across an organisation 'fly' at different levels. You'll experience it every day.

We have different altitudes of perspective and so we see different things, think differently.

We know this from being in an aircraft:

✈️ On the ground: you can see the airport, trees and tarmac as you're taxiing to the runway;

✈️ Up in the air: up to a few thousand feet up there, you can see cars, roads, rivers and patchwork quilts of fields and farms; and

✈️ Cruising Altitude: way up there, at 35,000 feet and above it’s cruising altitude and you're getting the big picture.

You can see a broader perspective stretching way w-a-y over the horizon. Today's leaders need to be able to fly at all levels - and most of all, to be able to recognise it or hear it when others are speaking.

This is one of the capabilities of the 'Leader as Facilitator' I posted on yesterday. Your preference may keep you 'locked' at a level that's not helpful.

Q: What say you? Are you an 'up in the clouds' person, 'down in the details' or do you fly somewhere in the middle?