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. 

Empty the load at the end of the day

The overwhelm of back to back meetings is real. So. Much. Content. Words and questions and people and ideas and still more meetings.

Our cognitive load takes a beating as we shove more information in to our already overloaded brain. It’s hard work.

In between meetings is the ideal time to pause, review, move and have a kind of ‘reset’, ready for the next meeting.

Deliberately.

And then at the end of the day, another pause. Review and clear the slate for the transition to social, family or home activities.

Otherwise it can get messy and the overloaded feeling takes longer to process naturally, automatically, organically. Do it deliberately.

Empty the load - between meetings if you can; and absolutely at the end of the working day. (And the end of the week too!)

What I do when I don’t know what to do

In times of doubt, uncertainty and change, there can be situations where we just don’t know what to do next. So it can be helpful to just do something. To get going and get into motion or momentum. To start.

Changing direction or shifting while you’re already in motion is much easier than trying to get going from a standing start.

When I don’t know what to do, I just do something ... anything ... to get me into motion.

I “do”.

Decisions, ideas, confidence and clarity come more frequently and easily.

It’s not the same

No it’s not.

The experience of online isn’t the same as face to face.

Working remotely isn’t the same as working alongside others in the same location.

The pasta isn’t exactly like your favourite restaurant.

The marketing you’re doing isn’t the same as last time.

If things aren’t the same as we expected or hoped, we just need to adapt. We can adapt systems and processes, routines and rituals. And we can adapt expectations too.

Adaptations are happening all the time even if they are tiny micro adaptations. Even if we don’t really notice them.

And if we aren’t adapting? Perhaps we are resisting. Or waiting... waiting for the old to return so that things can be the same again... But it’s not the same. No it’s not. And here we go around again...knowing it’s not the same.

Thankfully, cleverly we are an adaptive species. We can keep adapting and we can keep helping and supporting those around us as they adapt too.

Weaving it together

As information flows and bounces around, back and forth between people in a team, how are you helping to weave it all together?

These interlacing and interconnected threads of data, opinions, ideas and decisions need to be brought together. Not everyone sees what is obvious and not everyone is able to make the connections of information that help us make progress.

A key role for leaders in times of uncertainty and change is to make sense of what the heck is going on. Taking seemingly disparate threads and finding links, relevance and connections among and between them is part of that role of leadership.

Don’t let it happen via hope. accident or default. Because it may not happen at all.

Things can become more confusing and ambiguous when you believe it will just weave itself. Take an active role to thread, weave and connect information ... even if you think it’s obvious.

It helps ease the stress and uncertainty people may be feeling as it relieves a weight from our mind ... and our shoulders.