What does adaptive leadership mean and where should you be as the boss? Should a manager get stuck in with the action of the team or is a leader best placed standing back and surveying things from a distance? In other words, should you be on the dance floor or looking down from the balcony?

I am quite a hands-on kind of person. I like to lead from the front, so it is quite easy for me to get stuck in the action. But I learned early on the importance of being able to take a step back. One event of note, that reinforced this lesson, happened on 25^th December 2001.

An unusual Christmas Day

I was the commander of the Incident Response Team as part of the NATO mission in Bosnia. My multi-national squad was comprised of medics, firefighters, bomb disposal experts, communicators, a helicopter crew and even a dog (who could sniff out mines). We were tasked with the quick response to any life-threatening incident that affected NATO troops; be that a mine strike, road traffic accident or bomb threat.

On that day, Christmas Day, I had been up early to deliver presents to my team. I then help to set up and serve Christmas lunch for the troops. After dinner I was looking forward to a lazy afternoon in my cabin, opening my presents received from back home. That was until there was a knock at the door.

I was not happy at being disturbed and was about to express this to the Dutch soldier at the door. But before I opened my mouth they blurted out “Someone has been shot! They are in the medical wing!”

A critical issue

I quickly put on my jacket and raced down to the medical facility and then on to the treatment room. I was met by a wall of people blocking the entrance and a cacophony of chatter coming from inside. It was impossible to see what was going on or to make out what anyone was saying. So, I grabbed one of the doctors I recognised and pulled them to one side.

I then proceeded to ask a series of questions such as what has happened? Who is the injured party? What was the severity of the injury? While talking about the nature of the gunshot wound the doctor mentioned that the casualty would need to be evacuated to another hospital in the north of the country. My brain raced. It was winter in Bosnia, we were in the hills, and there was snow everywhere; it would take too long by road. This led me to my next question: “has anyone warned the helicopter crew to get ready?”

My voice must have carried, as suddenly things went much quieter and many of the medics had turned to face me. The wide eyes told the story. Everyone had been too focussed on the immediate needs of the patient to think about what needed to happen next; they were too close to the action.

The Balcony and the Dance

The metaphor of ‘the balcony and the dance’ was devised by Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow and is explained in The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009).

The idea is that a good manager knows when to get off the dance floor and head to the balcony for a better view. This different viewpoint – away from the movement and noise of the dancefloor – allows the leader to see the whole system, and identify patterns, problems and group dynamics. This perspective allows the leader to understand and best influence what is going on.

In the words of Grashow, Linskyt and Heifetz:

“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of “getting on the balcony” above the “dance floor” to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”

What is Adaptive Leadership? 

This balcony and dancefloor approach is part of being an adaptive leader. Adaptive leadership is defined thus:

“Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.” 

Grashow, Linskyt and Heifetz (2009)

At the heart of the Adaptive Leadership theory are the ideas of problem identification, seeing organisations as systems comprising of people, understanding the culture and values of an organisation, and working out how best to influence the system (people) toward a clear purpose.

These concepts are captured in the four groups or stages of activities for the Adaptive Leader:

1. Diagnose the system
2. Mobilise the system
3. See yourself as a system
4. Deploy yourself

Diagnosing the problem

Adaptive leadership starts with problem diagnosis. As with medicine, the diagnosis comes before action. If we want to solve a problem we first must ask, what sort of problem are we dealing with?

Here there are some other models and problem frameworks to help us. For example, the Cynefin framework helps us identify the nature of the problem, whether it is simple, complicated, complex or chaotic. Keith Grint’s model assists us in choosing which leadership style to apply given the type of problem, tame (simple) problems require management, critical problems require command and wicked problems need leadership.

Once the problem is diagnosed the leader can start to energise the system to solve it, and as the team starts to work, the leader moves from the dancefloor to the balcony, as required, to assess and manage progress.

Being in Flow

Once a manager is good at balancing paradigms – from the balcony or dancefloor – they can get to the point where they can maintain these two viewpoints conceptually, even if they are in the same place physically. As Grashow et al explain:

“When you move back and forth between balcony and dance floor, you can continually assess what is happening in your organization and take corrective midcourse action. If you perfect this skill, you might even be able to do both simultaneously: keeping one eye on the events happening immediately around you and the other eye on the larger patterns and dynamics.”

Grashow, Linsky and Heifetz

Or in the words of Keanu Reeves, “It’s Meta Baby!” Leaders in this state of flow can enter a quantum or non-binary state where they see both perspectives at once.

My experience of adaptive leadership

Achieving that sense of flow and dual perspective does not always happen, but I was in that state on that Christmas Day in Bosnia. From that moment of crisis onwards, I felt I had the pulse of the team and the situation, and we all moved purposefully towards our goal.

I am happy to report that we got the casualty on the helicopter and safely evacuated them to the hospital. While the casualty went into the operating theatre, my team and I flew back, back up the winding valleys of the Bosnian hills, towards our base. I distinctly remember sitting at the door of the helicopter, watching the sunset over the mountains, tired but smiling, knowing we had had a good day. We had fulfilled the ideal of adaptive leadership, in “mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges and thrive.”

What challenges can make your team thrive today?

So, in the challenges you face today, where do you need to be? On the dance floor or the balcony?

As a manager, where do you prefer to be? Do you need to be on the balcony a bit more to get a better leadership perspective? How can you get better at seeing both perspectives at the same time?

Whatever the challenge is, see it as an opportunity to thrive. Relish the adventure and have the satisfaction of seeing your team thrive while overcoming obstacles.

The term Adaptive Leadership was coined by Harvard University professor Ron Heifetz in his 1994 book, Leadership Without Easy Answers. The theory of Adaptive Leadership addresses the strategic question of how to mobilise people to adapt to change.

We don’t have to think too far back to realise how important this concept is. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how important it is to quickly adapt to new and fast-evolving circumstances. The Harvard Business Review was just one of the voices advocating Adaptive Leadership as the right sort of leadership model to assist in these sorts of situations.

But, Adaptive Leadership is not just relevant to crisis management. The pace of change in the business sphere demands an adaptive approach. For example, take the development of smartphones a decade ago, or now, the progression of AI; organisations that ignore these seismic technological shifts only put themselves in peril.

So how do we change and adapt to challenging environments? Ron Heifetz set out 5 strategic principles to guide leaders, and their teams, through this process.

5 strategic principles of Adaptive Leadership

These are the five strategic principles in simple terms:

1. Diagnose the situation.
2. Manage distress.
3. Identify distractions.
4. Delegate effectively.
5. Encourage challenge.

Heifetz’s original wording was more lengthy, and each concept needs a little more unpacking, so let’s look at each in more detail.

1. Diagnose the situation

The first step is problem diagnosis and understanding the situation. In the words of Heifetz:

“Diagnose the situation in light of the values at stake, and unbundle the issues involved.”

To analyse the circumstances Heifetz uses a simple problem typology and asks, what sort of problem do you face? Is it a technical or adaptive challenge? In this simple approach, a technical issue already has a known solution. These sorts of problems require management. Adaptive challenges are problems which have no precedent (such as AI) or ones that continue to evolve (like a pandemic) and therefore require leadership to address them. In this way, Heifetz reflects Keith Grint’s problem typology and technical issues are the same as tame problems, and adaptive challenges are synonymous with wicked problems.

One thing a leader can do to help at this stage is to ‘get on the balcony’ rather than being stuck ‘in the dance.’ In other words, a leader needs to take a physical or mental step back to gain perspective and assess the issue, slightly apart from the frenetic activity of the team. This concept is often referred to as leadership from the balcony and dance.

2. Manage distress

The need for change can lead to resistance and distress. People don’t resist change per se, in fact, people frequently embrace change when they see it as positive. For example, few people will turn down a pay rise!

But change can challenge values, assumptions and beliefs and therein lies the potential for conflict. Factions can form within a team, similar to the innovators, early adopters or laggards of the technological life cycle. The laggards bring dissent and resistance that provokes further discord.

Therefore, the leader must keep casting the vision and assessing the workforce in how they are progressing through the adoption curve. It requires judgement to do this and set the right pace for change. The Iceberg Model is a useful tool to help analyse these sorts of stresses.

Here, the ideal that Heifetz is expounding is to:

“Keep the level of distress within tolerable limits for doing adaptive work.”

Heifetz uses a pressure cooker analogy. The leader aims to keep the pressure up without allowing the vessel to blow up.

3. Identify distractions

The next step is to ensure that attention is focused on developing issues and not on less important distractions. Here once again the leader needs to do some diagnosis and identify which issues currently engage attention and differentiate between what is important and what is a distraction. When people find change difficult, they can adopt negative behaviours such as denying the issue, problem misdiagnosis, blaming others, delaying progress, or similar avoidance tactics. As Heifetz says:

“Identify the issues that engage the most attention and counteract avoidance mechanisms such as denial, scapegoating, pretending the problem is technical, or attacking individuals rather than issues.”

These negative behaviours must be identified, understood (once again, the Iceberg Model is useful here) and then challenged, to bring people back to the main issue.

4. Delegate effectively

One effective way of keeping people mission-focused is effective delegation. If you can give people tasks that allow them ownership of the problem – or at least keep them focussed on addressing it – then this will help to minimise distractions.

In my experience, it is productive for a leader to delegate to the point of pain, but only that far. In other words, it should be a little uncomfortable for the leader, who must trust the team member and also challenging for the individual being tasked, as the activity should stretch them. Or as Heifetz puts it:

“Allow people to take responsibility for the problem, but at a rate they can handle.”

In this way, the leader can place responsibility on the whole team while at the same time allowing development opportunities. But once again, the pressure cooker analogy applies. The team is put under stress to deal with the problem, but the leader needs to monitor levels of distress.

5. Encourage challenge

Voices of dissent can cause problems for leaders who are trying to encourage change, but a leader also must protect individuals who challenge them. This can be uncomfortable at times as these people can be a source of frustration to a person in authority, and destabilising for the team. Such people often seem unreasonable, but as George Bernard Shaw observed:

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Organisations need people to challenge them, and all teams need atmospheres of psychological safety where members can raise objections or new ideas. Therefore, the leader has to:

“Protect those who raise hard questions, generate distress, and challenge people to rethink the issues at stake.”

These people, who bring the hard questions, are often leaders in their own right.

The difference between authority and leadership

And here Heifetz draws the distinction between leadership and authority. An authority is a decision maker, someone with a specific leadership role and responsibility within a structure. These formal structures are important for bringing direction, protection, and continuity to a team. But leadership can come from anyone, even outside of these formal structures. Leaders bring influence and provoke change, no matter their role. Leadership should be encouraged throughout an organisation to ensure innovation, creativity, and challenge to the status quo. These individuals, demonstrating this sort of leadership, will often have the freedom to provoke rethinking that authorities lack.

How to develop Adaptive Leadership

So, to become a leader who can effectively navigate change, adopt the five principles of Adaptive Leadership:

1. Diagnose the situation.
2. Manage distress.
3. Identify distractions.
4. Delegate effectively.
5. Encourage challenge.

In today’s rapidly changing environment – in business, politics or life – we must learn to adjust quickly and positively. In the words of the (unofficial) Marine Corps motto, as espoused by Clint Eastwood as Gunny Highway in heartbreak ridge,

“You adapt, you overcome, you improvise!”

When you can do this, and encourage others to do the same, then you are on the way to becoming an Adaptive Leader.