Sublime

To practice adaptive leadership, you have to help people navigate through a period of disturbance as they sift through what is essential and what is expendable, and as they experiment with solutions to the adaptive challenges at hand.

Leadership is a difficult practice personally because it almost always requires you to make a challenging adaptation yourself. What makes adaptation complicated is that it involves deciding what is so essential that it must be preserved going forward and what of all that you value can be left behind.

on action: the practices of leadership on adaptive issues from preparation to implementation. Whatever form your interventions take, if successful, they are likely to have certain qualities: • Pointing to a long-term solution (rather than a quick fix) to the adaptive challenge • Framing the challenge and offering interpretations of the issues and t

Leadership on the Line by Ronald A. Heifetz

This means that one of the first overall tasks of leadership is to educate the people around you—junior, senior, lateral, and across boundaries—that adaptive challenges are fundamentally different from technical problems. You need to create the latitude to treat each kind of situation differently—technical problems with expertise, and adaptive chal

Leadership on the Line by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky,

Ireland. She is moved by his conviction that a central piece of the practice of leadership is “helping people to see the contradictions in such a way that they can discover what is in everybody’s best interest”—what Heifetz describes as “recognizing the gap that signals adaptive work.”

People will confer authority or volunteer to follow you because they are looking to you to provide a service, to be a champion, a representative, an expert, a doer who can provide solutions within the terms that they understand the situation.