Leadership During An Extended Period of Adaptation - part #2

Important Questions For The Team

“The usefulness of the knowledge we acquire and the effectiveness of the actions we take depend on the quality of the questions we ask,” write Eric Vogt, Juanita Brown, and David Isaacs in their short booklet called The Art of Powerful Questions. “Questions open the door to dialogue and discovery. They are an invitation to creativity and breakthrough thinking.” Questions during times of adaptation are very important at the individual and group level work. The challenge is to find the right questions. 

For this, I always turn to the work of Peter Drucker, Frances Hesselbein, and Joan Snyder Kuhl and their book called Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders (Wiley, 2015).  Here are the five questions I recommend a team start exploring during an adaptive challenge:

1. What is our mission?

2. Who is our customer?

3. What does the customer value?

4. What are our results?

5. What is our plan?

Reviewing these as a team is essential because the resulting dialogue and discussion will reveal, in part, what is and is not changing. This level of understanding will help team leaders communicate better when dealing with loss and resistance during a time period of extended adaptation. 

The interesting thing that I have observed during this level of dialogue is the focus on questions #2 and #3.  While question #2 may not change that much, I always find it intriguing to participate in a group setting and to witness how much awareness and understanding has or has not shifted around question #3. What I have seen is that the cause of many adaptation issues surface around the changes in customer expectations. 

One key to creating this level of understanding is to discern what customers want, need, and expect. The other is to ask ourselves a critical question: What do we want to be known for as a company? This can be broken down into the following categories: product quality, overall customer experience, i.e. buying the product/service and using the product/service, and finally the employee experience in the previous steps. 

In the end, the quality of the questions we ask will “open the door to dialogue and discovery. They are an invitation to creativity and breakthrough thinking.” And creativity and new ways of thinking and working are mission critical to success when working through complex adaptive problems. 

Team Leaders And Adaptation

When a team leader moves through an extended period of adaptation, so does their team. As a result, this often feels like the team is caught in a perpetual cycle of the classic storming stage within normal team development. When this happens, I coach team leaders to remember that team members are having two experiences at the same time.  

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall in their book, Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019) point out that there are two categories of experience, namely “We experiences” and “Me experiences.” As they explain, “… what distinguishes the best team leaders from the rest is their ability to meet these two categories of needs for the people on their teams. What we, as team members, want from you, our team leader, is firstly that you make us feel part of something bigger, that you show us how what we are doing together is important and meaningful; and secondly that you make us feel you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.” 

While the above paragraph is self-explanatory, within it are important points that sometimes get missed. First, when it comes to we experiences, a team leader needs to help their team members see “how what we are doing together is important and meaningful.” This action is often called framing and naming the work. Many leaders just tell people to work but don’t really explain why the work during an extended period of adaptation is important or meaningful. 

In basic terms, they don’t place the efforts of the team within the context of the bigger picture. The outcome of this action is two fold. One, people focus on maintaining and defending status quo. Two, they become disengaged over time because the work they do is just work and not something that is making a difference. In short, action without understanding is not going to result in innovation or effective collaboration. 

Second, during adaptive work, a team leader needs to focus on the me experiences. In particular, they need to make team members “feel you can see us, and connect to us, and care about us, and challenge us, in a way that recognizes who we are as individuals.” Again, on the surface, this seems like basic team leader work. But in reality, it is much harder than it appears. For to do this well, a team leader needs to build a healthy relationship with each member on the team while also building the whole team. Furthermore, they need to build a relationship that is based on authentic caring and trust. In short, feelings and EQ are more central to the work than the classic focus on clarity and IQ. 

Buckingham and Goodall add two final points in their book that I think relate to adaptive work. As they write, “local experiences… are significantly more important than company ones,” and “the truth is that … people care which team they’re on.” When it comes to the heavy lifting related to adaptive problem solving, local solutions are more important to people than company solutions, because local relationships and local outcomes are tangible and visible on a day to day basis. While these individuals may work for the company, the local team culture is their daily we experience and me experience. And given how important both of these experiences are to people, we must remember that working on a functional team can and will make a big difference to whether or not both of those experiences are stressful or overwhelming. 

Flip The VUCA Forces

Living and working in an extend period of adaptation, or what is sometimes called a VUCA environment, namely a time period where the world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous, is difficult. Leaders and companies are stretched by the technical and adaptive challenges before them. When this becomes an extended time period, rather than a VUCA episode, the work can become complex and complicated, all at the same time period. 

The term VUCA was introduced by the Army War College and by Bob Johansen in his book, Get There Early (Berrett-Koehler, 2007). Johansen contends that we have “to flip the VUCA forces to terms that create possibilities and refine VUCA as: Vision; Understanding; Clarity; Agility.” The pathway to doing this involves disciplined thought and disciplined action. 

We begin this flipping process by doing in-depth diagnostic work before action to determine what actually is going on. Next, we must create a culture of courageous conversations, and generate and distribute leadership deep into the organization in order to mobilize people to create new solutions. Then, we need to make two critical choices, namely to invest time and energy into resource building for greater perspective and understanding, and to stop self-criticism and self-judgement during the hard work of leading others. As we make these choices, we also need to ask ourselves and others quality questions and engage in thoughtful listening and dialogue. Finally, we need to understand the kind of we experiences and me experiences that people are having as they do this hard and on-going work. 

"In the end,” writes Max De Pree, American businessman, writer and founder of the Herman Miller office furniture company, “it is important to remember that we cannot become what we need to be by remaining where we are." Because, in the end, adaptation is always about transformation. And the most successful leaders moving through an extended period of adaptation are always agents of transformation. They help us, individually and collectively, move from where we are to where we need to be, resulting in vision, understanding, clarity, and agility. 

© Geery Howe 2025

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change

Leadership During An Extended Period of Adaptation - part #1

Introduction

Over the course of the last 6 months, it has become abundantly clear to me that we have entered an extended period of adaptation. As issues and various problems have surfaced, those involved have called into question fundamental assumptions about how to work and how to serve their customers. As a result, beliefs, priorities, and habits are being challenged, and certain systems are being re-examined. Clearly, new ways of thinking and working are being explored. All involved also know that they need to learn more in order to better define the problems before them, and to maintain perspective in spite of the complexities and complications that abound. 

Diagnosis Before Action

When I am asked about how to begin doing this level of work, I always defer to the in-depth expertise and research done by Ron Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Harvard Business Press, 2009). These authors point out that diagnosis should always precede action. In particular, this level of diagnostic work begins with the question: What is really going on here?. Furthermore, the question needs to focus on the “self and system levels.” 

After data collection and problem identification (the what), those involved need to move into the interpretation of the data (the why), and then create a plan of action or intervention (the what’s next). As Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky explain, “The single most important skill and most undervalued capacity for exercising adaptive leadership is diagnosis.” I agree 100% with this perspective. 

For me, one very interesting thing about their research falls into two categories. First, “Systemic and personal realities always play out simultaneously.” Second, “Shared language is important in leading adaptive change.” When I think back over nearly 40 years of doing this work, and when I have witnessed exceptional leaders mobilize people to deal with tough and challenging adaptive problems over extend periods of time, I realize that shared language changes the capacity of the group to deal with adaptivity. Furthermore, these same leaders work on the systemic level related issues, while also coaching people through the “personal realities” related to the adaptive challenges. Through shared language, it is synchronicity of these two actions, i.e. systemic work and personal work, that helps these leaders do solid diagnostic work and to co-create workable interventions. 

As part of this work, the aforementioned authors remind us that “yesterday’s adaptive challenges are today’s technical problems.” This little fact is often lost in the rush to create a solution to an adaptive challenge. They also point out that “people prefer status quo to doing things differently,” and that “what people resist is not change, but loss.” Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky note that “the common factor generating adaptive failure is resistance to loss.” So part of our work during extended periods of adaptation is to determine what is and what is not being lost. “Successful adaptive changes build on the past rather than jettison it…. [they] determine what is essential to preserving the organization’s heritage and what is expendable.” I have witnessed that when this kind of work is done well, there always is a connection back to mission and purpose. 

However, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky note that leaders who are dealing with adaptive challenges “need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict, for yourself and others around you.” This will require you as a leader to build “up your tolerance for disorder, ambiguity, and tension.” One way they recommend to do this is to “remind yourself that you (as a person) are not your role (as someone seeking to lead change).” They also encourage leaders to not go it alone and to identify their scope of authority. 

In particular, I think they are spot on when they advise adaptive leaders to “grow your own personal network outside of the system you are trying to change” and to talk regularly with confidants, and people outside the environment in which you are trying to lead adaptive change, who are invested in you, not the issues you are addressing.” They call this anchoring yourself in multiple communities. 

Face Two Competing Demands

In the same year that Ron Heifetz, Alexander Glasgow, and Marty Linsky published the aforementioned book, they also published an articled called “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis” in the July-August 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Multiple times over the course of my career, I have encouraged leaders to read this article and to discuss it with their team. Given current events, I again encourage people to read it. The common language and perspective that is gained from this article will come in handy and will make a difference. 

As the article notes, there are two distinct phases during a crisis, namely the  emergency phase and the adaptive phase. They point out that “people put enormous pressure on you [the leader] to respond to their anxieties with authoritative certainty, even if doing so means overselling what you know and discounting what you don’t.” Furthermore, leaders “face two competing demands. They must execute in order to meet today’s challenges. And they must adapt what and how things get done in order to thrive in tomorrow’s world.” With this in mind, they acknowledge that “an organization that depends solely on its senior managers to deal with the challenges risks failure.”

While there are many important points and helpful insights within this article, the three that speak to me today I believe can help with an extended period of adaptation. First, a leader must “create a culture of courageous conversations. In a period of sustained uncertainty, the most difficult topics must be discussed.” This ability to talk about difficult things is critical to building trust and solving problems. While perspective may be challenged, the holding of these crucial conversations are very important to generating effective solutions and creating better systems to handle the emerging adaptive problems. 

Second, a leader “must use leadership to generate more leadership deep in the organization.” In particular, they must “distribute leadership responsibility,” and “mobilize everyone to generate solutions by increasing the information flow that allows people across the organization to make independent decisions and share lessons they learn from innovation efforts.” Over time, this will create a “culture of interdependence” and build capacity for thriving in tomorrow’s world. 

Third, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky write more about the personal element of leading an organization through challenging times. They suggest people in leadership “give yourself permission to be both optimistic and realistic,” “find sanctuaries where you can reflect on events and regain perspective,” and “reach out to confidants with whom you can debrief your workdays and articulate your reasons for taking certain actions.” They conclude by offering some critical advice: “don’t lose yourself in your role. Defining life through a single endeavor, no matter how important your work is to you and to others, makes you vulnerable when the environment shifts. It also denies you other opportunities for fulfillment.” In sum, during extended periods of adaptation self-care is as important as organizational care. We need to be kind to ourself as much as we need to offer grace to those around us. The combination of these three elements will help over the short and long haul as the work become complex and complicated. 

Two Choices For Surviving Adaptation

Mark Nepo in his book, Surviving Storms: Finding The Strength To Meet Adversity (St. Martin’s Essentials, 2022), writes that we are living in a world where people are experiencing “our loss of relationship, the isolation of technology, the dissolution of reality, the loss of a common good, the press of narcissism over inclusion, and [an] addiction to violence.” From my perspective, all of these elements are impacting leaders at the professional and personal level. They make the work of being an adaptive leader difficult and complicated. And yet, as a leader, we have to keep moving forward, thoughtfully and carefully, in spite of these elements being present. 

Upon reflection, I think there are two critical choices that need to be made at times like this. The first choice is to invest time and energy into resource building. Because we suffer from negativity bias and a tendency to default to old choices, which are not always effective choices, we need to expand on the resources we have in order to improve our perspective, awareness, and understanding of how to proceed in a disciplined and effective manner. 

For me, this translates into three personal actions related to the first choice. One, I need to set aside more uninterrupted time for reflection. This choice reminds me to follow the advice of Trappist monk and poet, Thomas Merton who wrote, “Take more time, cover less ground.” Therefore, I need to go deep into self-reflection. As Mark Nepo reminds us in the aforementioned book: “When things break down or don’t go as planned, there are always three archetypal questions we are called to ask ourselves: What needs to be repaired? What needs to be reimagined? And what needs to be left dismantled?” These questions engage a more holistic perspective and ask me to think through the choices before me.  

Two, I need to spend more time reading a diversity of authors, recognizing that I am not the first person to go through a situation of this nature. And by doing this reading, I will learn from others’ past and current experiences. “Reading is an honor and a gift from a warrior or historian who - a decade or a thousand decades ago - set aside time to write,” notes Jim Mattis and Bing West in their book, Call Sign Chaos: Learning To Lead (Random House, 2019). “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate - you can’t coach and you can’t lead.” And coaching and leading are critical during adaptive problem solving. 

Three, I need to invest more time with trusted coaches and mentors in order to leverage their expertise, insights, and wisdom. This is one of the most challenging of choices because during extended periods of adaptation, time pressure is substantial. People expect solutions and they expect them now. But based on personal and professional experience, I have learned and relearned that making the time for this level of dialogue and sharing can transform my perspective and understanding. It also can be a source of grounding in common sense and lived experience. 

The second choice needs to happen at the same time as my first choice. I need to stop self-criticism and self-judgement. Over the decades, I have observed and been present with many leaders who struggle during extended time periods of adaptation. What becomes abundantly clear is that many leaders are experiencing some level of grief, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance during adaptation. The difficult part for all of them is that they would rather not deal with grief. So, they turn this grief into self-criticism and/or self-judgement as a response to the stress and difficulties that arise. While I understand how this default choice happens, we must recognize that this is neither helpful or productive. Instead, it reflects a desire for control and order in a time period where these are not typically present. If we seek to lead ourselves and others through adaptive periods, we need to stop making this choice for it has never resulted in effective outcomes or healthy ways of coping. Instead, it leads to either self-abandonment or aggression towards others. None of which will allow for dialogue and problem solving to take place. 

Again, I turn to Thomas Merton who wrote, “Perhaps I am stronger than I think.” This is a subtle and profound truth. When we learn to tap into our inner strength and to use it for good in the midst of adaptation, we are role modeling healthy leadership and healthy self-care. We also are creating a work environment where people can come as themselves and learn to build on their own strengths. In short, the combination of these two critical choices create the conditions for transformation in the midst of adaptation. And this is the desired outcome we seek during such times. 

To be continued on Tuesday. 

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change

Sustaining An Organization - part #4

Dealing With Depletion 

Fourth, if we seek to sustain the organization through challenging times, we need to understand that doing things that deplete us is very different than doing things when we are depleted. One of the most common problem for people in leadership positions during challenging times is decision fatigue. Endless numbers of people are coming to them at all hours of the day and night with small and large problems hoping that they, as the positional leader, will make a decision. And for every decision that is made, there is impact, and the potential for setting precedent. Therefore, leaders think about all of these decisions quite carefully. 

However, the volume and magnitude of the decisions to be made is not matched with enough hours in the day to make the decisions. As a result, notes Marshall Goldsmith in his book, Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts - Becoming the Person You Want to Be, (Crown Business, 2015), “we make careless choices or we surrender to the status quo and do nothing.” Either way, we end up drained. As Goldsmith continues, “It’s one thing to engage in depleting activities, but there’s another dimension: how we behave under the influence of depletion. Doing things that deplete us is not the same as doing things when we’re depleted. The former is cause, the latter effect.” And it is vital to our capacity to sustain an organization during challenging times to discern the difference. 

“Good decisions are not made by those who are running on empty,” writes Ryan Holiday in his book, Stillness Is The Key (Portfolio/Penguin, 2019). “What kind of interior life can you have, what kind of thinking can you do, when you’re utterly and completely overworked? It’s a vicious cycle: We end up having to work more to fix the errors we made when we would have been better off resting, having consciously said no instead of reflexively saying yes. We end up pushing good people away (and losing relationships) because we’re wound so tight and have so little patience.”

One way to break this destructive cycle, and to recharge and gain perspective, is to create uninterrupted time and space for reflection. “If I was to sum up the single biggest problem of senior leadership in the Information Age,” four-star Marine Corps general and former secretary of defense James Mattis has said, “it’s lack of reflection. We need solitude to refocus on prospective decision-making, rather than reacting to problems as they arise.” Ryan Holiday builds on this perspective when he wrote, “If solitude is the school of genius, as historian Edward Gibbon put it, then the crowded, busy world is the purgatory of the idiot.” Thus, we need to give ourselves permission for reflection and solitude. 

But I think a key to this choice was best defined by author and executive coach Lindsay Leahy when she wrote, “As with everything, I always encourage my clients to keep change simple and choose consistency over intensity.” As leaders, we need to recognize that consistent and routine, in-depth time to step back and engage in System 2 thinking rather than unproductive, reactionary action  is the key that unlocks the destructive pattern of continually being depleted. 

Working Coterminously

The aforementioned, four core concepts are not linear in nature. Instead, they are coterminous, namely they need to happen in a concurrent or as a synchronous pattern of choices. One of the choices is not more important than another. Instead, in a functional sense, they all need to happen at the same time. 

Furthermore, with these four choices, the goal is not to get them “done,” as in the sense of getting past them. Instead the goal is to engage these concepts routinely over time. The goal is progress, and to articulate the underlying common purpose which unites these four choices, namely to sustain the organization as it moves through challenging times. 

The result of these four choices being continually utilized over time is two fold. One, a leader gains experience which is a valuable source of knowledge for making better choices and better decisions. Two, the organization gains confidence, trust, and clarity which will help people, individually and collectively, move forward together. 

As we all know, challenging times come and go. Uncertainty is uncomfortable and common for people in leadership positions. However, when we consciously make the right choices and are disciplined in our thoughts and actions, we can sustain ourselves and others to make it through our individual and collectively difficulties. The key is to choose wisely and to be proactive. This is something as leaders that we can and must do each and every day. 

For Further Study:

- Charan, Ram. Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty: The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times, McGraw Hill, 2009.

- Heifetz, Ronald, Alexander Glasgow, and Marty Linsky. “Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2009.

- Pascale, Richard T., Mark Millemann and Linda Gioja. Surfing The Edge of Chaos: The Laws of Nature and the New Laws of Business, Three Rivers Press, 2000.

© Geery Howe 2025

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change

Sustaining An Organization - part #3

Embracing Vulnerability

Third, if we seek to sustain the organization through challenging times, leaders need to embrace vulnerability. First, we have to understand that few, if any, leaders actually choose to do this. They like the image and perception that they are the hero riding in on the white stallion and will save the day, rescuing those who are lost, and coming up with some brilliant observations, insights, and solutions along the way. Very few of them consider vulnerability as a sign of strength, let alone a viable leadership choice during challenging times. 

I think this happens because most leaders have been sold a bill of goods based on the notion that ideas are more important than relationships. This form of leadership is based on relational bypassing, namely that a positional leader chooses to think and act as if healthy relationships are not as important as the creation of desired outcomes or results. They believe people are interchangeable parts in a system that delivers results. While this mythology is believed by many, it still does not make it right. 

From my perspective, leaders need to embrace vulnerability. They also may need to deconstruct and reinvent their leadership style in order to be more successful during challenging times. While this can be hard and scary to do, the best leaders do not shy away from these scary and vulnerable moments. As Brene’ Brown in her book, Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience (Random House, 2021), notes: “Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure…. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”

Brene’ Brown also explore this subject in her book, Dare To Lead: Brave Work, Tough Conversations, Whole Hearts (Random House, 2018). As she writes, “Our ability to be daring leaders will never be greater than our capacity for vulnerability…. The definition of vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.” She continues, “To feel is to be vulnerable. Believing that vulnerability is weakness is believing that feeling is weakness.” She point out that if we dare to lead and embrace vulnerability as part of the process, then we need to take off our armor and expose our hearts. 

The interesting thing for me after decades of doing this work is that I have been present when leaders have done this. I have seen them be vulnerable, and the courage it takes to do this is impressive. I remember a non-profit Executive Director who admitted to his team that a two year project on team building had failed because the organization had not trained their team leaders appropriately and placed unrealistic expectations on them at the exact same time. I remember a CEO of a large company who privately shared that he had no idea how to move forward when a series of adaptive problems surfaced. He admitted that he was afraid and needed help. I remember a non-profit Executive Director who shared that they did not know how to do strategic planning and worried that this might result in them loosing their job. Each time and in each situation, they shared how they felt and how they were struggling. And each time as they worked through this sharing, they felt better and more clear about how to proceed. They also received significant and helpful support as they embraced their vulnerability. 

To be concluded on Thursday. 

Geery Howe, M.A. Executive Coach in Leadership, Strategic Planning, and Organizational Change