Sunday was Mother's Day and today is my mother's birthday, which has me reflecting on what a profound impact my mother has had on my life, my leadership style and my sense of responsibility and commitment toward those who work for and with me. My mother spent most of her 35-year career working for the Federal Government and is now retired. After completing her bachelor's degree at night, while working full-time and raising three kids, she started her master's degree, but quit that program once she achieved a management position because she had obtained her ideal leadership position of a team of professionals. Mom always wanted to be a team leader, she loved working with people, she was energized by the diversity of people, she knew every team member personally, to help them grow in their lives and careers. Any time that I went to work with her, I was told by everyone how lucky I was to have her as my mother.
My mother valued mentoring and viewed it as her responsibility to her team, to help them grow as she had been helped in her career. I have always lead and mentored in the same way in my career, as I saw the difference in a team that supports and grows together is much more enjoyable to work in and more productive. Plus it is rewarding to help others see what they cannot see, to suggest how they can improve themselves and their work -- with a positive and encouraging work dialog, then later witness their growth and gratitude.
Not all leaders value mentoring, as my mother and I have both encountered in our careers. We both have left jobs that we loved after having to deal with managers who didn't care as much about their staff and developing them as they valued numbers and task completion. Ironically, being personally connected with your team and committed to them usually produces a pro-active work environment, increased retention and self-initiated accountability -- which naturally raises team and individual productivity. It takes a leader's personal commitment to mentoring her team to accomplish optimal organizational productivity. Thanks, Mom, for modeling this for me!
The two phases of Adaptive Leadership are crisis and change, as explained by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky in "Adaptive Leadership in Practice." For leaders and organizations to consider creating and implementing adaptive change, they usually experience an urgent or emergency condition. Public safety leaders encounter emergencies daily and often try to implement quick technical fixes instead of adaptive change. Private organizations are less likely to implement change to improve their organizations, until there is a large crisis.
Here are Adaptive Leadership skills to turn a crisis into positive change:
Promote Adaptation
Doing what you have always done because it works, or used to work, keeps your organization stagnant. With constantly evolving economies and technologies, this makes it hard to grow or maintain existing customer loyalty. If you don't believe that your industry changes much, look at how much our society changes regularly -- cell phones, for example, constantly change to suit consumer demand. Future-thinking leaders are adapting to trends to maintain and exceed their market share. Small changes are a prudent method, enabling agility to easily modify and make the change more manageable for people in the organization.
Encourage Disequilibrium
Disturbance from crisis can be productive to encourage change, but too much can cause negative results in employees or customers fighting or fleeing your organization. Effective leaders manage the stress level for their organizations, moderating urgency and timeline demands to a manageable level, while pushing for more creativity and innovation.
Foster Leadership
Successful change happens when all levels of an organization embrace and implement it. Effective leaders empower everyone in the organization to contribute in a positive way. Diversity through listening to and learning from everyone, enables informed leadership, and enables a leader to admonish some of his own authority to create buy-in and new ideas. A fresh perspective enables a leader to disengage from the crisis and depart from his experience and emotions, enabling true innovation to occur. Authoritative leadership does not enable this kind of organizational environment.
For assistance in deciding how to implement change in your organization, contact us for advice. Get the perspective of an unbiased third-party to assist in your Adaptive Leadership.
Today I met with a friend that I began knowing as a professional networking contact over three years ago. After our discussion, I realized that some people have a gift for listening to others so well that they help you communicate your frustrations and come up with action items to work on your issues, not because you asked for help or even intended to ask for it, but because they heard you and were thoughtful enough to offer ideas to get you thinking about how to work on your issues.
About an hour after our talk, I was feeling uplifted and I realized that is what makes a great coach (and leader) -- being empathetic and wiling to share knowledge and life experience to improve someone else's thinking about their own life -- a coach's role is not to solve problems for others.
As a professional consultant/coach and trainer, my goal is to help others to see what they don't see, to understand how to change and do things differently for the betterment of their lives, careers, teams, etc. But I don't always think to follow my own advice when I am struggling -- to listen to someone else's perspective to help me change my thinking pattern. Today I am thankful for receiving coaching that helped me...even though I didn't intentionally seek it...I will make a point of seeking coaching for a perspective that I can use to change mine...
