Adaptive Leadership – Mind The Gap!

There is often a gap between our aspired values and our actions. Adaptive Leadership helps “address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.” ~ Ronald Heifetz

In London commuters are conscious of the “Mind the Gap” signs in the underground warning of the gap created between the train and the platform. For leaders of organizational change, we face our own chasms. Leadership is required to help people “mind the gap” between our aspired values and our actual actions. Below is a list of how adaptive leaders mind the gap.

1. Get up on the balcony. Leaders must be listeners, but also people who have the vision to see patterns and systemic realities at work in the organization. What is the “music” that keeps your organization, your church “dancing”?

2. Give the work back to the people most affected. Are you the only one who is losing sleep over the organizational challenges? What can we do as leaders to “escape the expert expectation”? First thing: transition from being the “great answer giver” to a “great question asker.”

3. Growth focused. Lead people to grow so THEY can face their biggest challenge. Leadership is mostly about learning. Group learning, corporate and collegial learning. To lead is to learn and lead the learning. If learning isn’t necessary, then leadership isn’t really necessary.

4. Go with the energy. Work with the mature and motivated. Let’s face it, most of our work is putting out fires, dealing with the resistant, attending to the cranky and trying to appease the complainers. But when it is time to lead on, more and more of your energy must be invested in those who are motivated to grow and take responsibility for themselves.

5. Grief work: Leading means dealing with loss. “Growing up means giving up.” Adaptive work is about helping people make hard decisions about competing values in their lives. Competing values can only be solved through Win-Lose. (“Win-win is lose-lose.”) This means something must give, something must go, something will be lost.

6. Get on with it! Go into the new uncharted territory. After you make some observations and interpretations, try some PLAYFUL interventions. Get right into the middle of the muddled mess. Experiment. Don’t wait until you figure out the future; step into it and learn along the way.

This article summarized from “Six Essential Skills for Transformational Pastors” By Tod Bolsinger http://bit.ly/14Qa5lU