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Most discussion about leadership focuses on the personal traits or skills needed to get people to follow someone in authority through good times and bad. But often we spend too much time thinking about the inspiration side and not enough on the perspiration side.
Meeting today's toughest challenges requires managing disorienting changes and inevitable conflicts that are bound to impact the habits and values of employees and their comfort level in the workplace. A company that must adapt to thrive needs Adaptive Leadership.
Adaptive Leadership makes you sweat. People trying to promote significant change in organizational life meet stiff resistance and determined attempts to push them aside and take them out of the game.
Just ask Carly Fiorina, the ousted former Hewlett-Packard CEO, or Larry Summers, the ex-Harvard president. Both wanted to shake things up, but neither had the skill nor will to attract enough allies or "think politically," a key practice of Adaptive Leadership.
Exercising Adaptive Leadership is difficult and dangerous. Difficult because it focuses on deep-seated conflicts, value-laden issues, and strongly held beliefs and loyalties. Dangerous because people understandably resist dredging up their innermost fears and concerns, exposing conflicts and questioning long-held assumptions. They push back to avoid dealing with anxiety- provoking issues-the very ones that the CEO exercising Adaptive Leadership must address. Truly transformational change asks people to make hard choices among valued norms and behaviors: what to preserve and then what to leave behind in order to make progress. Adaptive Leadership is about managing loss. A CEO exercising true leadership asks others to abandon something important to them for some potential, but unknown, better future.
The most common source of leadership failure is treating an adaptive challenge as a technical issue. For example, when a company lurches into financial difficulty, CEOs often order across-the-board belt-tightening instead of tackling the underlying systemic problems. In treating an adaptive challenge as a technical problem, a CEO meets expectations by taking the problem off of everyone else's shoulders and "fixing" it without painful deep change. Everyone can relax, under the comfortable illusion that the problem will go away with only minor inconvenience.
But the CEO who resists truly adapting to new realities sets his company up for failure. One who stepped up to the adaptive challenge was Drew Hodges, founder and CEO of Spot- Co, a leading Broadway ad agency. Informal management worked when the firm had a handful of employees but became dysfunctional as the company grew. Hodges, recognizing the need to change his own role in ways that were uncomfortable for him, "kicked himself upstairs." He became less involved in daily creative decisions, giving his managers more authority while he focused on the big picture and external issues. SpotCo today has a management structure that can support substantial growth, and Hodges no longer has to be involved in every decision and resolve every issue.
As difficult and risky as it is, the work of Adaptive Leadership is also enormously rewarding. A CEO leading adaptive change is addressing the most important issues facing the organization, helping to generate its capacity to meet new, unanticipated future realities in the fast-moving, intensely competitive global environment and enabling it to survive and thrive long after there is a new person at the helm. Because Adaptive Leadership deals with strongly held values and beliefs, it provides and clarifies meaning and purpose in professional life for CEOs and for the rest of the organization as well.
Marty Linsky (marty@cambridge-leadership. com) is a principal of Cambridge Leadership Associates, an international consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. (www.cambridge-leadership.com) | 
