The Practice of Adaptive Leadership

PART THREE

MOBILIZE THESYSTEM

IN PRACTICING ADAPTIVE LEADERSHIP, you make interventions that, though sometimes unwelcome, are designed to help people in your system (your organization, team, community, society, or family) address worthy challenges. For example:

• Frustrated in its attempts to persuade the school administration to broaden its focus to incorporate new technology, which the administrators neither understood nor valued, the school’s advisory committee resigned en masse.

• Unable to convince the HR department to move from a transactional orientation to a strategic partnership with the rest of the company, the CEO challenged the culture by moving a highly successful sales vice president into the vice president for HR role.

• Violating ...