Kim Woods Only (600 7.1 Discussion)

Post #1

Identify a situational challenge in your organization or one with which you are familiar that requires adaptive leadership and: Briefly describe the challenge discussing why it is technical/adaptive or adaptive

Northouse states, “although people often think of adaptive leadership as being leader centered, it is actually more follower centered. It focuses primarily on how leaders help others do the work they need to do, in order to adapt to the challenges they face. (2016, p.258) My situational challenge would be our day to day operations in protective services. On any given day we work with a different team. As a shift leader you are responsible for all of the movement and protection of the principal that day, so your success is based on the success of your followers or teammates. The shift leader must help the chase driver adapt to any situation we face while communicating with the limo driver and protective services officer. There endless moving parts and if a follower makes an error the responsibility is on the shift lead which makes a good adaptive leader focus on helping their followers do a good job by providing good training and additional guidance as needed throughout the day.

Discuss two leadership behaviors that are pivotal to mobilizing people to tackle this challenge and thrive providing specific examples.

One leadership behavior that is critical to help motivate people to tackle this challenging job is to regulate distress. It can be extremely stressful to drive a chase vehicle in a motorcade at high speed, inches from the bumper of a VIP in an armored car on crowded DC streets. The leader must make corrections and train as they go in a calm and encouraging manner to help get the best from the team member. Those leaders who amp it up only end up making their team uneasy. Northouse house states, “treating challenges with the wrong kind of leadership is maladaptive” (2016, p.264)

Another leadership behavior pivotal to success is regulating personal distress. “To help others through the adaptive process, adaptive leaders need to make sure they have their own act together.” (Northouse, 2016, p.268) A shift leader might have just gotten chewed out by someone or a quick change was made to a schedule and they are scrambling. The team needs to see a leader who can adapt quickly to change and keep a clear head, maintaining control of the mission. This goes hand in hand with regulating a follower’s distress. Showing your own stress is not going to help the mission get accomplished.

Assess the value of adaptive behavior in addressing change and meeting organizational goals

“Change and learning are inherent in organizational life, and adaptive leadership focuses specifically on helping followers to confront change and examine the emergence of new values that may accompany change.” (Northouse, 2016, p.275) I think adaptive behavior is quite valuable in addressing change and meeting organizational goals. Since it is a follower based theory it means that leaders are already in tune with followers and taking steps to mitigate stress and encourage growth and development which will ultimately lead to goals being met.

Northouse, P.G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice. Los Angeles, California: Sage

Publications, Inc.

Post #2

Briefly describe the challenge discussing why it is technical/adaptive or adaptive

A challenge faced in the Navy when attached to a submarine is an underway schedule change. Both having the underway delayed or having the underway moved up. This challenge is an adaptive challenge because it cannot be solved “through the normal ways of doing things in the organization” (Northouse, 2016). The situation will always be different. The submarine could be in port in another country, it could have any number of pieces of equipment torn apart for maintenance or repair, and there can be any number of personnel issues due to leaving early or late.

Discuss two leadership behaviors that are pivotal to mobilizing people to tackle this challenge and thrive providing specific examples.

There are several leadership behaviors that are pivotal to the successful outcome of this challenge. However, two that jump out at me are: “get on the balcony” and “protect leadership voices from below” (Northouse, 2016).

Get on the balcony, because the situation will be different every time. The leaders must be able to see all the unintended consequences of changing the schedule. The ability to step back and uncover and understand all the new challenges to getting underway is extremely important. To solve problems, first we must know what they are.

The second behavior, protect leadership voices from below, is also extremely important because that is where a lot of the solutions will come from. The workers know the status of their equipment and their fellow personnel, and they will provide the inputs of whether changing the schedule is even feasible, and what needs to be done to make it happen.

Assess the value of adaptive behavior in addressing change and meeting organizational goals

I think adaptive leadership is very valuable. The ability to adapt is vital to keeping organizations alive. “Mobilizing an organization to adapt its behaviors in order to thrive in new business environments is critical” ( Heifetz & Laurie, 1997). When organizations don’t adapt like Blockbuster when Netflix came out, then you will not only stop doing well, but may cease to exist.

Heifetz, R. A. & Laurie, D. L. (2001). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 79(11), 131-141

Northouse, P.G., (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications

Post #3

Adaptive Challenge

Currently our college is tasked with an institutional change in its approach to providing services to students to improve the time to matriculation. The current challenge is that attendance at the community college has become a three- to six-year journey, rather than two. The college knows that it is falling behind in providing fundamental solutions to increasingly diversified student populations and greater demand but cannot seem to remove itself from the confines of its current operations to remove obstacles to student attendance and success. This is an adaptive challenge because it requires the development of a new strategy and a new way of operating that will require the examination of patterns of behavior, underlying assumptions and beliefs, “values, practices, and relationships throughout the company” (Heifetz & Laurie, 1997, p. 134). This challenge requires the mobilization of employees at all levels of the organization to create solutions (Northouse, 2016).

Leadership Behaviors for Mobilization

The first important leadership behavior for this adaptive challenge is to get on the balcony and take a system view, “to see the big picture” of the challenge (Northouse, 2016, p. 263). Leaders must identify all the components of current situation to fully recognize the gap between reality and the envisioned future. In the context of system thinking, the point of leverage is finding ways to “advocate thinking about any given issue as a whole, emphasizing the interrelationships between its components rather than the components themselves” (Shaked & Schechter, 2013). By identifying interdependencies within the system, leadership can mobilize connected groups (i.e., faculty and administration) toward adaption and change.

A second important leadership behavior for this adaptive challenge is to regulate distress. Rarely is the process of change completed without some level of discomfort. Leaders must create a holding environment that provides direction, creates collaboration, empowers employees, resolves conflict, and establishes beneficial ground rules (Northouse, 2016, p. 266-268). According to Sikerbol (2015), leaders can “help employees feel motivated and committed to achieving their goals, implementing change, and realizing a new vision for the organization”, if they strive to understand and address varying employee reactions (para. 2). Creating an environment for faculty and administration to work together as a team to address the alignment of new strategies and dialogue about assumptions and beliefs is an important part of the process of addressing this challenge.

The Value of Adaptive Leadership

Adaptive leadership behavior is very similar to Senge’s (2006) five fundamental disciplines of learning organizations. Adaptive leadership promotes a systematic approach to change (systems thinking), a review of personal attitudes and beliefs (personal mastery) and deeply held assumptions (mental models), a common goal focus (building shared vision), and the use of dialogue in team learning to create a “collective intelligence of the group” (Heifetz & Laurie, 1997, p. 139). These are the characteristics of a learning organization, “where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together” (Senge, 2006, p. 3, 5).

References:

Heifetz, R. A. & Laurie, D. L. (2001). The work of leadership. Harvard Business Review, 79(11), 131-141.

Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and practice (7th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Senge, P.M. (2006). The fifth discipline: The art and science of a learning organization. New York, NY: Currency/ Doubleday.

Shaked, H. h., & Schechter, C. c. (2013). Seeing wholes: The concept of systems thinking and its implementation in school leadership. International Review Of Education / Internationale Zeitschrift Für Erziehungswissenschaft, 59(6), 771-791. DOI 10.1007/s11159-013-9387-8

Sikerbol, K. (2015, November 19). Managing emotional reactions to organizational change. Retrieved July 23, 2017, from http://irc.queensu.ca/articles/managing-emotional-reactions-organizational-change