In today’s organizations, leadership isn’t just about setting a vision and executing a plan. It’s about navigating an unpredictable sea of shifting priorities, conflicting values, rising emotional intensity, and, quite frankly, collective burnout.
I call it:
organizational whiplash, the experience of reacting to constant change without time to recalibrate. For many leaders I coach, it feels like managing a team on a spinning carousel: keep it moving, keep smiling, don’t fall off.
This is the new normal. And in our current environment, one kind of leadership stands out as not just relevant but essential.
It’s called adaptive leadership.
What Is Adaptive Leadership?
Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, along with Alexander Grashow, introduced the concept of adaptive leadership in the 1990s and early 2000s, with their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership.
It’s based on the idea that some of the most pressing challenges we face don’t have clear solutions and require us to shift mindsets, values, and behaviors rather than apply technical fixes.
Rather than solving problems for people, adaptive leaders create the space for others to face reality, build resilience, and co-create the path forward.
It’s about leading with curiosity and emotional intelligence, especially when the stakes are high and the answers are unclear.
The Center for Creative Leadership conducted a study on the behaviors of adaptable leaders and their white paper focuses on three main components of adaptable leadership: cognitive flexibility, dispositional flexibility, and emotional flexibility.
Why Adaptable Leadership Matters Now
We’re living in an era where traditional leadership approaches, top-down directives, heroic problem-solving, one-size-fits-all strategies are becoming increasingly ineffective.
Today’s senior leaders are grappling with:
- Organizational whiplash: constant pivots, restructuring, shifting KPIs
- Rising team sensitivity: amplified emotional responses and lower tolerance for ambiguity
- Cultural toxicity: erosion of trust, psychological safety, and morale
- Expectation overload: the pressure to be strategic, decisive, empathetic, inclusive, and inspirational
Why Adaptive Leadership Is Making a Comeback
The need for adaptive leadership isn’t new—but its relevance has skyrocketed. We are witnessing a convergence of forces:
- Eroding morale and cultural strain
- Sky-high expectations from boards, customers, and employees
- Increasing emotional and psychological complexity in teams
- A deep desire for meaning, authenticity, and transparency in leadership
In Forbes article, Why Adaptive Leadership Is the Leadership Skill We Need Now, Lynda Silsbee, confirms this as she describes shifting markets, advancing, and global events unfolding unpredictably driving the demand for adaptive leadership. Adaptive leadership allows leaders to navigate these complexities with agility, foresight and resilience.
Adaptive Strategies for Senior Leaders and Their Teams
Here are four practical ways to practice adaptive leadership in your organization today:
1. Name the Complexity Out Loud
People don’t need you to pretend everything is under control. In fact, pretending can erode trust. Instead, lead with transparency. Leaders often feel pressure to appear clear, confident, and in control, even when everything around them is shifting. But in adaptive leadership, pretending to have certainty in the face of ambiguity can erode trust faster than admitting you don’t have all the answers.
Naming the complexity out loud isn’t weakness, it’s displaying leadership. It’s saying, “This is messy, and we may not have the perfect solution yet, but we’re going to work through it together.”
As researcher Brené Brown defines it, vulnerability as:
“The emotion we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.”
—Brené Brown, Daring Greatly
In other words, being vulnerable as a leader means showing up, even when the path is unclear, the stakes are high, and there’s no guarantee of the outcome. When leaders acknowledge complexity instead of masking it, they normalize discomfort, model trustworthiness, and invite collaboration. Especially in moments of change or organizational fatigue, this kind of realness creates the psychological safety teams need to stay engaged and resilient.
You’re saying, “This is complex, and we won’t get it perfect. But we’ll learn together as we go.” It acknowledges complexity, creates psychological safety, and invites collective problem-solving.
2. Slow Down to Align
In the recent MIT Sloan Management Review, Henrik Saabye and Thomas Borup Kristensen explore Leaders’ Critical Role in Building a Learning Culture. Saabye and Kristensen’s conduct case studies on two large organizations, and their research highlight a key insight: “To become effective learning facilitators, leaders must embrace the counterintuitive approach of going slow to go fast.”
Urgency is tempting, especially under pressure. But speed without alignment leads to confusion and chaos. Take time to pause, clarify purpose, and recalibrate goals before charging ahead. One of the most valuable lessons in today’s complex, evolving leadership is the value of pause.
Ask yourself and your team:
- What are we solving for now?
- Has our definition of success changed?
- Where are we misaligned?
3. Focus on Building Adaptive Teams in a Learning Culture
Adaptive leadership isn’t a solo act. The goal is to build teams that are self-correcting, self-aware, and capable of navigating complexity together. In today’s environment of rapid technological change, environmental pressures, and evolving customer expectations, a company’s ability to learn and adapt is essential to its survival and long-term success. Still, many leaders underestimate their pivotal role in fostering that learning, particularly when large-scale initiatives require it most.
Another key point made in Saabye and Kristensen’s article is by framing each problem as an opportunity for growth and development, leaders encourage their teams to approach problems with a focus on strengthening long-term skills rather than just resolving the issue at hand.
Ways to do this:
- Bring curiosity into your leadership
- Hold regular retrospectives to reflect on what’s working and what’s not
- Normalize “test-and-learn” approaches instead of seeking perfection
- Create forums for candid, constructive conversations
- View problems as learning opportunities
4. Model Emotional Agility
Your team takes emotional cues from you. Adaptive leaders don’t suppress their feelings. They manage them with intention. They recognize stress signals, stay grounded in values, and respond, rather than react.
Watch Susan David’s Emotional Agility Ted Talk:
5. Developing Emotional Agility: Start with Self
In times of change, it’s easy for leaders to focus outward. Leading them to focus on strategy, deliverables, and team dynamics. But adaptive leadership starts inward with self-awareness. Emotional agility isn’t just a personal trait, it’s a leadership muscle. The ability to recognize, regulate, and respond to your own emotions directly impacts how you lead under pressure, navigate conflict, and foster trust.
Leadership is relational, but it begins internally.
The following questions are designed to help you slow down, reflect, and lead from a place of intention rather than reactivity. Consider this your “Self as Coach” moment as an invitation to pause and look inward before leading forward.
One of my personal favorites: “What’s really mine to carry, and what can I co-create with my team?”
Strengthen Emotional Agility
- What emotions am I feeling right now, and what might be at the crux?
- Where do I tend to react instead of responding, especially under pressure?
- What situations bring out defensiveness in me? Why?
- How do I typically deal with discomfort or uncertainty?
Values & Intentional Action
- What values do I want to lead from in this situation—even if it’s tough?
- What would it look like to act from purpose, not protection, right now?
- What story am I telling myself about this challenge, and is it true?
- What’s one small action I can take that aligns with who I want to be as a leader?
Relational Awareness
- Am I creating space for others’ emotions, or trying to fix or avoid them?
- How might my emotional state be affecting my team, spoken or unspoken?
- Where could curiosity serve me better than control in this conversation?
- How often do I model emotional agility for my team or just talk about it?
Learning & Reframing
- What’s my relationship with failure?
- What can this situation teach me about myself as a leader?
- Where am I avoiding growth because it feels uncomfortable or risky?
- What feedback (direct or indirect) am I hearing, and how am I receiving it?
Bottom Line
Being a leader today means being uncomfortable more often, and more importantly, learning to see that discomfort as a necessary part of growth.
Adaptive leadership isn’t a soft skill, it’s a survival skill.
When you lead adaptively:
- Morale improves because people feel seen and empowered
- Sensitivity becomes signal, not noise
- Toxicity decreases as trust and transparency grow
- You create a culture where people grow through change not in spite of it
The next time you feel overwhelmed by the pace of change, remember: it’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s a signal to lead differently.
If you or your team are navigating complexity and want to develop your adaptive capacity, I’d love to connect. I help leaders lead more effectively, and more humanely, through change.
Melanie is Founder & CEO of Radical Ignition, Inc. and draws from 30 years of C-level experience in human resources/organizational development, executive coaching, and consulting experience working across a broad range of industries. She is a self-proclaimed “hyper-achiever in recovery” who thrives in complexity, reinvention, and real talk. Her career has been shaped by startups, shakeups, and a deep personal understanding of adversity. She leans into that lived experience as her lens, and to help leaders confront the hard questions, embrace ambiguity, and find the boldest version of themselves.
She works with ambitious executives, founders, and their teams ready to challenge the status quo, not just in their roles and organizations, but in their own thinking, beliefs, habits, assumptions, and leadership style. Whether she’s on a keynote stage or in a coaching session, she brings provocation with purpose. She isn’t engaged with her clients to make them feel comfortable. She is there make transformation unavoidable.
Melanie is working with leaders from brands such as Fresenius Medical Care, CVS Health, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, ServiceNow, Cedar, and Airtable. She is a certified executive coach through the Hudson Institute in Santa Barbara, a certified team coach through Clutterbuck International, and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coach Federation (ICF). She is also the President of the Seattle Hudson Coach Community and on the Board for the ICF Chapter for Washington State.
