5 A closer look at more leadership styles
Historically, leadership research has focused on male leaders, often in large private-sector organisations within the North American context. Today’s research considers the perspectives of both male and female followers, peers and supervisors from a diverse range of organisations and countries across the world, and this has led to the definition of more inclusive leadership styles.
Adaptive leadership
Adaptive leadership helps people and organisations to adapt to changing and challenging environments: ‘Simply stated, adaptive leaders prepare and encourage people to deal with change’ (Northouse, 2022, p. 498).
The concept of adaptive leadership was developed by Ronald Heifetz, who worked with a variety of colleagues during the 1990s and beyond. He explains that ‘adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge’ (Heifetz and Laurie, 1997, p. 132).
Heifetz and Laurie define six leader behaviours that are key to the process:
- Get on the balcony – take a step back from the ‘field of action’ and look from a different perspective
- Identify the adaptive challenge – find out what the key challenge is
- Regulate distress – manage conflict and provide direction for your followers
- Maintain disciplined attention – encourage followers to remain open to, and learn from, conflicting points of view
- Give the work back to the people – empower your followers to solve their own problems
- Protect voices of leadership from below – encourage junior staff to share their concerns and don’t dismiss them.
Heifetz separates adaptive from technical challenges, explaining that technical challenges can be more easily defined and solved through the leader’s authority and/or expertise. In contrast, adaptive challenges are not clearly defined and require a range of expertise and a supportive and collaborative environment.
We face many adaptive situations in the workplace – Activity 5 will help you to consider a challenge you have faced.
Activity 5 What are your adaptive challenges?
Consider an adaptive challenge you have faced, either at work or in your personal life, for example, implementing a new set of regulations in the workplace or changing your lifestyle to correct a health issue, and answer the following questions:
What was the challenge?
What was difficult about adapting to your new situation?
What personal behaviours or habits did you have to change?
What specific actions did you take?
Who else needed to be involved to ensure success? What was their approach?
Discussion
Change can be difficult and distressing for many individuals and an effective leader will address that, even while having to adapt their own behaviours/values. Was the example you’ve used difficult or distressing for you? Did you receive support from the leader in your situation?
Understanding more about theories such as this one can help you to be a better leader of change in a difficult environment. It can be useful to have a list, such as the six behaviours outlined by Heifetz and Laurie, to refer to. You’ll explore leading change in more detail in Week 6.
In recent research, Goniewicz and Hertelendy (2023) argue that ‘in the post-pandemic world, adaptive leadership becomes even more vital as it requires strategic foresight, empathy, resilience, and effective communication.’ Drawing from lessons learned during the COVID-19 outbreak, they make the following recommendations for post-pandemic leaders:
- Adopt a learning mindset, both personally and organisationally
- Prioritise mental health and wellbeing, investing resources to help teams manage stress and maintain a healthy work–life balance
- Forge partnerships with other organisations, sectors and countries to share knowledge, resources and best practices
- Address systemic inequalities, creating inclusive, equitable environments to ensure future resilience
- Enhance crisis management skills such as rapid decision making and effective resource allocation.
Inclusive leadership
In their recommendations for adaptive leaders, Goniewicz and Hertelendy (2023) prioritise ‘creating inclusive, equitable environments’ and this is increasingly important in any leadership situation as the workforce grows more diverse, and global collaboration expands.
A report commissioned by the Employer Network for Equality and Inclusion (ENEI, 2016), drawing from a survey completed by almost 1000 employees from a range of organisations, and 61 interviews with 11 participating organisations, defines an inclusive leader as an ‘exemplar of inclusive behaviour’ who:
- listens to and seeks out the views of diverse people and takes account of these views, without bias, in the decisions they make
- appreciates that a diverse group of people will generate more creative solutions to problems and encourages this
- inspires people through a shared vision of future success and motivates them to deliver it
- leverages difference for high performance and provides responsive excellence to customers’, clients’ and service users’ needs
- provides positive feedback to boost people’s self-efficacy
- puts effort into helping diverse people identify their talents and develop them for performance now and future advancement
- communicates authentically and honestly in a way that inspires trust, loyalty and well-being.
The report also describes 15 core competencies present in an inclusive leader, ranging from empathy and confidence building to stewardship and healing. You can access the full list though the link to the Executive Summary in the References section of this week. You’ll explore a selection of leadership skills in more detail in Week 3, but if you’re interested in investigating inclusion in more detail, the OpenLearn course ‘Diversity and inclusion in the workplace [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’ is a useful resource.
While inclusive leadership has not yet been extensively researched, there is evidence to suggest a variety of benefits in the workplace, ranging from the promotion of psychological safety and work engagement (Nembhard & Edmondson, 2006) to innovative work behaviour (Qi, Liu, Wei & Hu, 2019).
Professional services and consultancy firm Deloitte, uses its community pro bono programme as a growth opportunity for cultivating inclusive leaders, as outlined in the following case study.
A case study
In common with many other global firms, Deloitte offers a broad range of pro bono programmes, encouraging staff to contribute to a variety of community based activities ranging from an annual day of service to immersive international projects.
A recently published report (Taproot Foundation, 2021) sharing the learning from some of these activities presents six stories of US based Deloitte professionals who have connected their pro bono experience to key inclusive leadership traits. One of these traits is curiosity.
One of the Deloitte professionals, Robert, had the opportunity to help a non-profit organisation dedicated to serving high risk young people. They wanted help in quantifying the impact of one of their programmes, requiring extensive research and stakeholder interviews. Robert and his team had experience with strategic communications and data analysis, but they weren’t familiar with the non-profit organisation’s intervention model or the challenges faced by their clients.
The report explains, ‘Robert saw first-hand how powerful curiosity can be. He learned to ask open-ended questions and facilitate conversations that brought together the Deloitte team’s expertise and the client’s knowledge – helping them to articulate and quantify the impact of their work in an entirely new way’ (Taproot Foundation, 2021)
The report’s page on ‘curiosity’ concludes ‘An inclusive environment must also be a curious one. Inclusive leaders constantly ask questions, recognising that knowledge from others can fill in the gaps in the bigger picture. They create an environment of inquiry to discover where new passions may lie. This openness can create a space for teams to safely push and inspire each other to the highest quality results.’
Now that you’ve explored several styles and theories, it will be useful to reflect on your own leadership style, which you can do in Section 6.