Adaptive Leadership (Part 2): Navigating the Gap to Find Solutions to Complex Challenges (A Guest Post)
Over three decades, Dale Matherly has successfully led faith communities and not-for-profits in retiring debt, reorganizing governance structures, and developing leaders who transform their communities. Known as a leader, coach, mentor, and facilitator, Dale is frequently invited to help others realize their aspirations through speaking, teaching, and coaching.
Dale earned a M.A. in Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity from the University of Notre Dame, a M.Div. from Emory University, and a B.A. in history from Centre College, certificates as a Leadership Coach and Teach Leadership from Kansas Leadership Center, and ordination in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
This post is Part 2 of a four-part series. You can find the first post here.
We live in a gap.
Each of us lives with dreams for our ministry and faith communities.
We also live with challenges and concerns within them.
Welcome to life in the gap: the nebulous space between our aspirations and concerns.
You try what you have always done, trusting you will get the same results, but discover your efforts don’t result in anticipated outcomes.
Society and culture are changing so quickly. Pair those changes with increased uncertainty all around you and you know that life in the gap is difficult, confusing, and challenging.
So what do you do to move through your concerns and make progress towards your aspirations as you live in this gap?
Name the gap
First, you have to find clarity by describing the gap in which you live.
You move towards clarity by asking and answering two questions:
When you think about the future of your faith community, what concerns you most?
When you think about the future of your faith community, what are your aspirations?
When you answer these questions honestly and with specificity, these questions aid you in making more progress.
You need clarity about both your concerns and your aspirations in order to navigate from one to the other.
The work you do moving from the first question about your concerns to the second question about your aspirations is adaptive work.
This space is where adaptive leadership is essential.
Identify whether your challenge is technical or adaptive
Technical Challenges
Has anyone ever faced and resolved the challenge before? Do you already know the solution or can you hire an expert to fix the situation?
If so, the challenge is probably technical.
For example, if the air conditioning in the building stops cooling, you call your heating and cooling expert and the technician inspects your system and resolves the issue. Even if they tell you the whole system has to be replaced, the issue can be resolved by the experts you hired. They send you a bill and the problem is resolved.
It’s a known problem with a known solution.
Technical challenges, even complex technical challenges, are clear, with clear solutions, usually resolved by an expert quickly. Technical challenges and solutions reside in the brain.
The Limits of Technical Solutions
We often attempt to handle complex congregational and organizational problems with technical solutions.
We hire an expert who we expect to give us a solution.
This process is linear…identify the problem, then identify the solution.
Adaptive Challenges
Adaptive challenges, however, reside in the heart.
Changes that involve shifts in culture of a congregation or organization are adaptive in nature.
Preaching is adaptive because it requires ongoing learning for you and others, requires experimentation expressed through changing texts and different messages, and works towards making progress through transformation rather than simple resolution.
Adaptive challenges are different from technical challenges because they are not clearly defined. They require learning to understand what is going on in the situation.
Adaptive challenges are about changing priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties for a compelling purpose.
They are about the heart and they involve values, loyalties, and losses which are often at odds with each other. Loyalties trump values. I believe, especially when losses are complicated and complex, losses can trump loyalties.
Progress on these challenges require learning to develop new tools, relationships, methods, and practices.
The Role of Adaptive Leadership in the Gap
Adaptive leadership helps individuals and organizations make progress and change to meet the needs and demands of challenging contexts.
When the same way of doing things does not work anymore, adaptive leadership can help.
“Adaptive Leadership” is a model of leadership developed by Marty Linsky and Ronald Heifetz, professors at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Adaptive Leadership adopts a stance of continued learning.
So, it is dynamic: you diagnose the situation, engage in learning, experiment, assess and start the process again.
How Adaptive Leaders Approach Adaptive Challenges
An adaptive leader asks lots of questions of themselves and other leaders in their organization:
What new learning needs to take place around this challenge,?
What stakeholders—likely from a variety of factions related to the challenge and organization— must be engaged?
What smart experiments should we try to test possible ways of moving forward and making progress?
Engaging in adaptive leadership is very difficult. Equipping yourself for this work is essential.
Consider these steps:
Know your strengths, vulnerabilities and buttons.
The forces in your congregations working towards stasis are strong. Being centered and grounded within yourself is essential. Knowing your strengths, vulnerabilities and buttons can help you lead towards progress more readily because you can keep your eye on the ball.
Be ready for uncertainty and conflict.
When you begin to talk about concerns and aspirations, change is involved and while change is a constant in the universe and impacts us whether we want it to or not, fear of change is a powerful counter punch. Change is going to involve choosing among competing values. So you’ve got to be ready for uncertainty and conflict.
Know the story that others tell about you.
Many of us know the story that our performance evaluation team tells about us. What are the other stories that are told about you and how does that impact your leadership?
Know your comfort zone and push outside of it.
You have a particular set of skills. You engage them readily and easily in a variety of circumstances. These skills define your comfort zone, that space where you know why you are choosing to do a particular thing; you know what that particular action is and how to do it. Remember adaptive challenges, adaptive work, requires new learning. It means you have to get outside your comfort zone and be willing to experiment outside that zone - not just any experiment, but a smart experiment that you know the risk of trying.
Practice self-care.
The work is difficult. You have to take care of yourself. Practice sabbath, take uninterrupted time away, dedicate time daily to mindfulness along with activities and stillness that bring deep rest to your mind, body, and heart so that your creativity and inspiration are renewed. You need all the sleep your body tells you it needs. You need to tend to exercise and eating habits so that you can do the work you need to do.
Build a network of support.
Where you live and work can be a lonely place! There is no one else in your specific community who walks the path you walk. All the possible candidates, within your congregation, have competing values. Hire a spiritual director, or executive leadership coach, or a therapist who can be your trusted confidant and thought partner to aide you in exploring powerful questions as you lead and live in the gap between your concerns and your aspirations.