Organizations face significant challenges due to the increasingly complex and
multifaceted nature of the modern-day workforce. Leading complex teams in a highly
demanding work setting often present significant challenges to leadership, hence the need to
pursue adaptive leadership to overcome the underlying concerns that permeated work settings
(Smith & Poblano, 2018). An adaptive challenge archetype is an approach to leadership where
managers inspire their followers to face, adapt, and amicably deal with the underlying challenges
and changes that permeate the work environment. According to Northouse (2016), this form of
leadership emphases on the adaptations that people need to espouse to respond adequately to the
ever-changing work environment. As such, adaptive leadership lays emphasis on a leader's
activities regarding the work of his/her followers within the prevailing context. Workgroups
must devise ways of working more collaboratively to approach the common challenges and
address and resolve the existing concerns through an adaptive leadership approach.
An Adaptive Challenge Archetype: Commitments in Competition
From the case study, the CEO created a large board of governors that doubles its
membership from 32 to 68 personnel. Such a move led to a board that comprised of two groups,
including the executive and the non-executive personnel. While the idea of having such a large
board was to facilitate the agency's influence within the community, it led to significant
drawbacks. For instance, the agency found it hard to convene meetings that every member could
attend. Additionally, such a large board provided limited opportunity for the personnel to have
meaningful conversation besides having less engaged members during meetings. Essentially, the
concept of adaptive leadership thrives within the fringes of group understanding. Traditionally,
working with large groups lead to communication challenges that deny teams an opportunity to
make a meaningful contribution in their undertakings. This paper, therefore, identifies
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Commitments in Competition as the overriding adaptive challenge archetype for analyzing the
organization presented in the case study (Heifetz & Linsky, 2014). According to Heifetz and
Linsky (2014), this archetype presupposes that organizations are complex in nature and,
therefore, tend to make conflicting commitments and investments. Traditionally, resolving these
concerns involves making severe decisions, which not everyone, please.
Lack of groupthink: The unwillingness of the group to consider alternative perspectives
or ideas might be one major undoing for the board. The agency’s board lacked critical thinking
capabilities to deliberate on and debate issue-based concerns. On their part, the agency’s
leadership might have failed in their responsibility of defining a compelling vision for the board,
by not delegating duties proportionately to accommodate multiple constituencies (O'Brien &
Selboe, 2015).
Poor communication: Due to its large membership, it is possible for the agency’s board
to interrupt and talk over one another during meetings, hence greater misunderstanding. A larger
membership might lead to consistent silence from some individuals, who might feel
uncomfortable sharing their opinion during meetings. Failure to address the underlying
perspectives of every board member might inspire significant opposition due to the assumptions
made by the management (Heifetz & Linsky, 2014). Large groups are typical of false consensus
due to an inability to sample the opinion or input of all the stakeholders. For instance, the
inability of the board to tame its members made it possible for the media to infiltrate the agency
and release unverified information, which escalated the problems. The case analysis explores that
the agency’s board members made chains off missteps while responding to media queries and
community concerns.
Lack of team identity: With such a large team, the board members might fail to master
the concept of team identity, hence the lack of mutual accountability to team objectives. The
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board lacked commitment and drive, hence difficulty in resolving differences thereby generating
endless conflicts within the work environment (O'Brien & Selboe, 2015). Besides, the absence of
the board’s team identity made it hard for members to make a clear distinction between personal
goals and group objectives, hence the ongoing dissatisfaction.
Decision-making challenges: Compared to a lean board, a large might one is likely to
experience significant challenges regarding decision making. According to Heifetz and Linsky
(2014), this is primarily due to the fact that members of a large group are likely to disengage
from one another and form alliances from within. As such, the agency's board members might
rigidly adhere to their positions of affiliation when making decisions. A difference in opinion
between affiliates within the agency's board is likely to generate repeated arguments, sideshows,
and publicity stunts rather than pursuing new information. Other significant challenges in line
with decision making were realized when the agency made conflicting announcements about the
nature of the compensation and how it was to be executed. For instance, while it developed by a
section of the board, others only learned about it through the media. A board of governors should
be an all-inclusive decision-making organ, which does not operate as a fragmented group
An Evaluation of the Problem
As a management concept, adaptive leadership assists followers in overcoming the
underlying challenges, which from the outset appear too complex and seem to have no known or
immediate solutions. As a subcategory of Complexity Leadership Theory, adaptive leadership
focuses significant attention of seeking a solution to problems based by adapting to them instead
of avoiding those concerns (O'Brien & Selboe, 2015). The Complexity Leadership Theory
comprises administrative and adaptive processes while enabling leadership to focus on the plans,
as well as actions, which inspire and discover creativity to adapt more in a multifaceted
organizational system (O'Brien & Selboe, 2015). Therefore, it is within this purview that
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adaptive leadership produces the much pursued social dynamics, which transforms the culture to
adjust to an organizational change. The changes that permeate work settings instigate chaos
within a system. According to Ertel and Kay (2014), these conflicts range from the differing
needs, ideas, as well as preferences of individuals within an organization. Adaptive Model of
Leadership provides managers with tried, tested, and trusted rubrics for engagement within an
organization to enable individuals to view a situation from the same perspective. Through a
shared approach to problems, adaptive leadership significantly limits the chances of conflicts that
occur due to an inability of a group to view a concern from the same wavelength.
Individuals within an organization are the stakeholders within that organization and,
therefore, their decisions and input determine the organization's outlook. Traditionally,
individuals are motivated by personal desires and as such engage in making alliances while
forging loyalties as per their personal values and ambition (Bushe & Marshak, 2015). As Arena
(2018) opines that such values underlie and override the behaviors of individuals and groups. To
engage in ongoing adaptive leadership, the organization must engage people at personal levels’
values. Besides, it is imperative to discover and conceptualize loyalties that exist between
members and their organization (Bushe & Marshak, 2015). Essentially, this means that while
dealing with each individual, managers must take into consideration the decisions or people that
influence situations. Leaders need to decisively view their organizations as “vegetable strews”
under which alliances and loyalties thrive. When a change takes place in an organization, it is
vital to distribute inevitable losses to minimize disruption and damages. According to Eoyang
and Holladay (2014), this denotes identifying the potential damages, both emotional and
material, to individuals and the sub-groups within an organization. The essence of adaptive
leadership is to assist each stakeholder and groups withstand the necessary initiatives, as well as
the anticipated losses attached to an undertaking or the organization in general.
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A Recommended Leadership Intervention
The decisions taken by the agency’s management such as the formation of a large board
generated multiple complex challenges that made it hard to function amicably. For instance, the
formation of executive and the non-executive board members led to deeply divided alliances that
encourage opposition and hardliners to take strong positions on various emerging issues. While
the idea of expanding the board not bad in essence as it sought to broaden representation, it led to
significant drawbacks experienced through difficulties in decision-making. For instance, the
agency experienced challenges convening meetings that every member could attend and be
content. Besides having less engaged members, a large board membership provided limited
prospects for the management to have a meaningful conversation during board meetings.
Intuitively, the concept of adaptive leadership blossoms well when groups understand one
another and approach issues as a single front (Nelson & Squires, 2017). Given these concerns,
the board experienced communication challenges that denied them an opportunity to speak with
one voice and make a meaningful contribution in all their activities.
Adaptive leadership necessitates a series of diagnoses and ongoing intervention to resolve
the emerging challenges experienced within the organization. The first step that the agency must
consider is to roll out an intervention framework to provide members with an opportunity to ask
important questions. The board should task themselves with questions touching on the location
of the organization’s primary adaptive challenge, as well as seeking to understand the group to
which the current issue impact most (Eoyang & Holladay, 2014). Answering these concerns
would assist in putting into context, the intervention strategy and timing that the agency must
explore. The essence of the intervention framing is to allow the members of the board to acquire
a firm understanding of the need to stage an intervention and when to execute it. While seeking
all possible pathways to reach out to all the stakeholders, managers should use an all-inclusive
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language that inspires members to readily connect with the organization's shared values and
sense of purpose (Nelson & Squires, 2017). Upon putting interventions into perspective, the
management can hold a firm grasp of emerging anxiety by envisioning the interventions and
prevailing over groups to adopt them.
The next phase of intervention is to conduct a rigorous education on group members to
enable to acquire a deeper understanding of the underlying differences between adaptive and
technical challenges (Eoyang & Holladay, 2014). The objective of this decision is to assist the
management to identify and put into perspective the organization's challenges and then translate
such concern to the level of an individual. The essence of intervention is to shift interpretations
or the concerns from organizational thinking to personal level thinking. Arguably, the idea is to
put members in the frontier for them to own a challenge and view its solution from their own
perspective (Nelson & Squires, 2017). The agency's management should when the people and
their perceptions are moving in the wrong or right direction to provide timely guidance on how
to overcome the anticipated challenges. Such an undertaking is vital because, in nearly all
situations, organizations and their workforces perceive adaptive challenges as technical concerns.
For the agency to fully integrate and demarcate the distinction between technical and
adaptive challenges, the management must reframe and reset the default assumptions held by
individuals and groups. In line with this initiative, the management must consider identifying and
naming the default assumptions held by individuals and probe the ways in which such
assumptions inhibit organizational growth (Arena, 2018). Closely associated with this process
are the practice and process of embracing multiple complex interpretations about values and
issues that affect individuals and groups. Leaders must explore all the necessary avenues and
apply multiple perspectives to bring about harmony in groupthink processes. Adaptive leadership
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demands that personal beliefs, as well as ideas, must concurrently be vehemently and objectively
subjected to wide-ranging feedback.
In the agency’s case, the leadership needs to pay close attention to understand which
groups or individuals form an instant understanding and commitment to the intervention. The
leadership should also listen and respond to the consenting voices or those who resist adaptive
change (Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009). In particular, the agency’s leadership must keep
groups and individuals within the organization involved at all times in all initiatives and
understand that change avoidance is a normal human response. There should be greater effort to
get allies and reach out to consenting voices and encourage them to be more involved in the
change process to be part of an investment in the process of intervention. In the case under study,
the agency’s executive board made significant institutional assumptions that rendered the
opinion of non-executive board meaningless. As such, it could be hard for the management to
tame the conflicting interests that ensured. With either group forming alliances while positioning
themselves strategically to oppose the decisions at board level, the agency and its leadership
could achieve very little.
It is important to realize that there is excessive politics that permeate organizations and
groups. As such, the agency should consider the underlying political perspectives that define the
alignments that shape the thinking and thinking prospects of individuals and groups. Thinking
politically in adaptive leadership explores the need to understand the alliances, relationships, and
personal and shared concerns among a wide variety of individuals or groups within the
organization (Eoyang & Holladay, 2014). The agency’s leadership needs to put the underlying
politics into perspectives to build alliances and invade opposition to advance and mobilize
support for a decision. The agency needs to follow the guideless beneath to guide it in its
adaptive leadership process.
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1. Expand informal authority: The agency can accomplish this undertaking by forging
alliances and repairing bridges to strengthen relationships. The board should, within its
power, strive to cultivate loyalty across its membership while intimately engaging groups
and individuals who are deeply partaking in a decision. Additionally, the board should
nurture team building to integrate the underlying opinion differences to enable members
to read from the same script. Prior to the main intervention, the management should hold
an inclusive convention that considers the input of both the executive and non-executive
board members (Northouse, 2016). From the foregoing case, it is worth noting that the
agency's problems emanated from an inability to integrate the differing positions held by
board members, thereby leading to a biased decision that only favored a section of the
board, hence the current impasse.
2. Manage authority: From the challenges experienced by the firm such as the opposing
alliances within the board, it is worth noting that a central authority was wanting. With
limited capacity to bring everyone into line, the authority failed significantly in its
unifying factor role (Northouse, 2016). Authority structures including CEOs, presidents,
supervisors, and unit managers must always anticipate the disruptive and indefinite
impact of adaptive change. In particular, those at the helm of the agency's leadership
should provide valuable feedback on how an intervention operates owing to their top-to-
bottom outlook.
3. Forge alliances and repair bridges: There are deeply rooted challenges that permeate
groups, hence the recurrence of conflicts. The agency’s leadership should assemble allies
before going public with their intentions and interventions. In particular, the board can
refer too and borrow from the successful previous political diagnoses to help in correctly
identifying the stakeholders with shared values and history of the organization. The
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building alliances initiative would greatly elevate the agency’s power and capacity to
bring virtually everyone into line when seeking to make changes.
4. Accommodate and protect the dissenting voices: The agency’s board faces significant
challenges regarding the deeply rooted opposing alliances that define its members. The
leadership should, therefore, find the midpoint of connecting more intimately to the
opposition to diminish the underlying and opposing perspectives that withhold the board
from making a unified decision. It is necessary to identify the individuals or groups with
the greater likelihood of opposing an initiative to bring them into line. The organization’s
managers should closely monitor such individuals and groups while seeking their
opinions and listening to their responses. The management should take particular
initiatives of eradicating the feelings of threat to which the dissenting voices associate.
5. Manage communication: One of the notable concerns highlighted in the case study is the
agency’s inability to roll out a unified communication (Northouse, 2016). As such, the
media easily infiltrated the organization and relayed conflicting information that only put
the agency on the spotlight. With conflicting information spilling out to the media, the
board was greatly under the threat of public scrutiny. To reclaim its waning public image,
the agency needs to allocate a communication organ with a robust public relations team
that ensures protocol in releasing pressers on the organization’s position on various
outstanding issues.
Conclusion
Leading multifaceted teams in a highly demanding work setting might present significant
challenges to those entrusted with leadership. In the agency’s case, for instance, challenges
experienced through large board members greatly regressed the organization’s capacity to carry
out its mandate amicably. With individuals and groups forging alliances and taking more
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oppositional perspectives on various situations that frequently arise, the agency can achieve very
little in its pursuits. To create and master lasting progress on adaptive concerns, the agency's
leadership must not only embrace the underlying conflicts but also control them through an
ongoing process of building bridges and reaching out to the dissenting voices to assemble a more
unified decision making an organ. Essentially, this undertaking requires the agency's board to
nurture and manage organizational conflicts while incrementally seeking to move forward
towards the desired resolution.
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