The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Marty Linsky (Author), Alexander Grashow (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

We live in a time of danger and opportunity. Individuals, organizations, communities and countries must continuously adapt to new realities to simply survive. Wanting more, wanting to thrive even under constantly shifting and often perilous conditions, people in all sectors are called upon to lead with the courage and skill to challenge the status quo, deploy themselves with agility, and mobilize others to step into the unknown.

Ron Heifetz first mapped a groundbreaking theory of leadership in the seminal book, Leadership Without Easy Answers. Followed by the bestselling Leadership on the Line, he and long-time Harvard colleague Marty Linsky offered a compelling set of arguments and stories to show how to lead and stay alive through the dangers of change.

Now Heifetz and Linsky, joined by Alexander Grashow, have distilled the learning from their combined sixty-plus years of leadership consulting, teaching and training around the globe into a practical hands-on guide to making your leadership both more effective and more powerful.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership will help you think and execute amidst profoundly changing complexity. With its comprehensive and systemic approach to assessing candidly the situation and yourself, and then taking action, its wisdom and advice are drawn also from the experiences of people like you, committed to advancing what you care about most.

The book is anchored in the framework of Adaptive Leadership, but goes beyond the theory to provide a practical set of stories, diagrams, techniques, and activities that will help you both assess and address the toughest challenges that lie ahead. Dozens of tools and tactics are presented in an exciting, clear, and reader-friendly design.

The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is your handbook to meeting the challenges of leadership in a complex and rapidly changing world.

About the Author

Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky are cofounders and Principals of Cambridge Leadership Associates and authors of previous books on adaptive leadership, with over fifty years of teaching and leadership consulting experience between them. Alexander Grashow is Cambridge Leadership Associates Director of Consulting Practice and has extensive experience as a leadership consultant, teacher, and trainer.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Press; 1 edition (May 18, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1422105768
• ISBN-13: 978-1422105764
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,964 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to mobilize people to tackle tough challenges and thrive?, May 11, 2009

By	Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection among species also applies to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change initiatives that originate elsewhere? Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus the relationship of adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills, experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time, patience, and persistence. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, "There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way...As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, `There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.'"

Only after twice re-reading Lawrence's comment did I fully appreciate how relevant his insight is to so many of the companies that seem dysfunctional but really aren't. Their inept leadership, flawed strategy, mediocre products, indifferent workforce, and poor customer service are all in alignment. That would not have happened had the companies' leaders been adaptive. That is, had they possessed the diagnostic skills needed to recognize or anticipate problems and opportunities and then take appropriate action. I commend Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky for their skillful use of several reader-friendly devices, notably the On the Balcony sections in most chapters that enable a reader to step back from a key point and examine from it a wider perspective (e.g. relevance to the reader's own circumstances) than its context in the chapter allows. They also include On the Practice Field sections in most chapters in which they suggest possible ways to apply key ideas or, in some instances, raise questions for the reader to consider.

Here are two examples, both from Chapter 9:

On the Balcony: "Each of the even steps [when designing effective interventions] can be understood as a skill set. What are your strengths? Where do you need to build your skills?"

On the Practice Field: "The next time you are in a meeting, notice what is going on inside your head while others are speaking. Are you judging their ideas or comments? Rehearsing what you are going to say when it is your turn? In what ways are you staying on the dance floor and leaping into action? Practice avoiding this mental leaping by listening to others and trying to figure out on whose behalf are they speaking, whose perspectives they are representing, and how you can give your perspectives context within the current concerns and subject on the table."

Those who have read Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers and/or Heifetz and Linsky's Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading already know that they (and presumably Grashow) are world-class pragmatists who have an insatiable curiosity to know what works in the business world, what doesn't, and (especially) why. After identifying the components (i.e. the "what") of adaptive leadership, they devote most of their attention to explaining how to develop and apply it. For that reason, they insert various checklists and Figures throughout their lively narrative that anchor insights in real-world situations. For example:

The unique challenges of adaptive leadership (Pages 52-53)
How to identify a primarily adaptive challenge (Page 74)
Nonconfrontational ways to slow down organizational momentum (Page 111)
Seven steps to orchestrating conflict (Pages 152-153)
How to personalize the adaptive challenge (Page 193)
Common leadership traps and how to avoid them (Pages 244-246)
How to ease the constraint presented by loyalties (Pages 248-251)

In the first chapter, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky explain that The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a "field book" in that it draws upon the vast scope and depth of their combined experiences "in the field" and that they wrote it "for the field" so that it could be of greatest practical value to their reader's own leadership efforts. On both counts, they succeed brilliantly. Bravo!

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommendation from a Professor of Ed Leadership, May 31, 2009

By	David Cox (Jonesboro, Arkansas USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Let me start off by letting you know I'm biased. I have met both Heifetz and Linsky and hold the highest admiration and respect for them both personally and professionally.

With their former book, Leadership on the Line, I learned about the difference between technical problems and adaptive challenges and the distinction between leadership and authority. They also taught me that a major failure of leadership is treating an adaptive challenge with a technical solution. Once I learned this I have seen it play out over and over again everywhere I turn. It is a gem I have passed on to my graduate students in educational leadership. It has also resonated strongly with them.

The sequel, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, has taken the concepts and strategies for leadership interventions to a new level of meaning. Learning more about the power of disequilibrium in promoting change and the encouragement to run small experiments have been further sharpened by this new book. Leaders, I've learned from the authors, are often too quick to jump on default action steps without first thinking through diagnostic options. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership addresses diagnosis of the system, diagnosis of self, how to mobilize the system, and how to most effectively deploy self. I highly recommend this book!

With my next group of doctoral students, I plan to use three books that make up a complementary, powerful trilogy: Leadership on the Line, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, and Immunity to Change (Kegan and Lahey).

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good content buried in a complex system, October 6, 2009

By	Walter H. Bock "Wally Bock - Author, Blogger,... (Charlotte NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have to confess that I didn't finish The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. As a practical matter, reading this book is a bit like joining a monastic order.

It will work for you if you're willing to take a lot of time to learn the system and then change your life to fit it. I don't think most of the managers who read my articles or blog will see that as a good trade-off.

Here's an idea of what to expect.

You will have to learn a new language. This is not that hard. I'm unclear why observing has to happen "On the Balcony" and why a "Practice Field" is necessary. But don't worry, there are lots of charts and diagrams to help you understand the concepts. Here is a list of just a few.

There is a 2 X 2 Diagnosis Matrix
A chart to help you distinguish Technical Problems from Adaptive Challenges
A graph of formal and informal authority
The Productive Zone of Disequilibrium

And of course, there is lots of consultant-speak. You get to read and decipher sentences like the following. "Previously highly successful protocols seem antiquated." I translate that as: "Things that used to work don't work anymore."

Like most books of this type, there is a lot of starting to prepare to begin to get ready to think about doing something. The first chapter is 'How to Use This Book." The second chapter is "The Theory Behind the Practice." And the third is "Before You Begin." Those chapters take up almost fifty pages.

Then you get to the examples. But they're not real examples. People and companies are not named. Instead you're told about "a large law firm: and "a fast-growing advertising and sales company" and "a global energy company" and a "large multinational corporation with a matrix organization." There are lots of non-business examples, drawn from the authors' experience with government agencies.

People are similarly un-named. The only identifying factors seem to be race and gender, which are nicely balanced.

Bottom Line.

A book can have some great content and still not be a book to buy. The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is more like a book of theology than one about leadership. Assumptions are never questioned. The book offers a carefully thought-through system, but one that requires full commitment and significant time to learn and put to use.

For most managers, there's a better use of time than reading The Practice of Adaptive Leadership. Simply put, it's not worth much if you can't put it to use.