I came across an article last week that is incredibly practical. It highlights the importance of a specific skill in helping leaders navigate change.
The skill is adaptive thinking. Most, if not all, of us want to be adaptive thinkers. We want to ensure that our decisions, connections, and experiences are not based on a rigid, brittle worldview. As leaders, our job is to constantly scan the environment, take disparate pieces of information, and make sense of them as a greater whole.
According to the article (link in the button below), there are four characteristics of adaptive thinkers.
- Open-mindedness
- Flexibility
- Willingness to learn
- Growth Mindset
Question: Which of the characteristics would you grade yourself highest on? What actions in your daily life reflect that characteristic? Discuss your answers with a colleague.
Now, what can you do to encourage adaptive thinking in your leadership team (according to the article)? My thoughts are in italics.
- Create a culture of continuous learning. Most leaders use book studies and encourage attendance at conferences to help our people to continually grow. Both of these strategies are effective. I also want to suggest ways you can encourage continuous learning that can be systematized in your work. First, just talk to your leadership team, both individually and collectively, about things you are learning and ask them about things they are learning. BUILD A LEARNING-LEADER RELATIONSHIP. Second, start your leadership team meetings with an agenda item illiciting something new people have learned since the last time you met.
- Embrace Ambiguity. In a VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world, agility counteracts ambiguity. Approach agility with the idea that you are going in a direction, but how you get there will be “messy,” as reflected in the graph below. If you are making progress toward a goal, then you are being successful…even if, at any given moment, you might temporarily go backward.
3. Understand your team’s thinking. One of the best ways to help build the cohesiveness of your team is to administer an assessment that helps people understand their personalities better. I like to use the Clifton’s Strength Finder, but any assessment will work if you actually review the results with your team.
4. Practice reflective thinking. The best productivity strategy that I have implemented in the last few years is simple…two times a week, I set aside one hour to think deeply about a problem I am facing. I go into the session with a sticky problem that I want to understand better, and then spend an hour, without distractions, and THINK. If you start doing this, I can guarantee you will see positive results.
