Engage courageously

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009). 

Heifetz and Linsky identify five major constraints to engaging in adaptive leadership which most people experience to some degree. These are:

1. Loyalties to people who may not believe you are doing the right thing
2. Fear of incompetence
3. Uncertainty about taking the right path
4. Fear of loss
5. Not having the stomach for the hard parts of the journey

They recommend tackling the first constraint by undertaking a number of steps. Firstly watching again for the gaps between you words and actions, staying in the present (and putting the past to rest), identify the loyalties you need to refashion and then conduct the needed conversations. You can also create rituals for refashioning ‘ancestor’ loyalties. This means if somebody who you need to converse with is deceased or can no longer be reached then you create a ‘ritual’ in order to create the closure you might need to leave the unproductive aspects of that loyalty behind you. And finally, focus on what you are conserving by remaining true to core principles and values as you leave perspectives that are no longer helpful.

Divided loyalties: a challenge for working parents

This blog is about my journey through a text called ‘The Practice of Adaptive Leadership’, (Heifetz, Grashow, Linsky, 2009).

Chapter 14 explores identifying your loyalties.

Heifetz and Linksy helpfully divide this into a further three components (having identified our personal system as our loyalties, our personal tuning and our bandwidth as discussed in the last blog.)

The three ‘circles’ of your loyalties are:

1. Colleagues (boss, peers, subordinates, etc.)
2. Community (family, friends, social, political etc.)
3. Ancestors (revered grandparents, special teacher and groups who form your gender, religion, ethnicity or national roots.)

As you work through these circles in the identified order, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify the loyalties. For example I feel a sense of loyalty to our small Leaders Institute team inclusively, my immediate family and friends who were essentially extended family in my 15 years interstate and yet I struggle to readily identify as I write this blog the ancestral loyalties.