Coaching practices for Adaptive Leadership with My Team

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Adaptive Leadership with My Team, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • My team just executes whatever I hand them and never pushes back or brings me a better idea
  • Everyone brings their problems to me to solve, I jump in and fix each one, and now I’m the bottleneck for everything while my people never grow
  • When I push my team on the hard stuff they either shut down and start blaming each other or just nod and carry on as before
  • I treat my whole team the same way and run the same kind of one-on-one with everyone, and it’s landing flat
  • I’ve basically written my team off as weak

Practices that may help

  1. Challenge assumptions and invite new thinking
    Actively encourage your team to question old ways and generate new approaches.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  2. Give the work back without abandoning people
    Resist taking ownership of problems that belong to the people facing the adaptive challenge.
    Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
  3. Regulate the level of distress in the system
    Keep productive pressure high enough to motivate change but low enough to prevent shutdown.
    Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
  4. Treat each person as an individual with distinct needs and aspirations
    Know what each team member needs to grow and provide support tailored to them.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  5. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders
    The same people perform differently under different leadership — so start with the leadership.
    Extreme Ownership, Made Practical
  6. Distribute leadership rather than centralizing it
    Develop leadership capacity throughout the team, not just in the designated leader.
    Transformational Leadership, Made Practical
  7. Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical
    Adaptive leadership, developed by Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky at Harvard, distinguishes between technical problems (solvable with existing expertise) and adaptive challenges (requiring people to change their values, beliefs, or habits). The core skill is resisting the pull to apply technical fixes to adaptive problems — and instead helping people do the hard work of change themselves.
  8. Performing: step back and protect the conditions
    A Performing team needs air cover and resources, not direction.
    Tuckman’s Stages of Team Development
  9. Lead from the strategic thinking domain — absorb and analyze information
    People strong in strategic thinking keep the team focused on what could be, not just what is.
    Strengths-Based Leadership, Made Practical
  10. Diagnose the challenge before choosing the response
    Ask whether the problem requires new expertise (technical) or new values and behavior (adaptive).
    Adaptive Leadership, Made Practical

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