Name: Adaptive leadership vs traditional leadership
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:16:56.000Z
Duration: 4 min 56 s
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What distinguishes and differentiates adaptive leadership from a more traditional idea of leadership?

In our traditional idea of leadership, we imagine leaders positioned as a senior authority and agent to get work done.

The traditional idea of a leader oversees direct reports and the active leadership directs daily actions.

When situations arrive escalating attention, the traditional idea of leadership is concerned with responding to and working the issue or crisis.

Whereas the adaptive leader sets conditions for employee action that is in harmony with the vision and mission of the organization.

The adaptive leader does this on the front end, long before the crisis or need for adaptation occurs by being clear, concise, transparent, and empowering.

Adaptive leadership then is less about what you do and more about the conditions that you set and what you teach others to do within them.

Let's look at an example situation, imagine a situation where a customer service representative is talking to a customer who has a particular problem that lies outside the norm.

In other words, a problem that requires the organization and the customer service representative to adapt.

In our traditional idea of leadership, we imagine the leader somewhere close by in both time and space, they share the same office area and are working on the same day.

The leader will perhaps help the representative to solve the problem or the representative may escalate the problem through multiple layers of leadership until the problem can be solved.

Alternatively, the leader noticing that a number of such problems seem to occur, would schedule meetings with other leaders to review the types of problems, catalog them, categorize them, and push them down, micromanage solutions to the group of representatives.

Aside from the obvious lack of empowerment and subsequent disengagement associated with such a solution, we can also see that this organizational structure cannot account for all the sundry unique situations and customer complexities that may occur on a daily basis.

Therefore, even with the best intentions, there is very little about this traditional scenario that is adaptive.

To push solutions upward, leading to customer frustration and delay, and resulting in what can only be called a lose lose situation where a costly solution to the organization is also displeasing to the customer.

Alternatively, adaptive leadership takes a very different view and approach.

First and foremost, it is not assumed that the situation and the leadership of the situation shares the same time and space.

In other words, there may not be a physical leader nearby sharing the same office or working on the same day.

The leadership may have occurred weeks, months, or years before in establishing a clear vision, mission, capacital systems, learning protocols, and deep culture that sets the stage for the customer service representative.

To act upon this clarity in what we would call a distal CEO.

In other words, we can imagine what the CEO of the company would do in that moment as a line level customer service representative.

Knowing the clear vision and mission and understanding the systems, the customer service representative is empowered to adapt to and solve the situation and then to share their learning into the organization.

As Mike Curtis, Airbnb vice president of engineering explained, we believe in shaping good judgement in individuals instead of imposing rules across the team.

The goal of any CEO should be to create distal CEOs, people at the end of the tentacle arms of the organization dealing with customers, suppliers and partners who have shared mental models that guide them through the all important mission moments.

People whose thoughts and actions indicate ownership in the organization, leaders need to create individuals who are constantly learning and adapting based on information on the ground.