What’s the one question you would ask to help you up your game?

This week I attended a really great networking event, where we were each given a couple of minutes to say what we do and why we do it. The aim was not to pitch, but to give everyone enough information to answer a question we put to them.

Mine was: Most people get that Adaptability is a key leadership skill, and that most leaders need to develop it. So why aren’t more organisations proactively bridging that gap?

I commonly hear a couple of answers:

1) ‘We haven’t really thought about it’
Well, not so long ago bookies would have given you good odds on Brexit, Covid19 (and its vaccine), Trump and Ukraine. Any one of those seismic events should be enough of a wake-up call to start thinking about it.

2) ‘We have that covered with Change Management’
Well, let’s be clear about what Change Management does and doesn’t do:

a) What it does:

i) It helps prepare people for the planned change of a project

ii) It helps people overcome their resistance to a specific change

iii) Over the last 30 years, it has been well proven to deliver a much higher rate of success than projects that are implemented without it

b) What it doesn’t do:

i) It doesn’t prepare people for unplanned change – and no strategy these days is ever implemented as first written

ii) It doesn’t reduce people’s innate resistance to the idea of any change. Most people are just as resistant at the beginning of the next project as they were at the beginning of the last one. It changes what people do, not how they feel about change

iii) It doesn’t improve the organisation’s ability to bend and flex and shock absorb when needed

iv) Adaptability is about developing a culture of curiosity, courage and speed, and you don’t necessarily need any of those traits to be coaxed through a Change Management process

It all comes down to this:

Resistance to change kills morale and the bottom line, and we resist because we have evolved to see change as a threat to our security.

So you can continue to give your leaders the ‘standard’ list of leadership skills, and your experts all the technical skills they need. But without the key – no, it’s more than that, it’s the keystone – skill of Adaptability, deploying all their other skills will be compromised as they struggle to operate in a world that is now changing faster than any strategist or bookie can predict.

Rich Alderton from High Performance Change is an Adaptability Intelligence specialist, so why not contact Rich for an initial discussion?