011 min
The problem adaptive leadership names
Picture a product team whose releases slip, quarter after quarter. The engineering manager does what a manager does. They add a release checklist. They buy a better deployment tool. They move two testers onto the team. Each step is sensible, and each one helps a little. The releases still slip.
Then a retrospective goes badly. The product manager says scope keeps changing because design finds problems late. The designer says engineers never say when a change becomes too expensive. The engineers say nobody reads their estimates. Nobody is wrong about a fact. The three roles hold different beliefs about who may change the plan and when, and each belief protects something that person cares about.
This is the situation Ronald Heifetz's ideas were built for. The manager's fixes worked on the parts of the problem that were technical. The part that is left asks three roles to change how they work with each other, and no tool or checklist does that for them. A manager who keeps adding fixes will stay busy for a year while the real problem stays where it is, and the team will learn that raising it is pointless.
021 min
Where adaptive leadership comes from
Heifetz first set the idea out in his 1994 book, Leadership Without Easy Answers. He had completed medical training in psychiatry before he founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, and he built the idea from watching how people in public life lead. In 1997 he and Donald Laurie rewrote the argument for company managers in a Harvard Business Review article called "The Work of Leadership". In 2002 Heifetz and Marty Linsky published Leadership on the Line, a book about the personal risks of leading change.
This article leans most on the 1997 piece, because it gives the plainest definitions and the cases below. There is no older folk tradition behind the term. It is one author's framework, and later sections say how much research supports it.
033 min
Technical problems and adaptive challenges
Heifetz splits problems into two kinds. A technical problem is one that people already know how to solve. An expert or an authority can fix it with existing knowledge, so the work goes to whoever has the skill. An adaptive challenge is one where the answer does not exist yet. Finding it means the people who have the problem must learn something: new habits, new priorities, a different view of what they owe each other.
Heifetz and Laurie make the difference clear with a patient. A heart surgeon can offer a bypass operation and medication, but only the patient can change their lifelong habits. The surgeon can mobilize the patient, but cannot do the patient's work.
| Technical problem | Adaptive challenge | |
|---|---|---|
| Is the answer known? | Yes, even if not yet in hand | No, it has to be found |
| Who does the work? | An expert or an authority | The people who have the problem |
| What has to change? | A tool, a process, a rule | Habits, priorities, loyalties |
| Typical sign | The fix works and stays fixed | The fix helps briefly and the problem returns |
One problem often contains both kinds. In the release team, the checklist and the tool were technical and did their job. The argument over who may change scope was adaptive. Heifetz and Laurie call the most common leadership error treating the second kind as if it were the first.
Why a hard problem is not always an adaptive one
Size and difficulty do not decide the kind. Building a new database engine is very hard, and it is still technical, because skilled engineers know how to approach it. A problem is adaptive when the people who own it have to change in order to solve it. The test is whether expert advice and technical adjustments would be enough, or whether people across the group must learn different ways of working.
Why leaders reach for technical fixes
Many executives reach authority because of their expertise, so a technical reading comes naturally to them. People below push in the same direction. They look up the chain of command and expect senior managers to solve problems that are partly their own. Heifetz and Laurie say the answers to adaptive challenges lie in the combined knowledge of people at every level, not in the executive suite. Both sides prefer the technical story, which is why the habit lasts.
Leadership without the answer
A common picture says a leader has a vision and persuades people to follow it. Heifetz and Laurie reject that picture for adaptive work, because it assumes the person in charge already knows where the group is going. This is where a charismatic leader can mislead a team: an inspiring vision is a technical answer to a problem that needed the team to find its own.
042 min
The six practices of adaptive leadership
Heifetz and Laurie describe six practices for leading adaptive work. A leader steps back to see the whole situation, which Heifetz calls getting on the balcony. They name the adaptive challenge. They keep distress at a level people can work in. They hold attention on the hard issue. They return the work to the people who own it. And they protect people who speak up from lower in the organization.
Take the release team again. From a distance, the manager notices that every argument ends on the same question: who may accept a late scope change? That is the naming step. Heifetz and Laurie compare the stepping back to a basketball player who plays hard and still keeps track of the whole game.
Adaptive work causes distress, because people are asked to give something up. The leader needs enough tension to move people and not so much that they stop thinking. Heifetz and Laurie say the leader first creates a holding environment: a setting where different groups can talk about the challenge, debate it and examine the assumptions behind their views. In a team this is close to what is now called psychological safety, although the two ideas come from different researchers.
The manager then does not announce a rule. They ask the product manager, the designer and the engineers each to propose one, because each holds information the others lack. And they make sure the newest engineer, who has said estimates are ignored, can keep saying it.
Speaking beyond your authority
Protecting voices from below matters because speaking beyond one's role is uncomfortable. Heifetz and Laurie note that people who do it often feel self-conscious, and may push too hard to find the nerve. A leader who punishes the clumsy first attempt ends the practice for everyone who watched.
Disciplined attention
Disciplined attention is the practice teams skip most. When a hard issue is raised, talk drifts to easier ones, such as tooling or meeting times. Heifetz and Laurie treat the group's attention as the leader's main resource, so the leader keeps pulling the conversation back to the issue that matters.
Work avoidance and proxy fights
People rarely meet distress by working on it. They use work avoidance, a quick return to comfort through moves that shift attention away from the hard issue. One common form is the proxy fight. Heifetz and Laurie say disputes over procedures, schedules and lines of authority often stand in for conflicts about values and norms. A long argument in the release team about which ticket template to use may really be about whether engineers have a say in scope. Work avoidance is one way resistance to change shows up.
052 min
Adaptive leadership at British Airways
In the 1980s Colin Marshall, then chief executive of British Airways, set out to make an airline that its own passengers called Bloody Awful into a model of customer service. Heifetz and Laurie say Marshall first had to ask his executive team whether unhappy customers were a technical or an adaptive threat. Staff who valued pleasing their bosses over pleasing customers, and who stayed inside their departments, would not change because of a training course. The challenge was adaptive.
Marshall and his team did three things the authors point to. They listened to people inside and outside the airline: they met crews on flights, went to the 350-person reservations center in New York, walked through the baggage area in Tokyo and visited passenger lounges. They read conflicts as clues to the adaptive challenge. And they faced the fact that they showed the problem themselves.
The executive team as the first evidence
Early in the change, competing values among the executives played out in ways that stopped the rest of the company from working across functions. Heifetz and Laurie say no executive can hide from the fact that their team reflects the best and the worst of the company's values. For a manager this has a plain meaning: if the leadership group cannot settle a disagreement across functions, the rest of the organization will not settle it either.
The passages used here describe what the leaders did. They do not report a measured result.
062 min
Adaptive leadership at KPMG Netherlands
The second case comes from a professional-services firm, which makes it a different setting from an airline. In 1994 Ruud Koedijk, the chairman of KPMG Netherlands, saw that the firm had to move into more profitable growth areas. He did not know which areas, or how the firm would find them.
Why the strategy work was adaptive
His board could do the technical part. They had the tools to study trends, core skills and the firm's position against competitors. What the analysis could not do was change how the partners saw the firm, and that part was adaptive. Heifetz and Laurie say a strategy process that skips this work is a sign of a technical outlook among senior managers. So Koedijk convinced the partners to free 100 people, partners and others, from their daily responsibilities so that they could work on the firm's strategy. A strategic integration team of 12 senior partners worked with the group, which the firm called "the 100". It was divided into 14 task forces covering three areas: future trends, core competencies and the adaptive challenges the firm itself faced.
The result was mixed in a way the authors report openly. Several senior partners had doubted that an auditing firm could hold creative people. They were surprised by how much imagination, energy and willingness to take risks the process released.
When the heat is too high
Some task forces did not survive the process. A number became dysfunctional and could not do their strategy work, because they had to face the firm's existing culture. The board and the integration team kept the pressure tolerable in several ways. In one case, when tension was unusually high, the 100 were brought together to tell the board what worried them. The lesson is that distress is a dose, and a task force that is pushed past it stops working instead of learning.
071 min
Adaptive leadership at SAS
A third case differs from the first two in where the push came from. Jan Carlzon, who led Scandinavian Airlines System, trusted others and decentralized authority so that more people took responsibility for problems. He held that people had to find the problem themselves, because they would not carry the solution unless they had recognized the problem.
British Airways began with an executive team naming the challenge. SAS began with the leader making room for others to name it. Both reached the same practice, which is returning the work to the people who own it, from opposite ends.
081 min
What adaptive leadership means for your work
The idea changes a few decisions that people in product and engineering make every week.
- A tech lead or engineering manager decides whether to add another fix. If the same problem has come back after two fixes, treat the third fix as a warning and ask who disagrees about what the problem is.
- A product manager decides how to handle a priority fight. If two stakeholders want opposite things, the fight may be about what each would lose. Ask each one what they would give up before you ask for a ranking.
- A designer decides what to do when critique keeps circling the same point. A critique that repeats usually means the team has not agreed on what the work is for, and a better mockup will not settle it.
- A founder decides who owns a decision before a disagreement starts. When the company outgrows its first way of working, the founder's old authority often needs to move to others, and saying so is part of the work.
None of these needs a title. Heifetz and Laurie say a leader can work from above or below, with or without authority.
092 min
How to apply adaptive leadership
Start by diagnosing before you act. Ask three questions about the problem in front of you. Has a fix already been tried and helped only briefly? Do the people involved describe the problem differently? Does anyone, including you, actually know the answer? Two or three yeses point to an adaptive challenge.
Then work in this order.
Step back and write down what you see.
List which topics end meetings early and who goes quiet when.
Name the conflict in the room.
Say what each side is protecting, not who is right.
Ask what people would lose.
An adaptive change asks people to give something up, and naming the loss makes it easier to discuss.
Limit the pressure.
Agree on small steps and short deadlines so no one is pushed past what they can take.
Return the decision.
Give the people who own the problem a deadline to propose the answer.
A manager can say it in plain words:
We have fixed the tooling twice and the delays came back. I think the part we have not touched is how we decide on late scope changes. I do not have the answer. Please each bring one proposal on Thursday.
It is working when people begin to disagree in the open and bring proposals of their own. It is not working when the room goes quiet, when arguments settle on side issues such as templates, or when everyone waits for you to decide. Test each proposal as a small experiment for one release before it becomes a rule.
101 min
When adaptive leadership breaks
Adaptive leadership is the wrong tool for a technical problem. If a production system is down, someone with the skill decides, and handing the work back to the group only wastes time. MindTools, a practitioner guide, says the approach is less effective in stable environments and during a crisis.
It also needs a setting where people can disagree with the person in charge. In a team where speaking against a manager is unsafe, there is no holding environment, and a request to propose answers will produce silence. The KPMG task forces show the other limit: too much distress, and the group stops being able to work.
One overclaim is worth correcting. Some summaries present the approach as a style a leader can have, such as being flexible. Heifetz's idea is about the work the group must do, not about a leader's temperament. A flexible manager who still solves every problem personally is practicing technical leadership.
111 min
Adaptive leadership vs. nearby concepts
| Concept | Main question | What separates it from adaptive leadership |
|---|---|---|
| Not in the library yetSituational leadership | ||
| BusinessChange management | ||
| BusinessCharismatic leadership |
Situational leadership theory and change management are the two neighbors people most often mix up with it. The deciding fact in both cases is who holds the answer. If the leader holds it, those tools fit. If the group must find it, they do not.
121 min
Where the evidence on adaptive leadership is limited
The framework is influential, but the research behind it is thin. Rahman, Beamish and Althaus reviewed 278 scholarly works in 2026. They found academic research on adaptive leadership conceptually fragmented, theoretically underdeveloped and methodologically inconsistent.
Is it proven to work?
No. Surveys that study it often borrow measuring scales from transformational or distributed leadership instead of using a scale built for adaptive leadership. That leaves open whether researchers are measuring something distinct or something that overlaps with older ideas. The cases in this article are told by the framework's own authors, who chose them, and they report what leaders did, not controlled results.
What should a practitioner do while this stays unsettled? Treat the diagnosis as a question worth asking, not a proven method. Judge it by the signals above in your own team: whether people start proposing answers, and whether the problem stops returning.
?6 questions
Questions people ask
Is adaptive leadership the same as being adaptable?
Can you practice adaptive leadership without being a manager?
Does adaptive leadership work in a small startup?
What is an example of an adaptive challenge?
How do I know a problem is adaptive?
Does it work for a nonprofit or public agency?
§5 sources
Sources
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Heifetz, R. A., and Laurie, D. L. (1997). The Work of Leadership. Harvard Business Review, 75(1), 124-134. Reprint in Breakthrough Leadership, December 2001.
ERIC record EJ537169 for The Work of Leadership, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1997.
Harvard Kennedy School. Ronald Heifetz, faculty profile.
Rahman, S., Beamish, A., and Althaus, C. (2026). From fragmentation to integration: reframing adaptive leadership through an integrative review. Management Review Quarterly.
MindTools. Adaptive Leadership, a practitioner guide.
