The Adaptive Leadership model incorporates the Systems, Biological, Service Orientation, and Psychotherapy perspectives.
The seminal book, Leadership Without Easy Answers, by Ronald Heifetz, provides the first description of the modern Adaptive Leadership approach from the early 1990s. At its core, Adaptive Leaders constantly strike a balance between the ability to pull people into solving complex and previously unsolved problems and the ability to manage people’s resistant behaviors.
Adaptive Leaders use their authority to diagnose problems to serve and help people directly face and resolve complex problem within dynamic, ever-changing systems. The leader strikes the balance of seeing the big picture and working with people to help them adapt to personal (internal) and external (organizational) change.
Those in leadership roles are faced with one of three situational challenges: Technical (clearly defined problems and known solutions), technical and adaptive (clearly
defined problems without straightforward solutions), and adaptive (challenges that are not clear-cut or easy to identify, and can’t be solved by the leader’s authority).