Conscious Leaders are well suited to the challenges of leading their companies into an uncertain and complex future. They combine deep levels of self-awareness, self-mastery and intuitive insight with an expanded perspective towards the wider system, taking in multiple factors and connections. They can find the simplicity in chaos and make sense of complexity.  By keeping the following tips in mind when they are faced with the challenge of leading their organisation to adapt to the future, conscious leaders can check their pace and move forward at the right speed, allowing better solutions to emerge from the ground up.

The Setting

In a world where we face unprecedented levels of complexity, globalization, pace and change, megatrends in business and society present us with uncertainty, which can take the form of risks and challenges as well as exciting opportunities for collaboration, creation and innovation. Conscious leaders, with their deep insight and expansive mindset, see patterns and opportunities that others don’t yet see. How best do they sell their ideas for progress into their organisations? As they guide their companies through the seas of transition and transformation, not everyone will be on board or have the same level of awareness and connectedness as the conscious leader. They are leading into a future that no one has seen before, in a way that has not been done before. This can evoke resistance and perhaps fear in those they are leading.

 Adaptive Challenges for Conscious Leaders

In their book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership (2009), authors Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky distinguish between adaptive challenges and technical challenges. Technical challenges are those that have a known solution, where the leader (or someone) can be the authoritative expert on a problem and where the organisation as it currently exists contains the know-how to deal with these challenges. Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, are tougher. These are the challenges that don’t yet have an answer. They require us to adapt the way we do business, who we are or how we work. Adaptive challenges require experimentation, diversification, incorporating multiple stakeholder views and our own learning. Solving adaptive challenges requires us to change, to let go of some aspect of our identity – perhaps the confidence we feel that what we’ve done before has worked and will work again, or that we are right about our views – because to solve adaptive challenges requires us to work together to come up with an entirely new solution, and to change while we’re at it.

A good example of a company handling adaptive challenges well is Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods company. They know that one of their greatest challenges is the range and depth of innovation required to be successful in the future. They employ an Open Innovation strategy called ‘Connect and Develop’ that promotes collaboration with inventors, suppliers, universities and even competitors to come up with new and better products. These products take the best of what P&G has to offer and the best of what the competitor or partner brings, and joins them up in a new innovation that benefits P&G, the competitor and the consumer. P&G realises that we can’t win as well on our own as we can in collaboration with others. Moving beyond our traditional boundaries and thinking differently about competition in business is an adaptive challenge and even a foundation for success in the new sharing economy.

Survival Tips for Conscious Leaders

To tackle these adaptive challenges that require the organisation to evolve and meet the needs of an ever-changing world, conscious leaders need to transport people from familiar territory to the unfamiliar. What kinds of behaviours and approaches can help? Those suggested by Heifetz and his colleagues in their book have formed the basis of our Survival Tips for Conscious Leaders, with refinements particular to conscious leadership.

Tip 1: Get on to the balcony

Conscious leaders are able to remain anchored in their view of the whole system by regularly stepping out on to the balcony and away from the action. Being on the balcony gives you the opportunity to watch for patterns and to keep asking the questions that allow for iterative improvements in response to adaptive challenges. Reality testing is key and conscious leaders watch and act, watch and act. The wisest approach to dealing with adaptive challenges is to assume the need for midcourse correction at all times. Crucially, getting others to join you on the balcony enables you to talk together about what you’re seeing so that you can develop more than one interpretation about events. Including multiple stakeholder viewpoints here helps to broaden the perspective. Equally, the balcony gives you a place to bring people when you need to help them defuse when the pressure of changing gets too great. Conscious leaders spend a lot of time on the metaphorical boundary to gain perspective on the situation, and practices such as mindfulness to develop calm and non-attachment can help in this regard.

Tip 2: Watching for when the issue is ripe

It’s no good pressing ‘go’ before the time is right, as mistimed interventions tend to land on stony ground. What the conscious leader is seeking to cultivate is ‘ripeness’. An issue can be thought of as ripe when the urgency to deal with it has become widespread across the system – that is, when people across your organisation feel that it’s time to act. Conscious leaders watch for these signs of ripeness and might even encourage them by acting strategically and tactically to move things along. It’s important to watch for signs that people are going for the easy answer by treating an adaptive challenge as a technical challenge, since this is the more comfortable route to go. It’s also important to watch for signs that they are becoming so uncomfortable that they are becoming paralyzed and not acting at all. Conscious leaders are alert to what’s going on for others beneath the surface by listening with their whole being i.e. their head, their heart and their intuition. They nudge and nurture the issue towards ripeness and the tipping point where the system is ready to act.

Tip 3: Seeing yourself within the picture

Conscious leaders have deep levels of self-awareness and think about the effect they’re having on the world around them. This is not simply about taking responsibility for their own actions; it’s also about having a good idea of how others see them so that they can adapt themselves to act in the best interests of transforming the organisation. For example, if you are usually seen in a particular way as a particular kind of leader and others have become used to you in this role, then changing your style while still remaining authentic can capture their attention and get them to sit up and take notice of the issue and work on the solution with you. By keeping themselves in their mind’s eye as part of the picture, conscious leaders can skilfully manage themselves so that they become a catalyst for transformation, and are not inadvertently reinforcing old patterns in the organisations through their own predictable actions.

Tip 4: Frame your interventions wisely

When it’s time to offer up an idea into your organisation that will help to move it further along the path of dealing with an adaptive challenge, you need to be able to frame your intervention in such a way that enables others to hear it. People need to understand what you have in mind, ideally from their perspective. Start where they are, not where you are. Speak to their hopes and fears. Inspire them about moving forward. Link your intervention to their dreams and connect to their values. Venturing into new territory evokes uncertainty and anxiety in us. This is not a time for head-led leadership, logic and force, but a time for heart-felt leadership, inspiration and compassion. The aim is to trigger engagement rather than fight-or-flight responses. Conscious leaders have awareness about whether they have a preference for leading from their head or their heart, and they sensitively frame their interventions and language according to whom they are speaking. They also ensure they build solutions with others, keeping in mind that collective intelligence trumps individual intelligence where adaptive challenges are concerned.

Tip 5: Keep a watchful eye on your impact

With adaptive challenges, when you have let an idea drop into the organisation, think of it as having a life of its own. Set your ideas free into the system and don’t chase after them or force them on to others. The idea will make its way through the system and people will take the time they need to digest it, think about it, discuss it and modify it. We cannot control what happens to it. Conscious leaders are well practiced at the art of letting go and remaining unattached. They are also acutely aware of when their ego is getting in their way, urging them to make the idea ‘mine’ and becoming overly invested in it. Instead of using force, conscious leaders stay present and keep listening, watching and adapting to the signals coming back to them from the system. Steadily holding the space and being comfortable with silence while you watch what emerges will give other people the permission to do the same. Since we cannot not communicate, acting impatiently to push for results at this stage unwittingly becomes the next intervention and we affect the system in ways that we may not intend. Presence of mind and self-possession is key.

Tip 6: Watch for the factions that begin to emerge

Staying conscious of the impact of an intervention also means watching how it lands with groups of others. Conscious leaders will pay close attention to who seems engaged, who has adopted the idea, who is resisting. Use your immediate group to create a map of the different responses you’ve picked up from the intervention, and use this insight to adapt further interventions for the larger organisation.

Tip 7: Keep the issue on the table

Conscious leaders keep in mind that resistance to an idea probably has more to do with the fears and losses this idea might represent to people than the merits of the idea itself. Often, others are under the influence of those to whom they report in the organisation and whom they need to keep happy. Politics can be a big distraction at this point. What can the conscious leader do to keep the issue, not the politics, at the forefront of people’s minds? It helps to work out how an intervention will impact on the person you’re interacting with, as well as their stakeholders. Consider how you can help them with the problems they might experience in backing your idea, for example by offering your support in conversations they need to have. Or, help them to reframe the resistance they might be experiencing from their stakeholders by empathising with what others are going through and avoiding blaming them. This might require exploring with your colleagues what is causing resistance, and treating these differences in views respectfully. Finally, finding support in the form of allies will help to reinforce the message and create a critical mass in numbers so that the issue remains on the table and at the centre of people’s attention.

Leaders who have developed their conscious awareness can use their insights to sense the way forward; however, they will still need to experiment with the effects, and lead people who want stability and security and who look to them for ‘the answer’. This works for technical challenges but is impossible for adaptive challenges. By keeping these tips in mind when faced with the need for their organisation to adapt, conscious leaders can help themselves to lead wisely and sensitively into the unknown.

For further reading of the original work on adaptive challenges on which this article is based, see The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (2009) by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky (pp. 125 – 132).

Contact The Global Centre for Conscious Leadership at www.gcfcl.com to develop your skills as a conscious leader.