Building Your Adaptive Leadership Skills Prepared for FORHP

Building Your Adaptive Leadership Skills Prepared for FORHP Rural Health Network Planning Grantees CRL Consulting is the Technical Assistance partner for the Network Planning Grantees.

Sustainable Network Core Relationships • Mutual Trust • Able to have difficult conversations • Have each others’ back Partners and Participants • Safe environment for risk taking • Authority • Front-line perspective • Transparency • Confidentiality • Perspectives • Resources Culture of Innovation • Knowledge • Assumes change is • Styles inevitable • Part of the Leadership Structure organizational DNA • Distributed • Value learning • Shared together • “Deep and wide” • Willingness to try new involvement and things accountability Vision and Charter • Agreement and Alignment • One voice • Not project-focused 2

Adaptive Leadership in the context of: • Collaboration not authority • Complex and actively changing health environment 3

Adaptive Leadership Qualities • Comfortable working with ambiguity • Connected to purpose - applies both “head” and “heart” • Constantly scanning and sense-making • Understands role and limitations of authoritative vs collaborative approaches • Experiments with smart risk-taking • Learns and adapts Adapted from: Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World, 2009 4

Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges Adapted from The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz, R et al Technical • May be complex and critically important but problem is clear • Have known solutions Adaptive • Problem definition not clear • No set of known solutions, requires learning • Requires shared solutions among stakeholders = collaboration • Can be resolved by applying • Requires changes in current structures and peoples’/partners’ beliefs, procedures habits and loyalties 5

Leadership As Fit Adaptive Leaders understand the importance of: • discerning technical from adaptive challenges, and • “fitting” their leadership approach to best support the stakeholders 6

Leadership As “Fit” Adapted from “Leadership as Fit: A Tool to Assess Leadership Capacity”; Eoyang and Olson, 2016, Human Systems Dynamics Institute • Spectrum of leadership approaches from more authoritative to more collaborative • Effective leaders apply the right approach to the context = Fit – They co-evolve with the environment - structured and demanding when needed or more open to shared exploration when more appropriate 7

Network Leadership: Self and Situational Assessment Tool Assessment tool for assessing natural and acquired adaptive leadership strengths and gaps 8