Amazon.ca:Customer reviews: Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

Top positive review

One of the best

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 9, 2017

Outstanding! Great practical techniques along with the theory. I've used concepts in this book for the past 3 years and my staff are better for it. For existing leaders that are looking to increase their capacity, this is where you can start. I hand out copies all the time to leaders that are in growth mode and want to lead different or just better.

Top critical review

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Karin

Effective For New or Struggling Managers

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 17, 2013

Clear, concise structure supported by research. It is a nice infrastructure for executive coaches that are working with clients that function best with step by step processes.

One person found this helpful

874 total ratings, 130 with reviews

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From Canada

Jordan S Polson

One of the best

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on August 9, 2017

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 17, 2017

Verified Purchase

A great book full of practical ideas for getting unstuck. In this complex world, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the choices we need to make. This book helps us to be rooted in an awareness of our own needs paired with the needs of the community around us, without confusing the two, in a symbiotic and vital dance of life.

One person found this helpful

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Bonnie Hutchinson

Keep this book within reach!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 14, 2014

Verified Purchase

SO much intelligence, experience and wisdom here. These guys have been around the track of the real world of real leadership. Grounded in research AND practical experience, this book should be within reach of every leader who wants to make a real long-lasting difference. Not only do they understand the pressures and hazards of leadership - with practical survival strategies - they can help you and your organization flourish.

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Amazon Customer

So worth the read!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 16, 2020

Verified Purchase

Loving the practicality and metaphors of this book so far!

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Marlies W van Dijk

Filled with gems!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 7, 2014

Verified Purchase

Totally amazing! Every page is packed with "gems". I carry it around with me everywhere! If you are ready to look at leadership through a different lens then this is your book.

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Karin

Effective For New or Struggling Managers

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on March 17, 2013

Verified Purchase

Clear, concise structure supported by research. It is a nice infrastructure for executive coaches that are working with clients that function best with step by step processes.

One person found this helpful

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Cayley School Book Fairy

Adapative Leadership

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 24, 2012

Verified Purchase

Loved this book. An practical guide to leadership that suits vagaries of the real life situations and real life human beings that we work with.

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Robert Morris

How to mobilize people to tackle tough challenges and thrive

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 11, 2009

Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection among species also applies to organizations and even to individuals within an organization. Those that do not adapt do not survive; only those that do adapt thrive. Therein lie two of the greatest challenges now facing those entrusted with leadership responsibilities: How to prepare, launch, sustain, and then successfully complete change initiatives? How to respond effectively to change initiatives that originate elsewhere? Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky respond to these and other questions when sharing their thoughts about what adaptive leadership involves and what it requires of those who practice it. Almost immediately, they focus the relationship of adaptive leadership to thriving: It is specifically about change; builds on the past rather than repudiating it; achieves organizational adaptation through continuous experimentation; heavily relies on diversity (i.e. talents, skills, experience, and perspectives); ensures that new adaptations significantly displace, re-regulate, or rearrange whatever is defective, obsolete, or irrelevant; and usually requires (as do biological adaptations) both time, patience, and persistence. Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky observe, "There is a myth that drives many change initiatives into the ground: that the organization needs to change because it is broken. The reality is that any social system (including an organization or a country or a family) is the way it is because the people in that system (at least those individuals and factions with the most leverage) want it that way...As our colleague Jeff Lawrence poignantly says, `There is no such thing as a dysfunctional organization, because every organization is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets.'"

Only after twice re-reading Lawrence's comment did I fully appreciate how relevant his insight is to so many of the companies that seem dysfunctional but really aren't. Their inept leadership, flawed strategy, mediocre products, indifferent workforce, and poor customer service are all in alignment. That would not have happened had the companies' leaders been adaptive. That is, had they possessed the diagnostic skills needed to recognize or anticipate problems and opportunities and then take appropriate action. I commend Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky for their skillful use of several reader-friendly devices, notably the On the Balcony sections in most chapters that enable a reader to step back from a key point and examine from it a wider perspective (e.g. relevance to the reader's own circumstances) than its context in the chapter allows. They also include On the Practice Field sections in most chapters in which they suggest possible ways to apply key ideas or, in some instances, raise questions for the reader to consider.

Here are two examples, both from Chapter 9:

On the Balcony: "Each of the even steps [when designing effective interventions] can be understood as a skill set. What are your strengths? Where do you need to build your skills?"

On the Practice Field: "The next time you are in a meeting, notice what is going on inside your head while others are speaking. Are you judging their ideas or comments? Rehearsing what you are going to say when it is your turn? In what ways are you staying on the dance floor and leaping into action? Practice avoiding this mental leaping by listening to others and trying to figure out on whose behalf are they speaking, whose perspectives they are representing, and how you can give your perspectives context within the current concerns and subject on the table."

Those who have read Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers and/or Heifetz and Linsky's Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading already know that they (and presumably Grashow) are world-class pragmatists who have an insatiable curiosity to know what works in the business world, what doesn't, and (especially) why. After identifying the components (i.e. the "what") of adaptive leadership, they devote most of their attention to explaining how to develop and apply it. For that reason, they insert various checklists and Figures throughout their lively narrative that anchor insights in real-world situations. For example:

The unique challenges of adaptive leadership (Pages 52-53)
How to identify a primarily adaptive challenge (Page 74)
Nonconfrontational ways to slow down organizational momentum (Page 111)
Seven steps to orchestrating conflict (Pages 152-153)
How to personalize the adaptive challenge (Page 193)
Common leadership traps and how to avoid them (Pages 244-246)
How to ease the constraint presented by loyalties (Pages 248-251)

In the first chapter, Heifetz, Grashow, and Linsky explain that The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a "field book" in that it draws upon the vast scope and depth of their combined experiences "in the field" and that they wrote it "for the field" so that it could be of greatest practical value to their reader's own leadership efforts. On both counts, they succeed brilliantly. Bravo!

8 people found this helpful

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From other countries

John Gagne

Essential Handbook for Leadership Studies

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 30, 2022

Verified Purchase

If you are enrolled in the Harvard leadership certification program or any comprehensive leadership academic study program or are in a leadership position either in a Public or Private Enterprise this volume is a masterpiece for refining your capacity to work through the challenges that one encounters in such a position everyday. I only wish I had this resource prior to my retirement. I am certain it would have elevated and accelerated by skills ten fold and given me a much needed and valuable boast to my abilities and success as a leader. More than just a fine read it is literally a handbook for one's everyday leadership work.

One person found this helpful

Dee

Not my favourite but well written.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 7, 2023

Verified Purchase

This book didn’t excite but that’s ok, a few good nuggets of wisdom in there.

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