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Leadership Mirror

Leadership Mirror · Explore · 6 min read

Adapting Your Leadership Response

Choosing a response that fits the situation

If your usual response stopped helping, what else would be available to you?

A leadership habit often exists for a good reason. It may have helped you deliver work, maintain relationships, develop people or ask an important question. The difficulty appears when a useful response becomes the only one you reach for, even as the demands around you change.

The Mirror offers four broad behaviours and several contexts to help you examine that range. The goal is not to discover one correct leadership style. It is to increase the responses available to you and become more deliberate about when you use them. This exploration considers behavioural flexibility alongside the adaptive leadership framework associated with Heifetz and colleagues. They are related lenses on responding to change, rather than interchangeable labels or a new classification of you.

What might be happening?

When an approach has worked repeatedly, it can become part of your sense of what leadership requires. You may associate leading with being decisive, being supportive, giving freedom or challenging assumptions. Others may also expect that response from you. A change can then feel uncomfortable even when the situation needs it.

Reading the context begins with the work. What needs to be achieved? What is known? What uncertainty or disagreement is blocking progress? Who has the relevant capability and authority? The answers may call for different actions within the same conversation. You can clarify a standard, listen to the difficulty and invite the other person to propose a workable route.

Flexibility therefore involves combinations as well as switching. Imagine a colleague who has missed a deadline. Clear accountability may require naming the expectation and impact. Understanding the cause may require listening. Preventing a repeat may involve sharing ownership of the next plan. A useful response need not be reduced to one behaviour for the whole interaction.

Context variation in your Mirror can be examined in that spirit. More direction in one setting and more enabling in another might reflect judgement about different demands. It might also reflect a habit you want to reconsider. The table cannot determine which explanation is correct. Compare it with a recent event, the options available and what happened after your response.

Avoid changing approach simply to make the labels look balanced. Sometimes one action deserves sustained emphasis. Range means having alternatives you can choose when they are useful, not using every behaviour equally. Explain changes of approach where they affect others: why you are providing more structure today, which choices remain open and what evidence will let you step back again.

The leadership tension

Range

Several responses are available, and you can combine them around the work. Changing approach without explaining why can make expectations hard to read.

Rigidity

A consistent approach can make standards and decisions predictable. Repeating it without checking the situation can limit options when conditions change.

Keep the purpose and essential standards clear while adapting the behaviour used to help people meet them.

Research lens

A few useful ideas can help make sense of this behaviour. The practical connections below are Greymatter’s interpretation of the research; these sources do not validate your Mirror result.

Flexible and adaptive leadership

Research-supported construct

Yukl and Mahsud discuss why leaders need to respond to changing conditions and balance competing demands. Their account emphasises understanding situations and selecting suitable behaviour rather than relying on a single preferred approach. It provides a conceptual basis for considering flexibility, while recognising that deciding what fits is a demanding part of leadership itself.

A practical implication is to make your choice of response examinable. State the demand you are responding to and look for evidence of whether the action helped. If extra direction improves coordination but reduces initiative, consider which part of the instruction can be relaxed. If consultation produces insight but delays a needed decision, establish a time boundary. Adaptation is a process of observing and adjusting, rather than a requirement to change for its own sake.

Source: Gary Yukl & Rubina Mahsud (2010) (opens in a new tab)

Technical and adaptive challenges

Established practice model

Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky’s adaptive leadership framework distinguishes problems that can be addressed with existing knowledge from challenges that require people to learn or change established ways of working. A situation can contain both. The framework is a practice lens: diagnosing the work matters before treating every problem as something an expert can fix for other people.

For example, introducing a new scheduling tool may have a technical element, while changing how a team shares scarce time may require negotiation and learning. Giving instructions about the tool will not settle the second issue. A practical question is what can be solved through expertise and what the people involved need to work through themselves. Use a small, bounded experiment to learn about that distinction while retaining clear responsibility for decisions and essential standards.

Source: Ronald A. Heifetz, Alexander Grashow & Marty Linsky (opens in a new tab)

When this helps and when to watch it

When this helps

  • The demands differ from the situation where your usual response worked.
  • Several behaviours could help different parts of the same problem.
  • People need to learn or renegotiate how the work happens.
  • You can observe the effect and adjust without exposing others to avoidable risk.

When to watch it

  • Changing approach makes responsibilities unpredictable.
  • Flexibility is used to avoid a necessary decision or standard.
  • You aim for equal emphasis rather than relevant behaviour.
  • A learning experiment substitutes for an established procedure in a serious-risk situation.

Experiment

Try it this week

Choose one different response

  1. Choose a routine situation coming up this week. Before it begins, name what the work needs and the response you would usually use. Consider what each Mirror behaviour could contribute: clarity, attention to perspectives, shared ownership or testing an assumption.
  2. Select one additional behaviour that fits the need. Keep the experiment small: ask for a missing perspective before deciding, clarify a boundary before delegating or test one assumption before accepting the plan. Explain the purpose if the change affects what someone expects from you.
  3. Afterwards, review what happened. Did the added behaviour improve the work, create confusion or make little difference? Ask for another person’s observation when appropriate. Keep the useful part and adapt the rest. A single event will not settle your leadership capability, but it can give you a better option for a similar situation.

Reflect afterwards
What became possible when I added a different response, and what still needed my usual approach?

Think about it

  • Which leadership response do I use even when it is no longer helping?
  • What makes a different approach feel uncomfortable or inconsistent to me?
  • How could I explain an adjustment so that others understand the purpose?

Notice a pattern, understand a possible explanation, try a manageable change and reflect on the result. That learning loop can continue without a new label or a higher result. Over time, collect evidence about when your responses help and when another approach is needed. Your judgement grows through examining those differences in actual work.

Explore further

These are three curated starting points. External resources open in a new tab.

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