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Abstract: Organizations seeking long-term success must thoughtfully evolve their leadership approaches to stay relevant in changing times. While past achievements are valuable, leaders must resist complacency and focus on anticipating and shaping the future. This involves scanning the external environment for shifts in demographics, technology, competition, and social/cultural trends, and establishing foundational leadership practices like vision, strategy, learning cultures, stakeholder engagement, and performance management. Recognizing the limitations of traditional hierarchies, leaders must also empower distributed decision-making, apply adaptive leadership principles to tackle complex challenges, and foster continuous improvement through experimentation, data-driven decisions, and reflective practices that embrace inherent organizational paradoxes - blending stability with openness to adaptive evolution in order to transition from past success to future relevance.
All organizations that hope to sustain long-term success must thoughtfully consider how to continually evolve their leadership approaches to stay relevant in changing times. While past success is something to be proud of, leaders must resist the temptation to rest on past laurels and instead focus forward to anticipate and shape what is needed for future viability.
Today will explore how organizational leaders can thoughtfully evolve their approaches based on research into effective leadership while drawing from specific industry examples. Through a blended focus on both establishing foundational practices and embracing necessary change, organizations can transition from past success to future relevance.
Adapting to Changes in the External Environment
One of the key roles of organizational leadership is to scan and understand changes in the environment and position the organization to adapt as needed. Research from business strategy emphasizes the importance of environmental scanning and analysis for effectively navigating changing dynamics that can impact an organization's viability if unaddressed (Johnson, Whittington, Scholes, Angwin, Regner & Thompson, 2017). Some of the ongoing environmental changes impacting organizations include:
Demographic shifts: Populations are rapidly aging in many parts of the world while also becoming more culturally diverse, necessitating leadership approaches and organizational structures that can better address multi-generational and cross-cultural perspectives and needs.
Technological innovations: Advances like artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing and virtual/augmented reality are disrupting entire industries while also enabling new opportunities. Leaders must thoughtfully consider technology's strategic role and impacts on operations, culture and workforce needs.
Competitive dynamics: Competition is increasingly global, diverse, and disruptive thanks to technological democratization and globalization of markets. Leaders must foster an innovative, learning culture to stay nimble in dynamic competitive landscapes.
Social/cultural trends: Rapidly changing social norms, expectations of corporate social responsibility, and lifestyle/consumption patterns require leadership that can adapt offerings, practices and communications appropriately.
A clear example of the need for leadership to thoughtfully consider changing environmental dynamics can be seen in the automotive industry's attempts to transition from a focus on gas-powered vehicles to hybrid and electric options. While companies like Toyota and Tesla pioneered this evolution early, recognition has grown that leadership from major automakers also needs to thoughtfully drive strategic change over the next decade to remain competitive and align with emerging consumer preferences and regulatory shifts (Clark, 2021; Hawkins, 2021). Adapting to change requires not just technical innovation but cultural and strategic evolution from leadership.
Establishing Foundational Practices
While keeping an eye toward necessary changes and future relevance, leadership must also focus on establishing and maintaining practices that form the organizational foundation for realizing its purpose and strategy. Research suggests several practices that effective leadership establishes include:
Vision and purpose: Communicating a clear, inspiring yet realistic vision for the organization's direction and role, along with a strong understood sense of core purpose and values (Kotter, 2012).
Strategic planning: Engaging in ongoing, iterative strategic planning and priority setting to guide resource allocation and focus efforts, evaluating progress and making adjustments as needed (Mintzberg, Ahlstrand, & Lampel, 2009).
Culture of learning and improvement: Fostering an organizational culture where continuous learning, innovation, data-informed decision making, and willingness to evolve successful programs are hallmarks, with an emphasis on developing talent at all levels (Schein & Schein, 2017).
Stakeholder engagement: Thoughtfully involving and being accountable to all key stakeholders, from employees to customers to community partners, appropriately considering diverse viewpoints in decision making (Freeman, 2010).
Performance management: Establishing a results-focused yet values-aligned performance management system that rewards impact, development and collaboration over individual achievements (Pulakos, Hanson, Arad, & Moye, 2015).
The New York Police Department's adoption of community policing approaches since the 1990s illustrates efforts to thoughtfully balance both establishing foundational practices and adapting to ongoing changes. This evolution included refocusing the department's mission, developing new policing strategies and officer training with a localized, collaborative focus - helping repair relationships while proactively addressing emergent public safety issues (Bratton & Knobler, 1998; Skogan, 2006). Remaining open to ongoing improvements beyond initial reforms has also been important.
Empowering Teams and Distributed Leadership
Traditional top-down, hierarchical leadership models struggle to foster the agility, engagement and shared ownership needed to thoughtfully adapt and change. Research shows instead that organizations thrive through empowering distributed leadership at all levels of the organization (Conger & Pearce, 2003; Pearce & Conger, 2003). Key ways leadership cultivates this include:
Team-based structures: Organizing work around cross-functional, self-managed teams with authority to solve problems and make decisions related to their roles.
Autonomy and accountability: Providing teams autonomy balanced with clear performance expectations and accountability for outcomes rather than process compliance.
Talent development: Investing in developing leadership skills at all levels through experience opportunities, coaching and ongoing training.
Information sharing: Promoting open information sharing norms horizontally and vertically to foster shared understanding and collaborative solutions.
Healthcare provider Kaiser Permanente exemplifies efforts to effectively distribute leadership responsibility. Reforms included transitioning to self-managed clinical care teams empowered with patient populations, standardized role expectations, and new training. This helped shift from a traditional medical hierarchy to a sustainable, quality-focused model still in place today (Leatt & Schneck, 1984; Goroll et al., 2017).
Embracing Change through Adaptive Leadership
While establishing foundational practices is important, leadership must also embrace an adaptive approach open to ongoing change, particularly surrounding processes and cultural/behavioral elements less amenable to control. Researchers emphasize adaptive leadership focuses on mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges through:
Identifying the "adaptive challenge": Diagnosing underlying issue as either technical (with known solutions) or adaptive (requiring experimentation and new learning).
Regulating distress: Reducing panic/anxiety impeding progress by openly confronting reality and supporting people through difficulty.
Maintaining disciplined attention: Focusing attention on important tasks rather than immediate crises.
Giving the work back: Empowering others to address challenges through collective effort and shared leadership rather than control.
Protecting leadership voices from below: Unlocking contributions from all levels rather than an exclusive top-down approach. (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009).
For example, the British government responded adaptively to the COVID-19 pandemic by emphasizing collective decision making across public health experts and local teams, reducing panic through clear communications, and rapidly adjusting strategies as evolving understanding allowed (Krishnan, 2020). While imperfect, this illustrated importance of adaptive leadership traits during rapidly changing crises impacting cultural behaviors.
Fostering Continuous Improvement through Learning Organization Practices
To thoughtfully transition between past success and future relevance, leadership must cultivate an ongoing commitment to continuous improvement through learning organization practices. Key emphases involve:
Experimentation: Encouraging small tests of promising new ideas before commitment and tolerating inevitable failures that come from pushing boundaries.
Data-driven decision making: Grounding major decisions in analysis of objective performance metrics and outcome data rather than assumptions or tradition alone.
Knowledge sharing: Promoting abundant horizontal and vertical sharing of lessons learned from experience to spread new ideas rapidly across teams.
Double-loop learning: Enabling reflection not just on strategy outcomes but underlying assumptions, paradigms and routines that could be updated or replaced (Argyris & Schön, 1978).
Leading Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas exemplifies focus on continuous improvement through commitment to experimentation, data analysis of performance/failure trends, and cross-project knowledge management systems. This agility and innovation mindset helps the company adapt rapidly as the wind energy sector advances (Vestas, n.d.; Elison, Sørensen & Lauridsen, 2020). Continuous improvement should be baked into the organizational DNA.
Embracing Paradox through Reflective Practice
Finally, research into leadership paradox emphasizes that organizations striving for relevance must embrace some degree of internal inconsistency or tension between competing demands through reflective practice (Schad, Lewis, Raisch, & Smith, 2016; Jay, 2013). Leaders can thoughtfully:
Acknowledge and address short term needs while still advancing long term strategy.
Balance standardization and consistency with space for localized adaptation.
Pursue efficiency and control while also prioritizing empowerment and autonomy.
Focus on data and analysis but also allow room for intuition, vision and human judgment.
Reflective practice helps surface how strategies pull in different directions and creates understanding to mitigate unintended consequences. For example, global standardization brings economies of scale but also stifles diverse perspectives. Open acknowledgement and ongoing balancing of tensions like these becomes an art form for forward-looking leadership.
Conclusion
While past successes are worthy of recognition, they are fleeting if leaders rely solely on established patterns that served organizations well previously. Thoughtfully evolving leadership approaches with consideration of environmental changes, stakeholder needs, emerging research and perpetual commitment to growth keeps organizations moving toward future relevance. A willingness to thoughtfully balance both establishing foundational stability alongside an openness to adaptive evolution and continuous improvement positions leadership to transition organizations gracefully from past wins to ongoing viability. With blended focus on the strategic, structural, cultural and personal levels, organizations can steward an intentional evolution journey that honors established strengths while fostering new capacities for tomorrow.
References
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Bratton, W., & Knobler, P. (1998). Turnaround: How America’s top cop reversed the crime epidemic. New York: Random House.
Clark, P. (2021, January 27). 5 ways automakers must adapt their leadership to stay competitive. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterclark/2021/01/27/5-ways-automakers-must-adapt-their-leadership-to-stay-competitive/
Conger, J. A., & Pearce, C. L. (2003). A landscape of opportunities: Future research on shared leadership. In C. L. Pearce & J. A. Conger (Eds.), Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership (pp. 285–303). Sage Publications.
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Freeman, R. E. (2010). Strategic management: A stakeholder approach. Cambridge University Press.
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Additional Reading
Westover, J. H. (2024). Optimizing Organizations: Reinvention through People, Adapted Mindsets, and the Dynamics of Change. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.3
Westover, J. H. (2024). Reinventing Leadership: People-Centered Strategies for Empowering Organizational Change. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.4
Westover, J. H. (2024). Cultivating Engagement: Mastering Inclusive Leadership, Culture Change, and Data-Informed Decision Making. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.5
Westover, J. H. (2024). Energizing Innovation: Inspiring Peak Performance through Talent, Culture, and Growth. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.6
Westover, J. H. (2024). Championing Performance: Aligning Organizational and Employee Trust, Purpose, and Well-Being. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.7
Citation: Westover, J. H. (2024). Workforce Evolution: Strategies for Adapting to Changing Human Capital Needs. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.8
Westover, J. H. (2024). Navigating Change: Keys to Organizational Agility, Innovation, and Impact. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.11
Westover, J. H. (2024). Inspiring Purpose: Leading People and Unlocking Human Capacity in the Workplace. HCI Academic Press. doi.org/10.70175/hclpress.2024.12
Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Chair/Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2025). Guiding Change: Adapting Leadership for Sustained Organizational Success. Human Capital Leadership Review, 17(2). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.17.2.2
