Do You Really Want Adaptive Employees?

If you want adaptive employees, surrender control and look for these 5 characteristics.

We always want it both ways. Companies say they want their employees to be adaptive and empowered to respond to changing needs. Yet at the same time, they are still wed to strategies set by leadership and top-down managerial approaches. They want to empower employees, so long as they stay on the rails as leaders and managers define them. They want workers to innovate, as long as they don’t neglect the responsibilities of their day jobs. Is any of that possible?

In a 2017 article in the Harvard Business Review, Lindsay McGregor and Neel Doshi describe two types of performance: tactical performance, or the ability of an individual or organization to deliver on its strategy, and adaptive performance, or the ability of an individual or organization to intentionally diverge from its strategy. While the authors put forward some suggestions on how to measure and manage both, therein lies a problem: You can’t really have both. Organizational structures can either be hierarchical or flat. Employees either need to be controlled or can be empowered. Strategies need to be developed and executed, or questions need to be raised so that teams can work together to produce an answer. People are pawns or people are trusted. While there is some room for experimentation and compromise in these models, the scale can’t lean in both directions.

Most companies, like most people, prefer stability and compliance; that’s what makes command-and-control models so appealing. It’s easier to hold people accountable when there are defined boundaries. The model also enables opportunities for apprenticeship. There are clear paths to power, for those who have fears related to their levels of status or belonging. From a neuroscience perspective, maintaining stability and having control reduces our mental effort and our anxiety levels, so we prefer it. The problem is, this approach prevents organizations from preparing for the future, when the nature of work is about adaptive, iterative innovation and anything routine or predictable is automated.

We no longer live in a world where companies or individuals can afford to be comfortable with the status quo. Adaptation isn’t really an option; it’s a requirement for meeting customer needs. The pace of change has become so fast (and it continues to speed up), that not being adaptive (and not measuring adaptive performance) is a risk most companies may not yet be willing to acknowledge. Yet here, too, a shift is needed. We can’t just measure variation from a strategy and assume that means the organization is adaptive. We have to look at the people and the processes to determine what modifications were made and why. Or, we have to find and support adaptive people and let them (and the teams they build) re-invent the work.

How do you do that? It’s highly likely that you already have adaptive people in your organization. Or, that your hiring practices could be adjusted to seek them out as you bring new people on. Adaptive people come in all shapes and sizes, but five things often separate them out.

• Openness. One of the big five personality traits in the Five Factor Model, openness is perhaps the greatest predicter of adaptability. Open-minded and inquisitive people look for new ways to do things and new things to try, and they are comfortable pivoting based on new information.

• Mindfulness. As Rick Hanson writes in “Resilient,” mindfulness is “staying present in this moment as it is, moment after moment, rather than daydreaming, ruminating, or being distracted.” Being mindful is about being aware of the world around you and the role that you play in it. People who lean in during meetings or in conversation are more mindful than those who are checking their phone — even if it just prompted you. As a result of that level of focus, mindful people make their counterparts feel like whatever they have to talk about is the only thing that matters. Mindfulness is also a component of being in a state of flow — identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihályi and Jeanne Nakamura — in which all of one’s energies are laser-focused on the work at hand.

• Empathy. Empathetic individuals are compassionate. They work well with others and listen to new perspectives, which often results in understanding different points of view. They are more likely to seek disconfirming evidence and make sure that a wider variety of voices are heard, which generally results in a more appealing outcome.  In “Supernormal,” Meg Jay investigates how adverse childhood experiences build resilience in high-performing individuals. The independence and degree of self-control that they develop combined with their compassion for people in pain makes them highly adaptive individuals.

• Perseverance. Adaptive people are persistent and resilient. They don’t stop when they hear no; instead they figure out how to get around the obstacle. They move more like water than molasses traveling down a hillside: Water finds a way. Molasses will stick to anything, moving slowly, as if trying to stay where it is. Angela Duckworth calls this "Grit". Whatever the drive, be it proving something to others or proving something to one’s self, people who rise to the challenge and adapt to new information are the ones who will thrive.

• Fearlessness. Individuals who fear the repercussions of voicing their opinions cannot help organizations adapt. Adaptive people must be comfortable with dissent. Jonah Sachs calls this “Unsafe Thinking,” which he defines as: “the ability to meet challenges with a willingness to depart from standard operating procedures; to confront anxiety, tolerate criticism, take intelligent risks, and refute conventional wisdom — especially one’s own views — in order to achieve breakthroughs.” Having the courage to stand up to authority and make an argument supported with facts is something too many people are simply afraid to do.

While these five characteristics are common among people who are adaptive, they are by no means the only characteristics to look for in such employees. Among others, humility and compassion often go hand-in-hand with adaptability, for example. One thing organizations don’t need: longer lists of traits or surveys to identify adaptive employees or weed out non-adaptive people.

It’s time for organizations to make a choice: Do you want adaptive, empowered employees, or do you want to lead and manage from the top? If you don’t know yet, can you find some people to empower that can show you what adaptability might look like in your organization? Do they have the fearlessness required to stand up to authority? Do you have the fearlessness to accept what they have to say?