Adaptive Leadership Development

Leadership Development

Adaptive Leadership Development

Adaptive Leadership reimagines leadership as a practice rather than a position. Leadership is a relational skill that can be learned, honed and applied to make progress. Our program is reflective and experiential in feeling. We support participants to understand and apply the core insights via a range of learning methodologies from the rigorously conceptual to the immediately practical. We help you start where you are, bring people along and appreciate the risks inherent in mobilising people towards possible futures with heart and smarts.

Key Outcomes

Learn the core concepts of adaptive leadership
Apply the ideas to your professional context to ‘read’ the landscape of your adaptive challenge
Recognise how to regulate the disequilibrium in change.
Generate new approaches to make progress on complex challenges
Gain new perspectives on your working context by applying the Immunity to Change and peer consultation methodologies

Featured project

City of Mitcham

An adaptive approach to leading municipal change

Over four months, Polykala worked with 28 senior executives and people managers at the City of Mitcham to build fluency in adaptive leadership and reorient how they approached the complex challenges facing their community. Midway through the morning session, one…

Our Approach

Leadership isn’t just consensus building or finding ‘best-practice’, it’s about making progress on tough, seemingly intractable predicaments. Leading is a context specific activity that looks and feels different depending on the practitioner and their environment. We therefore encourage participants to interrogate the core distinctions of adaptive leadership through their personal and professional experiences. We do not rely on case studies or try to develop any ‘style’ of leadership or theorise about leadership qualities. Our facilitators build a strong ‘holding environment’ that allows participants to explore tough ideas and contrary perspectives. This then enables people to: practise core leadership behaviours; undergo the adaptive peer consultation process; and the Immunity to Change framework to gain proficiency in leading adaptively. Our diverse learning methods equip participants to interpret their challenges rigorously and intervene skillfully. Participants leave the Polykala Adaptive Leadership Program with the felt experience of translating purpose into action.