If the past few years have shown us anything, it’s that change is inevitable. Modern business leaders must face health-related threats, shifting cultural norms and intense competition. A business cannot stay stagnant and expect to come out ahead. Instead, business leaders must constantly adapt and transform their companies to thrive. Programs like the online Master of Business Administration with a Concentration in Leadership program from Southeastern Oklahoma State University (Southeastern) provide relevant leadership knowledge and practices for graduates to anticipate and respond to change. Let’s examine the two leadership styles that fit into these mentalities.
What Is Adaptive Leadership?
Adaptive leadership mobilizes your employees to embrace tough challenges head-on and emerge triumphant. For the adaptive leader, traditional leadership, where a single heroic general leads an entire army into battle, is outdated. If one reworks this analogy for the modern day, the general would be riding amongst his army, offering advice and encouragement while the soldiers marched into battle.
Leadership in today’s world requires leaders to empower their followers. The adaptive leadership mentality addresses two main types of problems that emerge in business:
- Technical problems can be solved by an expert with the knowledge to solve them. One example would be a computer system failure for which the team has an IT specialist.
- Adaptive problems have no specific precedent, procedures or expert trained to handle them. One example would be the COVID-19 pandemic, which carried a fresh set of issues.
For adaptive problems, the adaptive leader must encourage their coworkers to pool their resources to come up with possible solutions. In this sense, adaptive leaders recognize their employees often have better ideas than they do.
What Is Transformational Leadership?
Transformational leaders inspire and motivate their employees to innovate and help shape the company’s future success. Transformational leaders train their employees to take authority over their decisions to survive existing problems and thrive by finding better solutions.
Instead of micromanaging, the transformational leader does almost the opposite. They step back and encourage employees to take accountability for their roles, be forward-thinking and find creative solutions to problems. In doing so, the transformational leader leverages the minds of all their employees, not just the individuals in charge.
Other key traits of transformational leaders include holding a high standard of success and encouraging others to do the same, encouraging coworkers to work for the common good instead of their self-interest and fostering a culture of coaching and mentoring.
Bringing the Two Together
Remember that you don’t necessarily have to choose one leadership style over the other. A truly effective leader can learn to leverage adaptive and transformational approaches to bring success to their organization. In fact, there are many Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs that can teach you when and how to use both strategies depending on the nature of the problem. Part of being a good leader is recognizing when you should use a certain leadership philosophy.
For example, a company like Disney often uses adaptive leadership to respond to shifting cultural norms. However, as younger generations grow older, the prevalent political and cultural mentalities change. As one of the world’s leading entertainment companies, Disney must recognize this change and adapt accordingly or risk alienating younger generations. However, too much rapid change can alienate older generations, who have been lifelong customers.
On the other hand, a company like Amazon routinely practices transformational leadership. As a massive technology conglomerate, Amazon needs to push its engineers ahead into the unknown to develop new solutions to stay ahead of the competition. Part of Amazon’s corporate culture is trying to solve customer problems before they even realize they need a solution. As a result, Amazon is highly transformational, expecting its employees and engineers to constantly innovate.
Learning More
To say that business leaders should incorporate both styles of leadership is relatively easy. But, to actually do it is much more complicated. That’s one primary reason why many aspiring leaders study both leadership styles at length, often in an MBA program like Southeastern’s 100% online MBA with a Concentration in Leadership program.
On top of offering an advanced degree, the Southeastern online MBA with a Concentration in Leadership program can be completed in as few as 12 months and provides access to Future Business Leaders of America ‐ Collegiate, a student network that helps you expand your career perspective.
Learn more about Southeastern Oklahoma State University’s online MBA with a Concentration in Leadership program.