The Adaptation Advantage

9Leading in Continuous Change: Modeling Vulnerability, Learning from Failure, and Providing the Psychological Safety that Builds Trusting Teams

Key Ideas

1. New times call for a new approach to leadership. Let your team know who you are and what you care about to establish your moral authority and to make clear why your team is following you.
2. The best leaders are constant learners unafraid not to know and open to being wrong in pursuit of increasing their capacity.
3. Psychological safety is the greatest determinant of high-performing teams. That safety starts with the leader and their willingness to be vulnerable and build trust.

You Are at the Wheel

We are driving faster and faster toward a horizon that none of us can see with perfect vision, and we're doing it with one eye on the rear-view mirror. Virtually all of our understanding of leadership was derived from Third Industrial Revolution practices. Many of those leadership theories remain relevant, yet so many other ideas, language, and analogies can be downright dangerous in accelerated change. As we wade into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have to be more thoughtful about who we are leading and where we are taking them.We were reminded of that truth when we spoke with leadership guru Jim Kouzes, coauthor with Barry Posner of the seminal book The Leadership Challenge. For nearly 40 years, Kouzes and Posner have studied the best practices of effective leaders, and we wanted to hear his views about what accelerated ...