Adapt Like Jazz Musicians For VUCA Times

Much like the leader of a jazz band, adaptive leadership requires leaders to pass the baton of leadership to whoever picks the rhythm best, joins in the music with humility and appreciates the fact that performances in the current environment will be live with no pre-set time for extensive rehearsals!

- Dr. Sujaya Banerjee

Tremendous forces are influencing the world of work. Recessionary business environments coupled with increased globalization, increased customer demand, disruptions through new business models, unknown customer profiles and competition from the most unexpected parts of the world, coupled with increased expectation and scarcity of talent. Organisations need to work with agility and have the ability to adapt and manage change on the fly, as the situation warrants so.

In this volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous terrain, the solutions and decisions of the past do not apply to the present or the future. The unpredictable terrain is posing a significant challenge to the kind of leadership and the leadership model that can enable the organisation to deliver performance. The 'Leader as a Hero Model' or the 'Leadership Team Mode' are clearly inadequate as we need to populate leadership with diverse personalities that can work together to make changes and lead organisations to avoid problems that have rendered previous structures redundant.

Organisations need new direction, less consensus, more emphasis on diversity, dissent and multiplicity of perspectives on a problem. In the current volatile business environment, there may be a tendency within some organisations to roll back into heroic leadership, but team oriented inclusive leadership from across levels is more likely to serve organisations better, as it has the power to integrate ground level insights from foot soldiers, more often cordoned off and lost across structures and levels.

Leader as hero model

Leader as hero was the most celebrated style of leadership in the 1980s right until early 2001. The 'Leader as Hero' philosophy presumed that the leader would free the organisation of past bureaucratic mindsets, and take it by the scruff of its neck to propel it into modernisation and competitiveness.