Effective leadership for adaptive management

Publication review

This chapter is about making it happen. Adaptive management, that is. How do you transform a conventional management regime into one of adaptive management? How do you make it safe and rewarding to fail? And how do you sustain the processes of adaptive management over time?

More specifically, we focus on leadership types, leadership processes, leadership skills and characteristics that seem to help catalyzing and maintaining adaptive management. We discuss the role of adaptive leadership, administrative leadership and enabling leadership.

We highlight the importance of managing through, managing out, managing in and managing up. Facilitative leadership is described briefly and then we provide a case study where transformational leadership was instrumental in shifting management regimes.

Although the chapter does not provide any blue print solutions, we try to illuminate some of the processes that need to be taken into account when leading for adaptive management.