There is growing recognition that today's leaders need to be more adaptable than ever. Rapid shifts in the economy, geopolitics, and technology have made organisational disruption feel less like an occasional event and more like the operating environment.

Amid that uncertainty, leaders play a pivotal role in shaping how well people cope with change day to day, acting as what has been described as an organisation's “internal change agents” (Schmitt & Pauknerová, 2026). That role asks a great deal of leaders' own capacity to read a situation accurately, hold competing pressures, and flex their approach as circumstances shift – in other words, to be genuinely adaptable.

That raises a practical question: how, specifically, do you develop adaptive leadership in a way that is structured, evidence-based, and contextually sensitive to an organisation's ever-changing demands?

What adaptive leadership is

Adaptive leadership was introduced by Heifetz (1998) and developed further by Heifetz et al. (2009). Unlike transformational or servant leadership, which centre on vision-setting or serving followers' growth, its focus is squarely on how leaders actually behave when facing complexity – the specific adjustments they make in the moment, rather than a fixed set of values or traits (Schmitt & Pauknerová, 2026). Defined as leaders' “rapid decisions and actions in response to an unexpected situation” – such as a crisis or an opportunity – it is shaped by both individual readiness (e.g. openness to feedback, a proactive disposition, self-efficacy) and organisational conditions (e.g. trust, empowerment, and freedom from rigid habitual routines, or path dependencies) (London, 2023).

Built from a systematic review of the adaptive leadership literature, and drawing on the model developed by Nöthel et al. (2023), Schmitt and Pauknerová (2026) sharpen this into four behavioural components that development activity can usefully be organised around:

1.     Accurately perceiving situational demands – reading a situation clearly enough to understand what people and the organisation genuinely need, rather than defaulting to what worked previously.

2.     Maintaining a toolbox of behavioural strategies – possessing a varied repertoire of approaches to draw on, rather than a single default style.

3.     Balancing opposing demands – holding tensions such as performance pressure versus employee wellbeing without treating them as a simple trade-off.

4.     Flexibly applying these behaviours – knowing when and how to shift approach as circumstances change.

Why develop adaptive leadership

Organisational uncertainty isn't one thing. Research distinguishes strategic, structural, and job-related forms, each placing different demands on the people trying to lead through it (Bordia et al., 2004). Navigating it well has been described as requiring leaders to build their own “capability for uncertainty”: a combination of positive identity, acceptance of uncertainty, effective sense-making, and learning agility (Bennett et al., 2016). More broadly, flexible and adaptive leadership has been argued to be essential precisely because rigid, one-size-fits-all approaches simply struggle to hold up under fast-changing conditions (Yukl & Mahsud, 2010).

One recent empirical illustration comes from Chughtai et al. (2023), who surveyed 373 employees across Pakistan's pharmaceutical sector. They found that learning organisations boost innovation partly by raising employees' change self-efficacy – their belief that they are capable of engaging with change – and that adaptive leadership significantly strengthened these relationships, moderating the links between learning organisations and innovation, between learning organisations and change self-efficacy, and between change self-efficacy and innovation itself. While limited to one industry and country, the study supports the role of adaptive leadership within an organisational change context.

How to develop adaptive leadership

Schmitt and Pauknerová's (2026) framework rests on three linked ideas:

1.     Behaviours are interconnected – the four behavioural components described above sit within what the authors call an “adaptive leadership cycle.” While each matters individually, they function most effectively together.

2.     It must be grounded in context – what counts as a well-designed development programme depends on the type and intensity of uncertainty the organisation is actually facing.

3.     It needs organisational support to take hold – even well-designed individual development goes nowhere without a culture that gives leaders room to practise new behaviours.

The five recommendations below are built around these three ideas. It's worth flagging that this is a conceptual framework, synthesised from a systematic literature review rather than tested through original data collection – the authors are upfront that it hasn't yet been tested empirically, and that whether it holds up across different kinds of organisations is still an open question. However, the “adaptive leadership behaviour development framework” remains a practical resource for planning, designing, and evaluating development activity.

Five ways to put this into practice

Drawing together the framework's practical contributions (Schmitt & Pauknerová, 2026), here is how HR professionals and learning practitioners can turn this into a valuable development programme.

1.     Ground it in a needs assessment. Use a validated baseline measure, such as the adaptive leadership behaviour scale (Shams et al., 2024), to identify where leaders' actual gaps sit against the four components – for instance, leaders struggling to perceive situational demands around employee distress – and select the intervention that addresses that specific gap. The same four components double as a simple checklist (Nöthel et al., 2023) for auditing whether existing leadership programmes already cover this ground.

2.     Match the intervention to the gap. Schmitt and Pauknerová (2026) examine two interventions in depth, drawing on their own applied research in organisations undergoing genuine uncertainty, each mapping onto different parts of the cycle:

•       Leadership coaching builds leaders' toolbox of behavioural strategies and their flexibility in applying them, through reflective conversation, role-play, and case discussion.

•       Mental health awareness training (MHAT) is reframed here as foundational rather than optional: it helps leaders perceive the psychological demands behind a dip in performance, and understand that performance and wellbeing are not competing priorities but an integrated strategy to balance.

Building mental health literacy into core leadership curricula as a genuine competency, rather than offering it as an optional wellbeing session bolted on separately, is one of the more distinctive practical implications of this framework.

Other intervention types, such as 360-degree feedback, action learning, and technology-enabled learning, can be selected on the same basis.

3.     Create the right organisational conditions. Development only sticks where leaders have room to practise it – rigid organisational routines and low trust can constrain even highly capable leaders from acting adaptively (London, 2023). Partner with senior leaders to build genuine sponsorship and a psychologically safe culture (Edmondson, 2019), so leaders who try new adaptive behaviours aren't penalised for the attempt.

4.     Scale thoughtfully, without losing context-sensitivity. Blended approaches – for example, pairing self-paced online simulations with face-to-face coaching – can help extend adaptive leadership development across larger or more dispersed teams, provided interventions are still tailored to the specific cultural and demographic contexts of different groups.

5.     Evaluate the impact for leaders and teams. Close the loop by tying interventions to measurable outcomes – employee engagement, wellbeing, retention – and by re-measuring adaptive leadership behaviour post-intervention using the same baseline tool. Schmitt & Pauknerová (2026) also note that leadership development is not automatically benign: performance-oriented programmes have, in some cases, inadvertently increased job demands and reduced employee control. It's therefore important to not only ask whether leaders feel more capable, but whether their teams are genuinely better off as a result.

A final thought

The case for adaptive leadership is well supported, but what has been comparatively under-developed, as Schmitt and Pauknerová (2026) themselves note, is empirical research on how to systematically develop adaptive leadership in practice. While their framework itself still awaits formal testing, it offers HR professionals and learning practitioners a structured way to assess where leaders currently stand against four concrete behavioural components, to select interventions that target those specific gaps, and to attend to the organisational conditions that encourage new behaviours to stick.

In a working world where the only real constant is change, perhaps the more useful question for HR and L&D to keep asking is not simply whether our leaders are adaptive enough – but whether our own approach to developing them is.

References

Bennett, K., Verwey, A., & Van Der Merwe, L. (2016). Exploring the notion of a 'capability for uncertainty' and the implications for leader development. SA Journal of Industrial Psychology, 42(1), Article 13. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajip.v42i1.1328

Bordia, P., Hobman, E., Jones, E., Gallois,C., & Callan, V. (2004). Uncertainty during organizational change: Types, consequences, and management strategies. Journal of Business and Psychology, 18(4), 507–532.

Chughtai, M. S., Syed, F., Naseer, S., & Chinchilla, N. (2023). Role of adaptive leadership in learning organizations to boost organizational innovations with change self-efficacy. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04669-z

Edmondson, A. (2019). The role of psychological safety: Maximizing employee input and commitment. Leader to Leader, 2019 (92), 13–19. https://doi.org/10.1002/ltl.20419

Heifetz, R. (1998). Leadership without easy answers. Harvard University Press.

Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). The practice of adaptive leadership: Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world. Harvard Business Press.

London, M. (2023). Causes and consequences of adaptive leadership: A model of leaders' rapid responses to unexpected events. Psychology of Leaders and Leadership, 26(1), 22–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/mgr0000136

Nöthel, S., Nübold, A., Uitdewilligen, S.,Schepers, J., & Hülsheger, U. (2023). Development and validation of the adaptive leadership behavior scale (ALBS). Frontiers in Psychology, 14, Article 1149371. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1149371

Schmitt, J., & Pauknerová, D. (2026). Building adaptive leaders: Rethinking leadership development in the age of uncertainty. European Journal of Training and Development, 50 (3–4), 293–312. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-05-2025-0083

Shams, K., Steffensmeier, T. R., & Wefald, A. J. (2024). Bridging the assessment gaps: The engaged validation of adaptive leadership behavior and self-awareness scales. Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, 32(1), 49–70. https://doi.org/10.1177/15480518241296665

Yukl, G., & Mahsud, R. (2010). Why flexible and adaptive leadership is essential. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 62(2), 81–93.https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019835

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