When Leadership Challenges Start Within Us
When we are facing a difficult leadership challenge, our attention often turns outward.
If people would just communicate better.
If the team would just buy in.
If leadership would just get out of the way.
Those thoughts are understandable. Complex challenges often involve other people, competing priorities, organizational pressures, and circumstances outside our control.
But adaptive leadership asks us to consider another possibility:
How might we be contributing to the very challenges we are trying to solve?
It is not an easy question. It’s also not about assuming we are always the problem.
It is about recognizing that our own behavior is one of the few things we actually have the power to change.
The Gap Between Intention and Impact
Most leaders have good intentions. We want to support our teams, solve problems, build trust, and move important work forward.
But our intentions and our impact are not always the same.
Under pressure, we often fall back on familiar habits. We might take on too much responsibility or avoid a difficult conversation. We may also push harder for a solution or make assumptions about why someone is resisting change.
These responses can feel productive in the moment. Sometimes, though, they unintentionally reinforce the dynamics we are trying to change.
Adaptive leadership creates space to notice those patterns.
- What happens when we become curious about our own reactions instead of immediately trying to fix someone else’s?
- What assumptions are influencing how we see the problem?
- What might change if we understood not only what we are doing, but why?
That kind of reflection can be uncomfortable. It can also open new possibilities for how we lead.
https://youtube.com/shorts/l9uRbXUbPkQ?feature
Learning to Lead Differently
This is the work at the heart of ACJI’s Adaptive Leadership Academy.
Beginning August 26, 2026, leaders will spend eight weeks exploring real challenges from their own work while examining the habits, emotions, assumptions, and stories that influence how they respond to them.
The experience is less about learning a list of leadership techniques and more about developing the awareness to recognize what a particular moment requires.
Sometimes, the next step towards change does not require others to act differently.
It can begin with getting curious about ourselves.
Interested in exploring what adaptive leadership could look like in your work? Learn more about the Adaptive Leadership Academy and the upcoming August 26 cohort here.
