I open this video with a question: what do you want to be known for? Somebody who always has a plan, or somebody who is super adaptable? It’s tempting to pick one. My answer is that you’ve got to be known for both.
That answer sounds simple, but living it is harder than it looks. Most leaders lean naturally toward one side. In this post I want to talk about what adaptability in leadership really means, why a plan still matters, and how to find the balance between holding on and letting go.
What Is Adaptability in Leadership?
Adaptability in leadership is the ability to adjust your approach, your plans, and your decisions when the situation in front of you changes, without losing sight of where you’re trying to go. It is not the same as having no plan. An adaptable leader still has a vision. They still map out the steps. They just don’t grip the plan so tightly that they miss what’s happening right in front of them.
The Center for Creative Leadership describes adaptability as having ready access to a range of behaviors that let a leader shift and experiment as things change. Their research on successful executives includes a phrase I love because it is so practical: revise plans as necessary. Notice that it assumes there is a plan to revise in the first place.
Plan or Adapt? The Answer Is Both
Here is how I put it in the video. You have to be known as somebody who can create a plan, create the opportunities, and lay out a road map to success. People need to be able to rely on you to see the bigger picture and know what the steps are.
But you also have to be known as somebody who doesn’t hold on so tightly that you become uncoachable. Have a plan. Be adaptable. They’re both important. And either one of them, taken to an extreme, becomes an irritant and a liability for a leader. A pretty good balance is going to be your best bet.
Irritant is the right word for it. Your team feels it when a leader won’t budge on a plan that clearly isn’t working. They also feel it when a leader changes direction every other week. Both wear people out, just in different ways.
Why Your Team Needs a Plan From You
A plan is not about control. It’s about giving people something solid to stand on. When your team knows where you’re headed and what the next few steps look like, they can make good decisions without checking with you every hour. That’s the foundation of the clear, consistent communication that strong teams depend on.
CCL’s research on leading through change names four questions every employee wants answered: What is happening? Why is it happening? How will this affect me and my job? What’s the plan for getting there? If you can’t answer that last one, people fill the gap with their own guesses, and the guesses are usually worse than reality.
Goals give a plan its shape, and my Shift Out Loud episode on proactive goal planning with Valerie Martinet goes deeper on that.
Plans Are Worthless, but Planning Is Everything
President Eisenhower had a line he said he picked up long ago in the Army: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.” In his 1957 remarks to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference, he explained that an emergency is unexpected by definition, so it won’t unfold the way you planned. You may have to throw the plan out the window and start again. But if you haven’t been planning, you can’t start to work intelligently at all.
Planning forces you to understand the problem, the people, and the resources. That understanding is what lets you adapt well when the plan meets the real world. Leaders who skip the planning and call it “being flexible” are usually just reacting.
When Holding On Makes You Uncoachable
The first trap is holding on too tightly. In the video I describe the leader who holds on so tightly because they don’t want to be wrong that they end up missing some really big, important things. That fear of being wrong is the real issue, and it’s more common than most of us admit.
Researchers have studied this pattern for decades. In a well known 1976 study, organizational behavior researcher Barry Staw had 240 business school students work through a simulated business investment decision. The students who were personally responsible for a choice that went badly committed the most additional resources to that same course of action. Staw called it escalating commitment to a chosen course of action. In plain terms, the more a decision is “ours,” the harder it becomes to admit it isn’t working.
When a leader stops being coachable, the team stops bringing bad news. If you’re not sure whether this is you, it may be one of your leadership blind spots worth asking about. And if needing to be right is tied to feeling like you have to prove you belong, my post on imposter syndrome at work may help.
When Too Much Flexibility Becomes a Liability
The opposite trap gets talked about less, but it’s just as common. Some leaders are so adaptable that nobody knows what the plan is anymore. Priorities shift after every meeting. The team learns not to get too invested, because the work might change next week.
Research Gartner shared with finance leaders points to why this hurts so much. Gartner reported in 2024 that the biggest driver of change fatigue is not the number of changes people face but how disruptive those changes are to them personally. Day to day changes, like a new direct manager, a different team makeup, or new job responsibilities, were significantly more fatiguing than large organizational transformations. Gartner also noted that change fatigued employees show much lower intent to stay and less discretionary effort.
So when a leader calls constant pivoting “agility,” the team often experiences it as instability. Being adaptable should make your people feel more secure, not less.
Adaptive Leadership vs Adaptability in Leadership
You may also hear the term adaptive leadership. It’s related, but it’s a specific framework. Ronald Heifetz of Harvard Kennedy School first defined adaptive leadership in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers, and later wrote The Practice of Adaptive Leadership with Marty Linsky and Alexander Grashow. His work separates technical problems, which experts can solve with known answers, from adaptive challenges, which require people to learn and change how they work.
Adaptability in leadership is more personal: how tightly you hold your own plans and how well you adjust without losing your direction. The two ideas fit together. You can’t lead people through an adaptive challenge if you can’t adapt yourself.
Signs You’re Holding the Plan Too Tightly
Here are a few signals to watch for:
- You defend the plan before you’ve fully heard the concern.
- Your team has stopped raising problems in meetings and only mentions them afterward.
- You keep adding time, money, or people to a project mainly because you’ve already invested so much in it.
- You hear “we already decided that” coming out of your mouth more than once a week.
- You feel a little defensive whenever someone suggests a different route.
A pattern of these usually means the plan has become about your ego instead of the outcome.
Signs You’re Changing Course Too Often
And here’s the other side of the coin:
- Your team asks “Is this still the priority?” on a regular basis.
- Projects rarely reach the finish line before something new replaces them.
- You change direction based on the last conversation you had rather than the full picture.
- People wait to start work because they expect it to change.
- You can’t clearly say what the plan is right now in two sentences.
If more of these sound familiar than the first list, your growth area probably isn’t flexibility. It’s commitment.
How to Become a More Adaptable Leader
Balance doesn’t happen by accident. These practices help:
Separate the destination from the route. Be firm about the goal and loose about the path. When something changes, ask whether it affects where you’re going or only how you get there. Most of the time it’s the route.
Build in checkpoints. Decide ahead of time when you’ll step back and review the plan, such as every two weeks or at each milestone. Scheduled reviews keep you from clinging too long or rewriting the plan every time you get nervous. This works best when the checkpoints fit the person and the project, which I talk about in my post on trusting people with the work instead of hovering over it.
Ask better questions. “Why did you do it that way?” puts people on the defensive. Questions like “What are we seeing that we didn’t expect?” and “What would we do differently if we started today?” open the door. Here’s more on swapping why for what and how.
Invite the challenge. A simple question does a lot of work here: “What am I missing?” It’s built into the four steps I share for bringing a problem and a solution to your boss, and it works just as well when you’re the one at the top of the org chart.
Treat new information as data, not a verdict. A gut feeling or a surprising result doesn’t automatically mean the plan is wrong. It means you have something to look into. I unpack that idea in my post on pausing before you make a decision you’ll regret.
How to Change the Plan Without Losing Your Team
Even a good change can land badly if it’s handled poorly. When the plan needs to shift, I suggest leaders cover three things out loud:
- What’s changing. Be specific; vague announcements create anxiety.
- Why it’s changing. Share the new information that led to the decision.
- What’s staying the same. Leaders forget this piece most often. Naming the goal, values, and commitments that haven’t moved gives people stability.
Then tell people as early as you reasonably can. There’s more on this in my guide to earning trust at work, because how you handle a changed plan is one of the moments your team remembers.
For a real example of leading people through a major change, Dr. Joanne Culverhouse joined me on Shift Out Loud to talk about restructuring a 45 year old school system with intention.
Your Temperament Pulls You One Way
Here’s something worth knowing about yourself: your natural wiring probably tilts you toward one side of this balance. Some people feel calm when there’s a detailed plan and uneasy when it changes. Others come alive in the middle of change and feel boxed in by too much structure. Neither is better. Each one just needs the other side developed on purpose.
Your team has the same mix. Understanding how different temperaments approach decisions can help you lead both of them through a change without frustrating either one.
Find Your Balance
So, what do you want to be known for? I hope the answer is both. Be the leader who can see the bigger picture and lay out the steps, and be the leader who is humble enough to change course when the facts change. Hold the plan firmly enough to give people direction, and loosely enough to stay coachable.
My own path didn’t follow a straight line either. You can read about the serious injury I had my freshman year, and what came after it, in my story. If you’d like to work through your own plans with me and a community of leaders doing the same, my monthly live workshops and Q&A sessions happen inside Trailer Park University. Bring the plan, and bring the part that isn’t going according to plan. That’s usually where the best coaching happens.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is adaptability in leadership?
Adaptability in leadership is the ability to adjust your plans, approach, and decisions when circumstances change while keeping your team focused on the goal. Adaptable leaders still set a vision and map out the steps. They simply avoid holding the plan so tightly that they miss new information or become uncoachable.
Why is adaptability important for leaders?
Plans rarely unfold exactly as written, and leaders who cannot adjust tend to keep investing in approaches that are not working. The Center for Creative Leadership has found that an inability to develop or adapt was the most frequently cited reason for career derailment among North American managers. Adaptability also helps teams trust that problems will be heard and addressed.
What is the difference between adaptive leadership and adaptability in leadership?
Adaptive leadership is a framework developed by Ronald Heifetz of Harvard Kennedy School. It separates technical problems, which have known solutions, from adaptive challenges, which require people to learn and change. Adaptability in leadership is a personal trait: how flexibly a leader adjusts their own plans and behavior. The two work together.
Can a leader be too adaptable?
Yes. A leader who changes direction too often creates confusion and fatigue, and teams stop investing in work they expect to change. Tracy Spears explains that having a plan and being adaptable are both important, and either one in excess becomes an irritant and a liability. The goal is a balance: a clear plan with regular checkpoints to adjust it.
How can I become a more adaptable leader?
Separate the goal from the route so you can stay firm on the destination and flexible on the path. Schedule regular checkpoints to review the plan, ask your team what you might be missing, and treat surprising results as information to explore. When the plan changes, explain what is changing, why, and what is staying the same.
