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What Is Adaptability?

It is your first day at work—a new job, a new location. You’re a bit nervous and unsure. You leave your new apartment early and head for the train. You can’t read a single directional sign, but you practiced your route the day before. Shortly after you arrive, you go to the team staff meeting with your new boss. You are hyperaware of being new as the boss sets the agenda for the meeting and talks of how you will work with the rest of the team. While you try to focus, you know that you have moved to a new country, started a new job, gotten a new boss, and gained new direct reports. You must learn a new language. You’re preparing to manage a geographically dispersed work team whose members live in five countries, speak eight different languages, and work across six time zones.

This scenario is the leadership equivalent of being right-handed but trying to write a letter with your left hand. It feels strange. It is awkward and challenging, and you really have to concentrate on every detail. Your known strengths are being tested, your previously successful approach doesn’t apply, and you feel like a beginner again. If you temporarily lost the use of your dominant hand, you might be able to learn to write with the other hand. But at the first chance, you would return to writing with the dominant hand. Similarly, if you left your expatriate assignment and returned to your home country, you would likely relax into your old habits and patterns.

Adaptability seems to go against this natural instinct and preference for that which is known and stable. Adaptable people enjoy the challenge of figuratively working with the other hand, working on foreign turf. They accept change, hone strategies for dealing with the unknown, and shift their behavior to accommodate new situations and challenges.

For leaders, adaptability means responding effectively to changing events in the organizational environment. How flexible are you when conditions, colleagues, or circumstances suddenly change?