Cambridge Leadership Associates (CLA) grew out of the work of two professors at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Ron Heifetz and Marty Linsky, who have spent more than 20 years examining the practice of leadership within a variety of organizations. From this work has come a new model of leadership oriented directly to the issue of adaptability and how organizations can overcome barriers to change and move forward to achieve their mission. It's called Adaptive Leadership. Today, CLA comprises a team of experienced consultants skilled in helping individuals and teams identify their most significant challenges, generate new solutions and exercise the leadership required to implement them.

Our work is grounded in the belief that exercising real leadership means guiding people and organizations through adaptive challenges—the ones that question long-held beliefs and demand new ways of doing things. It's easy to get stuck, and the quality and quantity of leadership is the key to whether an organization can change. Adaptive Leadership™ provides the understanding, skills and support that individuals and organizations need to free themselves, move forward and build the capacity for ongoing success in the midst of change.

CLA uses the Adaptive Leadership framework to narrow the gap between current reality and the desired high-performance state by identifying what parts of current practice are essential for the future and what new practices are needed, then building them across barriers, competing priorities and subgroups.

Adaptive Leadership™ is not about developing strategy, but about implementing it. While recognizing that adaptive work has critical personal implications and supporting participants fully, our focus is on the organization and its challenges, not on individuals. Building individual leadership capacity is done in the service of the organization's mission and its need for leadership. Real work gets done, and it is done by the client participants, not CLA consultants.