It’s not easy being a telephone utility in a rapidly changing world, and it is especially difficult in a country where social goals intersect daily with political and business realities. This is certainly true for the national telecommunications arm of one developing nation. On top of the significant technical issues, such as wireless development, involved with running such an organization, this group is thrashing out extremely difficult adaptive challenges as well: Should it be run as a private company whose profits can be used to fund new investments and service expansion? Or should it be a government agency, with a primary goal of providing jobs in a country with high unemployment?

CLA was initially called in as part of an executive development initiative, only to find a group divided, facing significant socio-economic, value-based decisions and torn by competition for leadership within the group. What would ordinarily have been a straightforward program to introduce the concepts of Adaptive Leadership™ to a dozen top executives immediately became an example of a key CLA methodology called Case-in-Point™, in which the actual situation is used to illustrate the principles and behaviors of Adaptive Leadership.

Real work got done in the initial three-day program. Executives espousing radically different approaches publicly committed to working together, allowing the underlying adaptive challenges to surface. Several executives privately took an oath to avoid negativity, and all recognized that the leadership capacity they had acquired as individuals and collectively may have made them excellent managers of technical problems, but it had not prepared them to meet the kinds of challenges they were now confronting.

Over the next months, certain default behaviors reappeared, but as the group came back together, they were able to diagnose their lapses, recalibrate and identify three specific areas of focus. Working in small groups, they began the work of solving many technical problems, freeing them to address what are frankly acknowledged to be serious adaptive issues, both in facing the competitive pressures of their external workplace and the social concerns that drive their internal politics. Examining their successes and failures in these small groups, they were able to identify behaviors that helped them make progress and those behaviors that held them back.

While the road to end results is a long one, the group has made noticeable strides in process. They have achieved greater clarity in appreciating the real issues facing them that will dictate their direction and their ability to develop and execute a concrete plan. They have a much deeper appreciation of what individual and collective leadership really look like. And they are practicing skills that facilitate their ability to talk about what really matters and to move forward.