Adaptability, not just adaptation
The model that worked with your longtime counterparts no longer holds with the new generation. Refining it isn’t enough anymore.
In her leadership team, Laura — the youngest member and the most recently hired — gets straight to the point. She asks the question the meeting has circled for ten minutes and offers a solution while everyone else is still working through the round table. Irritated glances, polite silence. Around the office, Laura’s lack of listening becomes an increasingly frequent topic. Then, one day, Laura herself is on the committee’s agenda: she needs to change.
Many will recognize this kind of committee: it deals with the “problem” of one person, without ever considering what that person’s attitude reveals. This mechanism serves a function: it protects the group. A group that focuses on one member’s shortcomings spares itself the task of examining its own functioning. Here, as long as attention stays on Laura, the committee avoids making decisions and remains unclear and, potentially, lacks leadership.(1)
A group that focuses on one member's shortcomings spares itself the task of examining its own functioning.
That said, this isn’t about reversing the blame and focusing solely on the committee’s own shortcomings. Resistance, in any case, will likely be strong enough that the very patterns identified will only intensify. It’s one reason groups — even well-intentioned ones — return to business as usual after a training session, a seminar…
Consider what’s actually happening: Laura’s interventions (impatience) trigger a reaction from committee members (irritation), who call for a correction (Laura should fall in line) in order to return to the status quo. You may recognize the mechanism of homeostasis, which, in biology, allows an organism to regulate its own functioning.
Rather than asking Laura to conform, the committee could have asked itself:
Laura probably has norms to learn, and the committee, for its part, has just as much to gain in clarity and courage. More than solutions to these gaps, what matters is making the norms explicit, weighing them against the mission, and — where needed — changing them genuinely and lastingly.
A committee that calls itself open to difference rarely treats it as revealing something about its own functioning. Instead, it addresses it through evaluations and recommendations, until the different person falls in line — or leaves. Either way, the group changes something — a style, a person — without ever changing how it treats the difference itself. That’s a first-order change, one that leaves untouched what would actually need to be transformed.(2)
The waste is right there. Asking the different person to fall in line with the group’s norms is really asking them to give up precisely what their difference could have contributed. The group won’t just have avoided examining itself; it will have lost the very thing it claimed—in theory—it wanted when it said it valued diversity.
That cost grows as the environment becomes harder to predict. A team that can no longer draw on the full range of its members’ differences loses part of its capacity to innovate, exactly when it needs it most.
Notes
Research and writing conducted in collaboration with Claude.
The model that worked with your longtime counterparts no longer holds with the new generation. Refining it isn’t enough anymore.
AI can analyze conversations and reveal participation patterns. But leaders still need presence to interpret context, trust, power, and risk — and to turn shared contribution into better decisions.
Recognizing a power play isn’t enough once the reference points shift. “Presence” to catch the signal before reacting, “Courage” to turn tension into something co-constructed — two directions of the Inclusive Leadership Compass for leading well when the rules stop holding still.