There are lots of opinions on leadership development. It can sometimes feel like it swings with the latest soundbite – “start with why”, “be authentic”, “show vulnerability”. These aren’t wrong, but they’re often too simplistic for what leaders are facing today.
Across the organisations we work with, leaders are navigating complexity, ambiguity, constant shifts, and increasing pressure. The future state isn’t always clear, and decisions are often made on a “try it and see” basis, even though performance is still judged by the outcome. It’s an uncomfortable place to lead from.
It also raises a genuine question: are the leadership approaches that once worked still fit for purpose?
For years, leadership has been taught through defined models – transformational, transactional, charismatic, distributed, servant, collaborative. Interview questions even asked, “What’s your leadership style?” The assumption was that one approach could be applied to a new setting. But every organisational context is different. All of those models are valid – dependant on the context.
Today, when the solution isn’t clear, leaders need something deeper: the ability to flex, adapt, and create the right conditions around their team.
It’s the environment – not slogans – that makes sustainable, effective teams possible. And under pressure, it’s often this environment that starts to fray.
Leaders see intelligent, capable teams not doing what they “should”. What’s often unseen is the layer of unspoken rules, protective habits, power dynamics, and stress responses that creates the gap between knowing what to do and quietly undermine progress. These patterns can be hard to shift when people feel stretched or uncertain.
Walk into any bookstore or open LinkedIn and you’ll find plenty of “fixes”. But when the solution is unclear, leaders need a different foundation. Below are three evidence-based approaches that often guide our work and help leaders create an environment where people can think clearly, work sustainably, and contribute meaningfully.
Detached observation: solving the right problem
Every story has multiple perspectives – but which one is true?
A late monthly report can look like poor time management, until you learn that upstream teams don’t prioritise information because their productivity is monitored differently, or systems don’t talk to each other, or workloads don’t match expectations. If you assume the first story is the whole story, the solution you choose probably won’t fix the problem.
Detached observation helps leaders slow down enough to understand what’s actually happening. It begins with inner work:
- Taking small moments. Practices like breath work or mindfulness restore perspective. Even as little as 5 minutes a day has been found to be beneficial.
- Asking curious questions and listening beyond what the team is comfortable to share.
- Noticing where your own fears, alliances, or preferences may be shaping your interpretation.
These practices don’t delay action – they help prevent premature action on the wrong issue.
Adaptive leadership: bringing people into the work
When facing a challenge without a clear solution, leaders often fall into two traps:
- Believing they must have all the answers.
- Trying to protect the team from extra workload or discomfort.
Both, with the best of intentions, shut people out. And teams – full of experts with knowledge and insight – feel it.
When a problem arises and people are reacting, questioning, or expressing concern, there is a window where leaders can harness that energy into a shared, connected effort. Not long term – that’s not sustainable – but in contained periods, teams often achieve surprising clarity and momentum.
Three aspects of adaptive leadership that make a meaningful difference:
- Support and empower managers, who often carry the load of dysfunction and responsibility for implementation.
- Host structured conversations that separate day-to-day workflow from deeper problem-solving and ideation, allowing space for insight and creativity.
- Embed daily rituals and practices that normalise conversations about stress, create stability, and reinforce connection and rest.
This approach shifts leadership from providing answers to hosting the conditions for answers to emerge.
Sense-making vs problem-solving
Problem-solving works when the destination is known and we’re choosing the best route. But when we don’t know what we’re dealing with – or what’s driving it – sense-making is needed first.
In these situations, defaulting to old solutions can be like putting a band-aid on a deeper issue – temporarily masking the symptoms but in time can lead to unintended chaos.
To apply sense-making:
- Pause to identify what’s known and unknown.
- Involve those closest to the experience, as well as those who will implement outcomes for valuable insight.
- When no evidence exists, shift into experimentation and treating it as an adaptive challenge.
Sense-making is slow at first, but it prevents wasted energy and misdirected effort – two things teams can’t spare right now.
If you’ve read this far, you’re likely leading a team or influencing leadership capability in your organisation. These approaches only touch on the deeper work required to lead well in uncertainty, but I hope they align with your thinking or spark a useful conversation.
There is enormous pressure on leaders to have the answers. But as Jennifer Garvey Berger says: “The best leaders are not those with the best answers, but those that host the best conversations.”