Ensuring Adaptability and Delivering Results: Focusing on Drive, Delivery and Performance

Adaptability and determination are essential, if anything worthwhile is to be accomplished. Being adaptable means being able to match your response to complex, changing situations. Drive and a focus on winning solutions are also necessary: they are prerequisites for success. As if that were not enough, there is now an awareness that change requires leaders to be more flexible and to learn at a far greater rate than, say, ten or twenty years ago.

Adapting is a skill that self-starters use routinely. Essentially, things do not always go to plan and we do not always get what we expect. Adapting means not being battered by these events but taking command of them – adapting well implies drive. However, there are dangers: too much drive blinds people to competing possibilities and can shut down their ability to “adapt, possibly because they have too much committed to the status quo.