Adaptability – Renu

The truism, “Nothing is constant except change,” underlies why adaptability is so important to leadership.  While change may not be comfortable or fit neatly into an expected timeline, it is necessary, and creates opportunities for improvement, if one can see past the immediate upheaval.  In fact, in the ideal case, negative impacts from change are minimized because all members of the team have a common vision for where they are going, or at least have trust that the process for change is not a thinly disguised reorganization power play, or at the other extreme, trust that the change is not a token attempt with no real improvements.  Given the diversity of human nature, in real life, change can be very messy and non-linear.  Which means the real challenge in being adaptable and fostering adaptability is to have built trust within your organization so that real, meaningful changes can be made.

 

Given that most environmental programs have changed and evolved to meet new statutory and regulatory requirements, many of us have experienced that type of change.  And as budgets get tightened and positions get cut, there has also been change to accommodate these realities.   But adaptability isn’t just the changes necessary to “get by,” it is a mindset which allows for true optimization of processes and outcomes that serves the overarching agency mission and goals, while also maintaining trust.  DEP as a whole tends to be a command-and-control hierarchy, partly as a result of alignment with the rules and programs we implement, and partly because this is a very common, and therefore comfortable, structure (for example, many schools and families are based on this model).

 

Overall, DEP has been successful in improving and maintaining the environment over the course of its history.  Proactively incorporating an organizational mindset based on greater adaptability would serve DEP well as the scope and pace of change increases.   Organizational barriers include planning not only within a given program but across programs.  Further, individual accountability becomes even more important in a situation in which individuals move in and out of various teams for various projects, with various team leaders.  Striking a balance between thinking outside the box, and maintaining a sufficiently stable work environment for productivity will be an ongoing challenge.

 

The need to stay adaptable while holding fast to core values (Chang, 2016) is recognized as a way to anchor change to real problems and real outcomes.  Change simply for the sake of change is not productive, and only masks real issues while consuming scare resources.  In the examples of Google’s culture of adaptability, the core mission of customer service has not been lost, and has even improved over time.  Similarly, I would argue that DEP’s main mission of protecting the environment has been successful overall, and that increasing adaptability will help to solve current and future environmental concerns that may have interdisciplinary solutions.

 

Reference:

Rachel Chang, April 2, 2015, “‘Stay Anchored to Core Values but be Adaptable’:  Civil Service Head,” http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/stay-anchored-to-core-values-but-be-adaptable-civil-service-head