How Great Leaders Know What to Solve and What to Learn From

A few years ago, I was coaching “Maria,” a department head at a large organization. She was sharp, strategic and exhausted. “I’ve tried everything,” she told me.

She definitely had: New software, new structure, redefined roles, outside consultants. Still, her meetings were flat. Collaboration was stalled. Decisions were passively undermined or actively reversed after the fact. The problem wasn’t technical. It was cultural.

After some conversations with department members, I learned that her team didn’t feel safe telling the truth. The ghosts of past conflicts and unspoken judgments had produced a climate where “smile and nod” was the only path forward. Once we named that, the work changed, and we began solving for the right problem. Maria stopped trying to fix the team and started leading it. That work began with building the kind of culture where truth could breathe.

That’s adaptive leadership. It’s less black and white, but oftentimes, this is the kind of leadership that makes goal achievement possible.

Ronald Heifetz’s foundational work classified challenges as two types:

• Technical challenges (e.g., budgeting, scheduling, legal compliance, product defects), which have clear problems and clear solutions based on expertise.
• Adaptive challenges (e.g., rebuilding trust, leading through loss, navigating culture shifts, or redefining success), which are fuzzy and relational, requiring co-created solutions based on learning and deep change.

When we don’t name this distinction, we throw tools at things that need conversation. We mistake silence for agreement. We promote people who are great at fixing, but unpracticed at coaching team members and facilitating others’ learning. Over time, that mindset costs us trust, talent and traction.

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The cost of swift solutions

Here’s what I see again and again: a leader is handed a tangled problem, such as declining engagement, siloed communication or team conflict. Without blinking, they launch into action: They move a few roles around. They send a heartfelt memo. They allocate some budget. Maybe they even bring in a consultant. For a moment, it feels like progress. But six months later, nothing has changed. The problem may have gone quiet, but it hasn’t gone away.

When leaders treat adaptive challenges like technical ones, three things tend to happen:

1. Over-functioning: The leader becomes the fixer, absorbing complexity, decision-making and ownership. This is when I hear leaders complain, “I’m too stuck in the weeds.”
2. Disempowerment: People stop engaging creatively and instead wait for direction. You’ll hear team members say, “Just tell me what you want,” or worse, “I didn’t think it was my place to weigh in.”
3. Rework: The problem returns because the root causes were never addressed. That’s when you hear sighs, see eye rolls, and stakeholders ask, “Didn’t we already solve this?” or “Here we go again.”

First seek to understand

Thought leaders, including Greek philosopher Epictetus, humanist psychologist Carl Rogers and leadership guru Stephen Covey, all have been credited with the dictum of seeking to listen and understand before acting. In the same way, adaptive leadership starts with diagnosis — not with vision, charisma or decisive action.

Therefore, the adaptive leader’s first responsibility is to step back and ask: What kind of challenge am I facing? Heifetz advises that most problems are a mix of technical and adaptive challenges. Imagine, for example, you have an underperforming cross-functional team. Maybe there is a technical fix. Perhaps the process needs to be clarified, the expectations need to be reset, or the roles reassigned. But underneath, there also might be turf protection, identity threat, or lack of trust in leadership.

The key is to name both layers. According to Heifetz, if you treat the problem like it’s 90% technical when it’s actually 70% adaptive, you’ll waste time and erode trust. If you try to make it all about feelings and purpose when there’s a real process issue, you’ll come off as evasive or unclear. Understanding the real nature of the problem doesn’t just help you act — it helps your team feel seen.

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What to do now

Here are three practical steps to help you start leading more adaptively:

1. What kind of challenge is this? Before charging ahead with a solution, ask: Is this a technical problem, an adaptive challenge or a mix of both? If the problem requires someone to change behavior, mindset or identity, it’s adaptive. If it requires a specific skill or authority to be applied, it’s technical. If it requires both, it’s a mix. Once you’ve clarified it for yourself, bring your team in on the conversation to create shared awareness and shift responsibility from leader-as-fixer to team-as-learners.

2. Build the framework together. Map out the problem and its solution with your team. You can do this by drawing a triangle, labeling the base “technical,” the top “adaptive,” and the middle “hybrid.” Then list the challenges surrounding that problem on sticky notes and place each one where it belongs. For each challenge, ask: Who owns this challenge? What kind of learning is required? What kind of support is needed? This makes the invisible visible.

3. Invite the right people into the right work. Once you’ve fully mapped the challenges, resist the urge to carry it alone. Adaptive leadership means shared ownership. You’re not assigning blame; you’re enlisting co-learners. This isn’t just good teamwork. It’s how people grow. Further, they will be far more likely to support and ensure the success of solutions they have helped shape. While you don’t need to democratize every decision, you should match the challenge with those who have the most insight and the most to gain by learning their way through it.

Once you start distinguishing between technical and adaptive challenges, you’ll never look at your to-do list the same way again. That small act of diagnosis might be the most powerful leadership move you make all week.