There’s a move most senior leaders make instinctively when a team starts to struggle. They turn down the heat.
Reassurance. Comfort. A reframe that makes the challenge feel smaller. The intention is care. The effect is often stagnation.
The principles of Adaptive Leadership, developed by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky of the Harvard Kennedy School, tell us that change requires discomfort. Not dysfunction, and not overwhelm, but genuine tension: the kind where people aren’t quite sure how to proceed and have to think differently to find out.
You can think of it as three temperatures:
- Too cool: no urgency. People stay comfortable, and change doesn’t come.
- Too hot: anxiety, blame and shutdown. People stop engaging.
- Just right: stretch, debate, experimentation and learning.
That middle state has been dubbed the ‘Goldilocks zone of productivity’. The leader’s job is to keep the team in it: turning the heat up when things get comfortable, and down when the pressure tips into fear.
So the next time your team feels uneasy about a change, resist the urge to smooth it over straight away. Ask whether the discomfort is productive or damaging. Discomfort isn’t the sign something has gone wrong. It’s the sign the work has started.
Now we’re really cooking.
Pia and Dan