How Adaptative Leadership Makes the Difference in Business
A recent PwC survey conducted on 50,000 employees worldwide shows that two-thirds of employees experienced more change in the last year than in the previous five years combined. Among them, one-third reported undergoing four or five significant changes during this year in team structure, tools, responsibilities, and ways of working… These alarming figures highlight a critical issue in the modern workplace. For Catherine Tanneau, Leadership Professor and Academic Director of the Leading with Impact program at HEC Paris, CEO of Variations, a Coaching and Management consulting firm, a Master Coach and an Author on situational intelligence, "the risk of change fatigue, stress, and overwhelming workloads is real." Real enough to believe that kindness, purpose, adaptation, and impactful leadership are essential to support leaders as they navigate these changes.
A rising red flag leading to a call for kindness
The Canadian Mental Health Association issued a 'call to kindness' this year, highlighting its importance in leadership. For Catherine Tanneau, kindness goes beyond being nice. It’s about fostering a culture that balances work-life expectations, promotes honest communication, and shows genuine empathy. “Authentic leaders who genuinely care about their employees are essential,” she explains. “This approach benefits individual employees and contributes to long-term organizational performance and sustainability." Professor Tanneau identifies four conditions where genuine care from leaders leads to success:
- Being sincere: "Leaders must be truly sincere and authentic," she explains. If leaders pretend to be sincere, employees will recognize insincerity, which will inevitably backfire.
- Being caring: "Caring isn’t about being nice all the time," Catherine clarifies. It's indeed about treating people with respect and honesty. Sharing bad news is part of this honesty. If you lie or withhold information for the sake of being caring, it will create the opposite effect.
- Listening with empathy: "The capacity to listen with empathy and understand what workers are facing is crucial, especially with the emergence of AI and digital changes," she states. Leaders must provide concrete solutions with tools, training, mentoring, and coaching.
- Showing equal consideration: "While showing equal consideration to their teams, leaders must also recognize individual performances," Catherine Tanneau affirms.
Beyond these leadership traits, leaders must integrate other dimensions to lead in turbulent times effectively.
Paradoxical and adaptive leadership is the new normal
Much like the contradictory but complementary situations that leaders must face, they must juggle between contradictory but complementary dimensions of leadership. “Every day, leaders need to take cautious risks–meaning being courageous and innovating while being prudent and not making mistakes,” Catherine explains. They must deliver short-term results while also investing in future sustainability. These ambidextrous examples lead us to the concept of paradoxical and adaptive leadership, which is an integral component of the HEC Paris Leading with Impact program. Catherine Tanneau assigns the origin of this concept to Professor Michel Fiol, whose research has highlighted the importance of balancing ‘dynamic and gentle leadership’.
Catherine Tanneau states, "gentle leadership emphasizes relationships, team cohesion, and individual growth”. In contrast, dynamic leadership focuses on performance, market expansion, strategy, and financial success." To reach the right balance between the two aproaches, leaders can rely on situational intelligence.
Catherine Tanneau describes situational intelligence as the ability of leaders to adapt according to the situation. "Situational intelligence helps leaders decipher what is at stake for different stakeholders and understand why people behave as they do," she explains. "The famous saying 'what got you here won't get you there' applies here," Professor Tanneau states. "Leaders need to adapt their behavior and develop situational and cultural intelligence to succeed in different contexts."
Beyond paradoxical and adaptive leadership and situational intelligence, one last–but essential–element is needed for leaders to fully become impactful leaders: being purpose-driven leaders.
Adopting purposeful leadership for a better future
Based on the foundational work of Professor Fiol and Professor Durand, the Leading For Impact program focuses on purposeful and responsible leadership. "Today's leaders need to create a purpose-driven culture within their organizations," Tanneau emphasizes. To do so, they should act on the three dimensions they can impact.
The first dimension is the personal one, which involves having an impact on themselves and their teams. Leaders should foster individual development and empathy within their teams. Next comes the environment, including the organization, and how they create a desirable future for everyone, which is deeply connected to the third dimension: sustainability. This dimension implies the social aspect, where leaders should be considerate, create policies promoting diversity and gender equality, and implement concrete measures. Then comes sustainability in terms of ecological transition. Crucial questions here are: How do you transform your business, and measure and report sustainable practices and actions that preserve the future? Finally, leaders are expected to establish fair governance: How do you drive your business and comply with different policies such as CSRD?
"A leader's role is not just to manage the present but to create the future," Catherine Tanneau states. "This requires consistency between values-based behavior and performance."
Performance is also financial and non-financial. Therefore, it is up to the leaders to create a desirable future that leads to sustainability and make decisions today to preserve tomorrow.
Throughout the program, Professor Tanneau, Professor Coblence, and the HEC faculty work hand-in-hand with leaders to help them positively influence their environment, wherever they are in the organization. “All that matters is what they can do to bring purpose, and to create an environment where people feel they are contributing to a purpose: Mission, Vision and Ambition, for the future.”
A development journey to impact
With the Leading with Impact program, Catherine Tanneau sees leaders navigating the transformation journey for themselves. The first step is self-awareness—understanding your values and the purpose you want to instill in your team. "The second step involves understanding your situation, developing empathy, and listening deeply to your team," she continues. This implies, for example, listening to weak signals in any situation. "The third step is exercising responsibility towards creating a sustainable world," either within their team by being purpose-driven in everything they do or by providing purpose for the people to engage and create a new sense of motivation. To conclude, "leaders must be aware of their influence on their environment and be ready to experiment and adapt to situations."
The structure of the online program reflects these four steps:
• Focus 1: Growing self-awareness as a leader
• Focus 2: Situational intelligence
• Focus 3: Leading through challenges with purpose & engagement
• Focus 4: Leading with paradoxes: adaptive leadership
• Focus 5: Leading change and transformation
An ever-relevant heritage for the art of management
For Catherine Tanneau, “There is no magic work in the world of leadership. It’s all about experimenting.” These concepts are not new. Tanneau recalls a female leadership thinker from the 1930s, Mary Parker Follett. "She was an advocate for creating leadership at every level, developing a vision, embodying it, and nurturing leaders throughout the organization," Tanneau says, highlighting the timeless relevance of Follett's principles that shaped modern management.
Follett’s belief that managers should exercise "power with" rather than "power over" their teams resonates deeply in today’s leadership practices. She emphasized that success comes when everyone, from workers to management, understands “the situation”—a shared vision of who, what, and why they are working toward a goal. This approach, which encourages collaboration and shared responsibility, is as modern as it is essential, even 100 years after she first described management as “the art of getting things done through people.” Follett's forward-thinking ideas on leadership, experimentation, and collaboration continue to inspire and inform the adaptive leadership models we see today.
As leaders face unprecedented challenges, the need for adaptive, purpose-driven leadership has never been greater. The HEC Paris Leading with Impact program offers a structured path for those ready to develop these critical skills. By focusing on self-awareness, situational intelligence, and sustainable leadership, the program equips leaders to navigate complexity and inspire change. For those committed to making a real difference, now is the time to explore how this program can shape your leadership journey.