Adaptive Leadership FAQs

Launched in 2016 by Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant and Professor Marc Manashil at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, the mission of the Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Institute (ALHSI) is to prepare social work graduate students and practicing professionals to exercise leadership to: address the pressing social challenges of our time, contribute to the efficacy of their organizations, and equip them to assume senior management positions in the human services arena. 

With support from Dean Michael Lindsey, the B. Robert Williamson Jr. Foundation, Katherine and Howard Aibel Foundation, and Staten Island Foundation, the institute enables students, alumni, and human service practitioners to learn and apply the adaptive framework to engage challenges and support social change in their work.

Learn more about the Institute

Our purpose is to increase the capacity of social workers to exercise leadership on the biggest challenges facing our communities and the world and effect social change. To help realize this purpose, we seek to dramatically increase the number of social work programs offering leadership development education experiences to their students.

Social workers can be uniquely positioned to exercise leadership and bring about progress on difficult adaptive challenges such as income inequality, healthcare, criminal justice, and educational disparities. We are at the forefront of helping individuals who bear the brunt of these inequities. Yet, our numbers are under-represented in senior management positions of human service agencies and at the tables in which policies and funding are determined despite our unique professional lens. Social workers need to contribute to those conversations and leadership development, and particularly adaptive leadership training, are crucial for social work students to mobilize stakeholders to develop creative strategies that address such challenges. The adaptive framework also helps us better understand organizational systems and how to catalyze systems change.

The Adaptive Leadership framework emerged from 40+ years of development and practice at Harvard Kennedy School. It is comprised of a set of tools and techniques for moving organizations, communities, and teams beyond the status quo when “the way things are done around here” is no longer serving their purpose.

Adaptive Leadership is a practical leadership framework that helps individuals and organizations adapt and thrive in challenging environments. The practice is about being able, both individually and collectively, to take on the gradual, but meaningful, process of change. It is about diagnosing the essential from the expendable and bringing about a real challenge to the status quo.

Adaptive challenges differ from technical challenges, which depend upon expertise to deliver known solutions. Unlike technical challenges, procedures, rules, or regulations can’t solve them. Instead, they are usually systemic issues that require a shift in values or beliefs. Adaptive challenges have human complexity because the problems cannot be separated from the people who are part of the problem scenario itself, and as such social workers are uniquely positioned to address them.

When dealing with an adaptive challenge, people have to face difficult new realities, accept losses, and adopt new ways of working that can upset their sense of competence and of self. Because of the discomfort that adaptive work generates, people often respond reflexively to such challenges with technical solutions that inevitably fail because they do not address the root of the problem. We intend to help our students and trainees avoid that trap.

Adaptive leadership is a specific approach within the larger realm of leadership development. However, the adaptive framework looks at leadership differently from the way it is often framed in society, where it is equated with formal authority. Instead, we view leadership as an activity that is accessible to anyone regardless of where they sit in an organization or system. The work of leadership, then, involves pushing beyond the boundaries of our given authority and taking risks to help bring about needed adaptation and change.

Too often, leadership is conceptualized as the ability, skill, and often position that someone uses to get people ‘on board’ with a perspective or a direction that the person known as ‘leader’ has deemed the right way to go. The adaptive framework’s concept of leadership, uncoupled from position or role, frees our thinking from traditional notions that people in the highest positions of authority are the only ones who have the power, intelligence, skill and/or experience to bring about change. Rather, anyone can exercise leadership to advance change. We need not wait for power, position or permission. This conceptualization of leadership is anti-oppressive and empowering, a tool that can help us mobilize to do the risky and hard work of challenging and dismantling oppressive practices, policies, laws, and systems. It is an unshackling of leadership ideas as being for the few, the special, the powerful. The opportunity to exercise leadership is there for us all.

Our approach to leadership is rooted in the adaptive leadership framework developed by Dr. Ronald Heifetz and colleagues at the Harvard Kennedy School and is now being advanced by a growing community of educators worldwide. The adaptive framework is oriented around the idea of leadership as an activity that can be practiced irrespective of one’s formal authority. The framework also makes a distinction between technical challenges, which depend upon expertise to deliver known solutions, from adaptive challenges, which require leadership to bring about changes in attitudes and behaviors over time. (Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linsky, 2009; Heifetz & Linsky, 2002; Williams, 2005; Williams, 2015).

Through the difficult work of surfacing adaptive challenges, managing losses, and engaging allies, practitioners of adaptive leadership work within their organizational and community contexts to reaffirm important practices that need to be preserved, to let go of outdated practices that no longer fulfill their purpose, and to help stakeholders discover new paths of innovation and change, at a rate that they can tolerate.

ALHSI Practicum Placements for MSW and BS students: The Adaptive Leadership Macro Intern will support the efforts of the Institute to build upon our thriving adaptive leadership community for current students and alumni of our leadership programs to provide an ongoing source of education and support in dealing with their greatest challenges and increase the exercise of leadership among students in addressing some of the greatest challenges of the social services sector.

Trainings and Workshops: Adaptive Leadership training and workshops are offered through NYU Silver’s Office of Global and Lifelong Learning.

The MSW Adaptive Leadership Fellowship: The competitive program features intensive weekend seminars on the adaptive leadership framework, providing strategies and tools to help practitioners bring about needed change within organizations and communities. Fellows also receive coaching and guidance to help them directly apply what they have learned to challenges they have identified at their practicum placement agencies, their communities, or the school itself.

The Adaptive Leadership Fellowship is a competitive program that develops social workers to be change leaders through intensive training and hands-on application. 

Key components include:

• Weekend seminars featuring adaptive leadership training, key concept review, large group discussions, and small case consultation groups with expert faculty

• Hands-on application of leadership strategies to address real challenges in your practicum placement, community, or organization.

• Individual coaching and structured peer feedback to refine your intervention plans and leadership approach

• Preparatory work, including readings, written assignments, and progress presentations to deepen learning

• Regular project development sessions where you'll conduct needs assessments, design interventions, and implement change strategies

• Final colloquium presentation to share your impact and insights with the broader NYU community

Yes. The strategies used to manage uncertainty, shift mindsets, and foster long-term leadership growth enhance clinical social work interventions.

Yes! All second and third-year students are eligible to apply.

No, the Fellowship is open to any social work student.

The Fellowship consists of four sessions plus the final colloquium spread evenly from January to May. Sessions typically occur in person at NYU Silver’s Washington Square campus on Sundays from 11 AM - 4 PM (lunch included).

Yes, students receive a $1,000 stipend upon completion of the Fellowship.

Yes! The course is open to any social work student. Masters-level students who complete this course satisfactorily will receive priority for the Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Fellowship to be offered in the Spring Semester.

• Addressing the need for comprehensive and trauma-informed sexual and reproductive health education

• Health Liberation For All: A Cultural Responsive Framework For Clinical And Macro Work

• Aiming to improve the work-life balance at their practicum placement organization against the backdrop of a company culture that reinforces and rewards those who work outside of regular working hours

• Expanding educational and practicum opportunities for social work students interested in Macro social work practice.

• Dreaming Beyond Boundaries: Addressing Racism within NYU Silver and Beyond

• How to reduce emotional exhaustion amongst service providers working with newly arrived asylum seekers in NYC

Exercising Leadership in the Non-Profit and Public Sectors Elective: A 3-credit elective open to all Master’s level students. The course will introduce students to the adaptive framework and a set of tools and strategies for effectively bringing about that change within organizations and communities while mitigating the risk of becoming permanently sidelined in the process. If you have questions about eligibility, please contact silver.adaptiveleadership@nyu.edu.

Key ideas of the course include:

• Adaptive Leadership is a framework that increases the capacity of communities and organizations to make the adaptations needed to thrive and survive in rapidly changing contexts.

• The work of leadership is about accompanying people through the realities and losses of necessary change while opening them up to the promise of the future.

• A change-making approach overly reliant on the use of individual authority can be perilous.

• Change is less likely to be sustainably effectuated by the “lone ranger” who tries only to deploy authority and persuasive power. It is more likely to be affected by those who recognize the complexity of the challenges we face and engage others by doing the hard work of building bridges, crossing boundaries and creating “networks” within and outside organizations that build the collective urgency to change an unhealthy status quo.

For more information, view the MSW elective syllabus.

Macro-focused sections of Social Work Practice III: Dr. Lausell Bryant and Professor Manashil have comprehensively integrated adaptive leadership into this core curriculum course for MSW students in their final year.

DSW Program

• Adaptive Leadership for Organizational Change (Required DSW course offered in the Summer before the final year of study)
  View the syllabus

Leadership Labs: The Adaptive Leadership Lab, ALHSI’s innovation that has proved especially successful, is where human service professionals work together to collectively address an adaptive challenge of shared concern. Lab members seek to better understand the larger system of stakeholders relevant to the challenge and make community-oriented interventions that require constant adaptability as they learn from the impact of their actions while receiving ongoing consultation from fellow cohort members.

Adaptive Leadership in Human Services Network: A community of Lab and Fellowship alumni and adaptive leadership practitioners. Previous events include: Community Of Practice Café Is Convened On Racism In The Human Services Field As An Adaptive Challenge.

Post-Master’s Certificate
Executive Leadership in the Not-for-Profit Sector

Examples of Places of Employment:
Community Resource Exchange
CORO NY Leadership Center
City of New York
New York Department of Education
Bronxworks
Drug Policy Alliance
CenterLight Health System
NYU Langone
City of New York
NYC Health + Hospitals
Lenox Hill Hospital
New Alternatives for Children

Examples of Roles:
Leadership Facilitator
Senior Director of Programs
Program Coordinator, Engagement
School Social Worker
Program Director
Family Therapist
Founder & CEO
Psychotherapist
Social Services Coordinator
Social Work Supervisor
Medical Social Worker
Congressional Caseworker

92% of Adaptive Leadership fellows report employment (data found through LinkedIn and outreach to fellows)

• (Rate of NYU grads employed as per Wasserman, 90%)

94% when we take out the Spring 2022 grads

77% of Spring 2022 grads are already employed/graduated with job offers

• (Overall NYU % from 2020 who graduated with job offers is 40.7%)

• (Overall NYU % 3 months post-grad, 65.7%)

5 of those 9 report mentioning AL in their interviews

Our cohorts consistently meet or exceed expectations for employment post-graduation

“This fellowship is a tool for a social worker, and I think during these times when change is so necessary, we can't afford to not be at the table, we can’t afford to not exercise leadership. We are too large of a profession, we provide too many services to not equip ourselves with the tools to create change in a meaningful and adaptive way,”
– Natasha, Spring 2017 Fellow at the Spring 2017 Colloquium

“Adaptive Leadership has been, perhaps, the most valuable experience I have had in social work school. It has changed the way I view society, organizations, and myself. It has provided me with an important definition of leadership, a new framework through which to understand organizations and a better understanding of how I can lead.”
– Rachel, Spring 2020 Fellow, at the Spring 2020 Colloquium

“The Adaptive Leadership Fellowship has been a truly enriching professional and personal experience. Throughout my career, I have blamed organizational issues on authority or broken systems, felt hopeless, and avoided addressing challenges despite how passionate I felt about change. By learning the Adaptive Leadership Framework, I feel confident that I am part of the system and therefore, I can influence it. Adaptive leadership now comes up in every challenge I face and I am going to keep referencing it in my career as a social worker.”
– Kaylin, College of Staten Island, Spring 2020 Fellow at the Spring 2020 Colloquium

What else do you want to share about the impact of your interventions/experiments in helping the organization make progress on its adaptive change?

“The adaptive leadership framework has been a turnkey to seeing the endless potential in the skill and necessity of the social work profession. I am beyond grateful to have had the opportunity to learn and grow in my work with this fellowship.”
Spring 2021 Fellow (Anonymous evaluation response)

“I believe that participating in this Adaptive Leadership Fellowship has provided the tools necessary to create meaningful and sustainable change. This Fellowship has really provided me with an entirely different way of thinking and problem-solving. I am able to look at situations from multiple perspectives and identify the many factors that influence how systems function. Also: Leadership is a verb!”
Spring 2021 Fellow (Anonymous evaluation response)

“Advancing the Case for Adaptive Leadership in Human Services” by Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant, Mary Burns, LMSW, and Marc Manashil, MSW, MPA; article in Research Handbook in Leadership in Social Care and Social Work (2025)

Social Work A Call to Action: A Time for Reflection and Reckoning by Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant, Phillip Coltoff

Transforming Careers in Mental Health for BIPOC: Strategies to Promote Healing and Social Change, edited by Dr. Linda Lausell Bryant and Dr. Doris Chang

A Guide for Sustaining Conversations on Racism, Identity, And Our Mutual Humanity by Steve Burghardt, Kalima DeSuze, Linda Lausell Bryant, and Mohan Vinjamuri

Contact Mary Burns, ALHSI Program Coordinator, at mary.burns@nyu.edu or silver.adaptiveleadership@nyu.edu