What can be taught

Whenever I hear a leader say, “This team needs more grit,” I tend to bristle.

The same thing happens when I hear calls for more resilience.

It is not because I think perseverance has no value, or because I believe people should be shielded from difficulty, pressure, or the need to recover. Quite the opposite. I’ve long advocated that leadership, by definition, asks a great deal of people (whether by choice or circumstance). Teams will face setbacks. Plans will break. Markets will move. People will disappoint each other. Unexpected conditions will force changes that no one wanted and few feel ready for. None of that is avoidable.

My issue has less to do with the underlying ideas than with the way the words are often used.

When leaders ask for more grit or resilience, the language can sound serious, even noble, yet remain underdeveloped, shall we say. I.e., it can create the impression of depth without offering much developmental clarity; it compels me to ask, what exactly is being asked of the team (or individual)?

• More endurance?

• More emotional control?

• More willingness to absorb stress without complaint?

• More stamina in a poorly designed system?

• More recovery after repeated shocks?

Sometimes the answer is yes to some of those things. But the question itself is often left unexamined. That is where my resistance begins. Because if a capability matters, I want to know whether it can be taught. Then…

• If it can be taught, I want to know whether it can be practiced. Then…

• If it can be practiced, I want to know whether it can be reinforced often enough to become part of how a person actually operates.

If I hold the words against that standard (taught, practiced, reinforced), then my relationship to them changes.

Now, to be fair, grit and resilience are still useful ideas. In organizational life, though, they often do not strike me as especially useful instructions.

And that is part of why I keep coming back to adaptability; not because it is trendier, sounds softer, or is somehow free of the same risks. It is not. After all, any leadership term can become vague enough to be admired and broad enough to be useless.

Adaptability can absolutely fall into that trap if it stays abstract. A leader can say, “We need to be more adaptable,” and mean little more than “deal with it.” So I am not trying to replace one empty virtue word with another.

I am trying to get underneath all three and ask a different question: what can actually be taught?

That’s the question that has been sitting with me for a while, and I think it is part of why the second book Marcus and I are writing on adaptive leadership is taking the shape it has. It is not becoming a purely theoretical treatment of adaptive systems, or a long meditation on why adaptability matters in the abstract.

Like our first book, our new book is becoming much more of a manual. More practical. More procedural. More concerned with steps, disciplines, and how to build the thing rather than merely describing it.

And, equally important, the more I sit with that choice, the more it feels right. Why? Because I have grown increasingly skeptical of leadership language that asks people to possess a quality without showing them how to develop it.

Let’s dive in.

There are some concepts leaders use that are valuable mainly because they name something worthy of the honor they confer. Courage can function that way. Integrity can function that way. Humility can too. They matter, and it is useful to name them, but naming them does not automatically make them teachable in a clean, linear way.

In organizational life, grit and resilience often get used in a similar register. They function as a form of praise for people or teams who can endure difficulty, recover from adversity, or persist with a challenge over time. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. In many contexts, those capacities matter a great deal.

But admiration and instruction are not the same thing.

A leader may admire a team's resilience and still have no meaningful way to help the team become more resilient. A company may celebrate grit in its highest performers and still have no idea whether it is developing grit, selecting for it, exploiting it, or merely rewarding the people who have learned to endure dysfunction more than others.

When a team is told it needs more resilience, the message can easily become moral rather than developmental. The implication is that the deficiency sits inside the individual or the team. The demand lands first; then the mechanism arrives, if it arrives at all. In some organizations, it never does. The word becomes a way of asking people to absorb strain while the system remains comfortably uninterrogated.

That is one of the reasons I react to it.

The problem is not that resilience has no value. The problem is that it is often invoked at exactly the moment when a leader should be clarifying what can actually be changed, what can actually be built, and what conditions may be making resilience more necessary than it should be.

Grit can be used the same way. It can sound like a call for perseverance when, in reality, people are being asked to carry ambiguity, overload, or inconsistency without sufficient support, structure, or developmental guidance. Again, that does not make grit a meaningless concept. It just means the word is too often asked to do a plan's work. It’s suboptimized leadership words hiding in plain sight.

And words are not plans…

• If I tell a team to have more grit, what have I actually taught them?

• If I tell a leader to be more resilient, what have I actually given them to practice?

Those questions may sound almost annoyingly literal, but I have come to think they are among the most important in leadership development. We spend a lot of time praising the right qualities and not nearly enough time distinguishing between what sounds admirable and what can be built.

This is where adaptability begins to feel more useful to me. It is not perfect or self-explanatory, but it does strike me as more practical.

The main reason is that adaptability lends itself more naturally to behavior. It does not sit in my mind as a trait that one either possesses or lacks. It feels more like a spectrum of response.

A person can be more adaptable in one environment than another. More adaptable under one kind of pressure than another. More adaptable this year than they were three years ago. That matters because once a capability sits on a spectrum, it becomes easier to assess, coach, and strengthen over time.

It starts to move from identity into practice.

Adaptability, at least as I think about it, is not simply toughness under pressure. It is not the same thing as stoicism. It is not passive tolerance. It is not “figure it out” stripped of support and thrown over the fence to a team. It is a set of more active moves, more kinetic if you will:

• Noticing what is changing.

• Interpreting what matters.

• Letting go of old assumptions sooner.

• Reframing the problem.

• Adjusting the approach without losing the purpose.

• Remaining responsive rather than purely reactive.

Simply, it’s learning in motion, which, to me, is a different developmental proposition.

A leader can coach someone toward better pattern recognition. A team can practice reframing assumptions before conditions force them to do so. A group can get better at running premortems, pressure-testing plans, noticing weak signals, asking better questions when the facts change, and shifting tactics without treating every change as failure. A manager can create check-ins that ask not only what happened, but what changed, what was learned, and what now needs to be updated.

None of that guarantees adaptability, of course. But it creates pathways into it.

Adaptability can often be operationalized more directly in day-to-day leadership behavior. That does not make it easy. It does make it more teachable. Simple right?

Still, I want to be careful here. Adaptability can become just as empty as grit or resilience if it is left at the level of aspiration.

A leader who says, “We need to be more adaptable,” without defining what that means in practice, has not solved the problem. They have just swapped vocabularies. The word may feel more modern, more dynamic, even more sophisticated. But if no one can observe it, practice it, reinforce it, or assess it over time, then it remains little more than a better-dressed abstraction.

This is the trap I do not want to fall into.

If I am going to argue that adaptability is the more useful concept, then I also have to accept the burden that comes with it. I have to be able to say what it looks like. I have to be able to describe how it is strengthened. I have to be able to point to the systems, routines, and reinforcing mechanisms that help it become part of how people and teams actually operate.

Otherwise, I am doing the same thing I claim to dislike—I am naming a virtue, admiring it from a distance, and pretending that language itself counts as development. It does not. What turns a concept into a capability is not the first exposure; it is what happens after.

That is one of the more practical insights Marcus has surfaced repeatedly in his work with clients, and it is one I continue to see as well. Many leaders are open to initial concepts. They will nod along with a workshop. They will agree that adaptability matters. They will often welcome the language and even the first set of tools. Where resistance shows up is later, when the capability starts making demands on real behavior: Follow-up. Check-ins. Practice loops. Repetition. Reflection. The operating discipline that is required to turn a good idea into a changed response. That is where the work becomes less flattering and more developmental.

This is true of almost any capability worth building:

Teaching creates language and awareness. Practice creates behavioral trials. Reinforcement turns isolated trials into patterns.

Over time, those patterns shape beliefs, which in turn alter how people respond under real pressure. That is not a circular argument. It is simply how human development often works. Very little of what matters in leadership arrives fully formed through insight alone.

That is why I have grown suspicious of development efforts that stop at naming or branding. Most of them do not fail because the idea was wrong; they fail because the system never stayed with the idea long enough for it to become practice.

So, I keep coming back to that question because it feels both narrower and more useful than many of the leadership questions we ask: what can be taught? I do not mean what can be admired, demanded, or made to sound strong in a keynote or a strategy offsite. I mean, literally, what can actually be taught? With evidence?

I think adaptability passes that test better than grit and resilience usually do, not because perseverance and recovery are unimportant, but because adaptability gives us a more workable path from concept to behavior.

As I posited before, if a capability can be named behaviorally, it can be practiced. If it can be practiced, it can be reinforced. And if it can be reinforced, it has a much better chance of becoming part of how a person or team operates under pressure. That is a very different proposition from simply telling someone to be tougher, recover faster, or stay in the fight.

Upon deeper reflection, there may also be a subtler ethical question here: when leaders rely too heavily on words like grit and resilience, they may unintentionally shift too much of the burden of adaptation onto the individual.

That message, even when well meant, can become: “absorb more, withstand more, bounce back faster.” Thus, leaving the recipient dejected, confused, aimless, or disengaged/cynical.

I recognize that adaptability does not automatically eliminate that risk, but it gives us a better chance to distribute responsibility more honestly. It allows us to ask not only whether the individual is growing, but also whether the team is practicing the right habits, whether the leader is reinforcing the right behaviors, and whether the operating environment is making thoughtful adaptation more likely or less likely.

That distinction matters to me…

Because leadership development, if it is serious, should not only produce tougher people. It should produce better responses.

I think that is the deeper point behind all of this. It is also one of the reasons our next book will also feel like a manual rather than a theoretical treatment.

Important to note: there is no shortage of writing explaining why adaptability matters. I (we) believe that there is less writing that helps a leader build it step by step or helps a team embed it into real operating rhythms—meeting them where they are, rather than where we “wish” them to be. I.e., if adaptability is going to become a central leadership capability for the future, then theory will not be enough. Leaders will need handles. They will need practice. They will need ways to diagnose where adaptability is weak, ways to rehearse it, and ways to reinforce it after the first conversation.

In other words, they will need something that can be taught.

To be clear: I do not reject grit; nor do I reject resilience. I understand why those words still hold so much cultural weight. But I do not trust leadership language simply because it sounds serious, and I have grown wary of asking teams for qualities that are easier to praise than to build.

What I want from a leadership capability now is more demanding than that. I want to know whether it can be taught, practiced, reinforced, and eventually lived. I want to know whether it helps people respond better, not merely endure longer.

That is why I keep coming back to adaptability. Not as a slogan. Not as a substitute virtue. And certainly not as a cleaner buzzword.

Adaptability is a capability that, when handled with sufficient care and specificity, can provide leaders and teams with something useful to work on. Because adaptive leaders don’t just learn leadership; they run on it.

Simple, not easy.

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