Are You Leading — or Just Avoiding the Real Work?

At a recent leadership retreat, a nonprofit's executive team gathered to “solve” their declining member engagement. They brainstormed new marketing campaigns, redesigned the website, and scheduled more events — but avoided discussing deeper issues: outdated programming, lack of trust in leadership, and unclear organizational identity. A year later, despite all the activity, engagement continued to drop.

This is a textbook example of work avoidance — a concept central to The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ron Heifetz, Marty Linsky, and Zander Grashow.

Work avoidance happens when individuals or organizations steer away from addressing the real, often painful, adaptive challenges they face. Instead, they focus on technical fixes, easy wins, or distractions that create the illusion of progress but leave the underlying issues untouched.

Heifetz and his colleagues describe two main strategies of work avoidance:

• Displacement of Responsibility: pushing the work onto others or systems rather than taking ownership.

• Diversion of Attention: focusing on technical tasks or side issues instead of grappling with adaptive work.

Common patterns within these strategies include:

Displacement of Responsibility

1. Blaming external forces (“It’s just the economy”)

2. Waiting for top leadership to fix it (“We’ll act when the CEO tells us to”)

3. Over-delegating to consultants or task forces (“The new initiative team will handle it”)

Diversion of Attention

1. Over-focusing on technical fixes (like rebranding without rethinking purpose)

2. Getting stuck in endless planning (mistaking plans for action)

3. Pushing for quick wins to create a false sense of progress while avoiding harder conversations

So what can be done to combat work avoidance? Here's a few tips:

1. Name the real, adaptive challenge clearly — even if it’s uncomfortable.

2. Stay in the discomfort long enough for real learning and ownership to happen.

3. Engage multiple voices across the system, not just the usual decision-makers.

4. Resist pressure to jump to technical fixes too quickly.

5. Model vulnerability by admitting uncertainty and inviting experimentation.

   
   

Adaptive challenges require adaptive leadership — and that means resisting the very human urge to avoid what’s hard. Progress starts by recognizing when you’re busy instead of productive, planning instead of leading, or fixing instead of transforming.

Real leadership begins where work avoidance ends.