Adaptation Application
Letter from the editor
Quick, what’s your favorite animal, and what do you think that says about you?
Mine, since you asked, is the lemur – has been for years.
But why?
I dig their funny bugged-out eyes, chic strips on the ring-tailed ones, and generally cool demeanor. If you see them at the zoo or the Duke Lemur Center in Durham, they might run and play, but I’ve never caught one mugging to the camera (ahem, penguins.)
But a fun fact about lemurs is they evolved in the wild on their own schedule. Isolated on the island of Madagascar – the only place in the world where they’re found in the wild – lemurs adapted to their immediate environment and not the world at large.
Like the alien-faced primates, we are also adapting – a lot of time also in response to our immediate environment.
That includes how we interact with other humans.
“We’re always adapting to our environment,” Jessica Wolfe, chief client success officer for The Forté Institute, said recently.
Wolfe was talking to members of this year’s WILMA Leadership Institute at their orientation session last month. In this case, she was speaking about how we each have natural communication and decision styles – some of us are naturally patient; some of us are nonconformists – and those styles are clues to how we best respond to other people as well as how we would prefer people to interact with us.
The kick is not everyone is the same. Which, while inconvenient, brings a wide range of perspectives to any conversation.
Like the lemurs grew longer fingers and toes to grip trees better, we too also need to consider adapting to where teammates are coming from. Meanwhile, they should also be thinking about and adapting to your natural style, too.
“We want to make sure we’re doing it intentionally,” Wolfe said about adapting communication styles. “And once we’re doing it intentionally, we want to communicate effectively.”
So, whether you devour this summer issue impatiently to scour all the nuggets of advice and leadership bullet points or you patiently flip through absorbing the nuances, we hope you find something that communicates to you on the following pages – no matter what your style.
Vicky Janowski, WILMA editor
