Diary of a Leader: Building Adaptive Capacity Before It Breaks You
- Lindsay Sheldrake
- Apr 28
- 4 min read
Welcome to "Diary of a Leader" - Real Stories, Leadership Lessons, and Personal Growth
Ah, leadership. It’s messy, rewarding, and full of lessons you can only learn by doing.
Welcome to Diary of a Leader—a behind-the-scenes look at what it really takes to lead high-performing teams and deliver results in project-based businesses.
Whether you’re scaling operations or managing creative chaos, this space is for leaders who want to grow with clarity, confidence, and impact.
If you lead a design firm, creative studio, or project-driven team, you’ve probably felt it—the tension between wanting to move faster and the reality of limited time, people, and energy.
As a Fractional COO and project leadership partner, I see it all the time: businesses growing quickly, adding projects, hiring new people, layering on responsibilities.
At first, it feels exciting.
But if you don't actively build adaptive capacity into your business, that growth quickly turns into burnout, breakdowns, and missed opportunities.
Let’s dig into what adaptive capacity actually is—and why it’s a skill every business needs if they want to scale without constantly burning out their best people.
What Is Adaptive Capacity?
Adaptive capacity is your team’s ability to adjust, absorb change, and still deliver strong results—even as things evolve.
It’s not about working longer hours.
It’s about building smarter systems and stronger support that allows people to perform at a high level without falling apart.
When your adaptive capacity is healthy, your business can handle:
Shifting timelines
Changing client needs
Internal growth
Unexpected curveballs
without throwing everything off track.
When it's not?
The cracks start to show—and fast.
What Happens When Adaptive Capacity Breaks?
Here’s a real-world example:
I recently supported an Operations Manager who was managing a full portfolio of projects and trying to onboard new employees, and handling resourcing and staffing, and overseeing team development.
At first, they managed by sheer willpower.
But over time, even with the best time management skills, the reality set in: there were only so many hours in a day.
Balls started dropping.
Deadlines slipped.
Team members felt unsupported.
And the manager, once thriving, was overwhelmed and doubting their ability to keep up.
The biggest problem wasn’t lack of effort—it was lack of space.
They didn’t have the adaptive capacity needed to lead well and deliver results.
Why Adaptive Capacity Protects Growth
Adaptive capacity is what separates businesses that scale sustainably from those that crumble under their own weight.
Without it, growth looks like this:
Constant firefighting
Strained client relationships
Missed opportunities because the team is too maxed out
With it, growth looks like this:
Clear priorities
Strategic delegation
Consistent project delivery, even when things shift
If you want to see why structure is the key to avoiding project chaos, check out this post on why project delivery breaks down.
Building Adaptive Capacity Starts with Leadership
You can’t simply tell your team to "adapt better."
You need to create the conditions that make adaptive performance possible.
That starts with a few key leadership moves:
Protect Clarity
Clear goals, clear roles, and clear communication give your team the stability they need to absorb change without chaos.
Manage Scope Ruthlessly
Scope creep doesn’t just kill budgets—it kills adaptive capacity.
Get serious about defining, tracking, and protecting project scope to prevent burnout.
Build Recovery into the System
Your team isn’t a machine.
Create breathing room between major pushes—because resilience isn’t built through nonstop hustle. It’s built through healthy cycles of effort and recovery.
The Leadership Lesson
Adaptive capacity isn’t just about surviving growth.
It’s about creating the space for your team—and yourself—to thrive during it.
It’s about leading proactively, not reactively.
Planning for capacity, not reacting to burnout.
Protecting clarity, not piling on chaos.
When you lead with that mindset, scaling doesn’t just become possible—it becomes sustainable.
Wrapping Up (Because Time is Precious)
Growth doesn’t break businesses.
The inability to adapt to growth does.
As leaders, we need to stop trying to cram more into broken systems and start building businesses that have the capacity to thrive as they evolve.
Adaptive capacity isn’t optional if you want to scale successfully.
It’s the foundation that makes sustainable growth possible.
And the best part?
You don’t need to wait for a crisis to build it.
You can start today.
Catch you next time, fellow leaders-in-training.
And remember: Growth without adaptive capacity isn’t growth. It’s a slow unraveling.
Choose to lead with clarity. Choose to protect the core.
Want support building the systems and structure your business needs to scale?
Stay tuned for more real-world lessons on leadership, operational clarity, and successful project delivery in the next installment of Diary of a Leader—because leading teams and managing projects isn’t about doing it all; it’s about doing what matters, exceptionally well.
Comments