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Leadership Without Easy Answers

Ronald A. Heifetz

Last accessed on Tuesday July 14, 2015

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Imagine the differences in behavior when people operate with the idea that "leadership means influencing the community to follow the leader's vision" versus "leadership means influencing the community to face its problems."

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linguistic root of the word "to lead" means "to go forth, die.

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contingency theory, which posits that the appropriate style of leadership is contingent on the requirements of the particular situation.

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This study examines the usefulness of viewing leadership in terms of adaptive work. Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face.

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opportunities and facets of a situation. The implication is important: the inclusion of competing value perspectives may be essential to adaptive success.

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In analyzing a community's response to hard realities, we would ask the following questions: Are its members testing their views of the problem against competing views within the community or are they defensively sticking to a particular perspective and suppressing others? Are people testing seriously the relationship between means and ends? Are conflicts over values and the morality of various means open to examination? Are policies analyzed and evaluated to distinguish fact from fiction?

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Tackling tough problems-problems that often require an evolution of values-is the end of leadership; getting that work done is its essence.

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With different values, we screen reality for different information and put the facts together into a different picture.' If a society values individual freedom, it will tend to highlight those aspects of reality that challenge freedom. And as a corollary, it will also be inclined to neglect those elements of reality upon which another society with another central value, like shared responsibility, will focus. The aspect of truth each sees depends significantly on who cares about what.'

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though a mother with very young offspring has more privileges than other adult females. For example, she and her young are afforded greater protection by staying in close proximity to the silverback.v

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not all authority relationships are the product of a conscious and deliberate conferring of power. Often, like dominance, they are produced by habitual deference. 9 Many of us have been so conditioned to defer to authority that we do not realize the extent to which we are the source of an authority's power.40 We forget that we are the principals.41 When we realize our collective power, the person in authority becomes vulnerable because we can retract the power we have given. Such was the American Revolution.

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giving people power does not readily produce empowered and responsible citizens. Not only do people have to change their concepts of power and responsibility, they also have to give up the payoffs of deference: political and economic security. In the old system, people knew where the government stood; its services in the form of jobs and welfare were secure and predictable. Most people did not have to worry about getting fired or laid off, or going homeless or hungry. If civil unrest surfaced in the countryside, all knew that order would be restored. If a foreign nation threatened war, the government's protective response would be decisive. No one need worry about drug abuse either (except with alcohol) because the borders were sealed tight and the punishments for the crime predictable and severe.

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A holding environment consists of any relationship in which one party has the
power to hold the attention of another party and facilitate adaptive work. I apply it to any relationship which has a developmental task or opportunity-including the relationships between politicians and their polities, nations and other nations, coaches and their teams, managers and subordinates, and even relationships between friends.

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People cannot learn new ways when they are overwhelmed. But eliminating the stress altogether eliminates the impetus for adaptive work. The strategic task is to maintain a level of tension that mobilizes people.

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Trust in authority relationships is a matter of predictability along two dimensions: values and skill.

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Chairs set up in a circle encourages more participation than auditorium-style seating, where everyone is looking to the front of the room for guidance and answers.

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Getting people to pay attention to tough issues rather than diversions is at the heart of strategy.

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An authority may be given wide access to diagnostic data without a clear authorization to communicate it. In leading, one has to communicate with subtlety, taking into account the particularities of the constituents, their networks of support, and the harshness of the news.

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Unless there are compelling reasons to begin with an unripe issue, a person in authority would begin with those issues that have already fastened in people's minds. There is no science to this. In real-time, one makes an educated guess, tests how the issue is received, and then reassesses its appropriateness. If only a small faction is urgent about a problem, but one agrees from one's vantage point that the problem the faction sees should be confronted sooner than later, the strategic challenge will be to find ways to generate more generalized urgency, and thus ripen the issue.

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President Clinton's first days in office illustrate, in part, the importance of gauging the ripeness of problems. With a wide agenda of issues, some of which were very ripe in the society (the budget deficit, a sluggish economy, health policy) and others for which urgency was not generalized (gays in the military), Clinton took action across the spectrum. Authoritative presidential action, of course, ripens issues quickly. When Clinton announced that by executive action he would lift the ban on gays in the military, it immediately became a national issue. But it also expended informal authority needed for other issues more challenging to Congress and the nation, such as raising taxes, closing defense industries, restructuring the health care system, and cutting federal benefits."

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Leading these factions required engaging each in the perspective of the other.

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Deciding which process to use-autocratic, consultative, participative, or consensual-requires judgment based on several factors.16 We have begun to introduce three of these factors already: the type of problem, the resilience of the social system, and the severity of the problem. To these we should add a fourth: the time frame for taking action.

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Foremost among priorities, the authority will have to reduce the level of disequilibrium, often by autocratic behavior, to bring the distress down into the range in which the factions in the society can begin working productively on the issues. For example, Franklin Roosevelt took hurried and autocratic action in 1933, and did so because calming the nation meant as much to the cause of economic recovery as any programmatic experiment.

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One becomes more autocratic-exclusive-when the issue is likely to overwhelm the current resilience of the group or society given the time available for decision.

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A public that is predisposed to defer to authority and that knows little about the costs of U.S. foreign policy can be expected to rally around the President. Second, military crisis requires dispatch. Only a clear chain of command can implement complex strategy in short order. Third, the intricacies of foreign affairs require the substantive expertise of experienced professionals. Only the President and his political and military advisers, immersed
in the technical details, can be trusted to know what is best. Fourth, negotiations require decisiveness. International law demands of each nation a single point of responsible authority.41 Finally, the President sits at the hub of military and diplomatic channels of information, some of which are secret. He needs to be able to maintain that secrecy. As the framers of the Constitution recognized, practical foreign policy may require autocratic decisionmaking distant from the turbulence of public debate and legislative politics. Even Thomas Jefferson, who felt more strongly than most about the dangers of presidential authority, said in 1790 while serving as George Washington's Secretary of State, "The transaction of business with foreign nations is Executive altogether."42

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Surely, Johnson's view of himself as the solitary decisionmaker, the sole provider of direction, protection, and order would be appropriate in a routine problem situation and in those foreign policymaking situations where unity, dispatch, expertise, negotiating authority, and secrecy are dominant requirements. But in the case of Vietnam, these requirements were either unachievable or did not apply.

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When Pacing the Work Becomes Work Avoidance

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By making the President the decisionmaker instead of the leader of the nation's problem-solving, Johnson lost his vantage point and his leverage over the holding environment."

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His very education as an engineer may have left him ill-prepared to understand the adaptive requirements of policies, and therefore the need for collaboration and pacing.

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As Johnson demonstrated in his response to a distressed nation during events in Selma, in the midst of a teaching moment one has to hold steady. Disorder at the top is perhaps the last thing people
want to see when the distress of change compels them to seek greater reliability in their authorities.

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That I use the metaphor of the table, with the head traditionally a man and the foot characteristically a woman is no accident. Leadership without authority has been the domain to which women have been restricted for ages.

Note:denny head neck

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King spoke of equality and freedom, and learned the workings of the legal, political, and economic systems controlled by white society in building a national movement to combat racism.

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First, the absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decisionmaking. Instead of providing answers that soothe, one can more readily raise questions that disturb. One does not have to keep the ship on an even keel. One has more latitude for creative deviance.

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One does not have to contend so fully with meeting the multiple expectations of multiple constituencies and providing the holding environment for everybody. One can have an issue focus.

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Third, operating with little or no authority places one closer to the detailed experiences of some of the stakeholders in the situation. One may lose the larger perspective but gain the fine grain of people's hopes, pains, values, habits, and history. One has frontline information.

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authority figures are beholden to their subordinates for information.
The advantage of formal positions of authority is breadth. The disadvantage is distance from raw and relevant detail.14

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"How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?"

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brutality avoids the
limelight. At the same time, the attention King could bring might force a more measured expression of brutality into the limelight, where local norms would be subject to scrutiny by the larger society, and racism would be seen for what it was. Moreover, King's informal authority gave him the power to set the context for action, whether it was integrated buses or voting rights.

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Authority's rejection of challenge represents a complex dynamic. A leader without authority can easily oversimplify the complexity of the situation by interpreting the rejection as an indication of a flawed presentation, an inadequate argument, or the personal bias of the authority figure. Certainly, there may be some truth here and important lessons to draw in devising the next move. However, the rejection generally originates with the community of stakeholders that resist a disturbance of their equilibrium. The authority is their proxy. Indeed, the authority may be personally sympathetic but may see no options, given the expectations he carries. Thus, returning to the authority figure with an "improved version" of the presentation that takes his biases into account often leads nowhere."

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So we have competing principles at work: maintaining the holding power of one's authority, which requires meeting expectations for bold action as well as protection, and promoting adaptive work, which requires anticipated or real hardship.

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Thus, the questions one would ask in pacing the work derive from familiar concerns. First, how stressful is the question or problem being raised? How much loss does it involve? Second, how resilient are the people being challenged? Are they accustomed to learning or are they likely to reach quickly for an avoidance mechanism with which to restore equilibrium? Third, how strong are the bonds of authority that give one the power to hold people's attention to brutally hard questions?

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If the logical connections of the argument were long and tedious, then so would be the pace of the discussion. If Socrates could make the connections more quickly, then the argument would move swiftly.
As a model of leadership, this neglects human truths. The learning required to accomplish adaptive work is not simply conceptual. Logical argument is rarely sufficient. Sifting through the old and fashioning something new takes emotional work.

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Leadership is both active and reflective. One has to alternate between participating and observing. Walt Whitman described it as being "both in and out of the game."

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The following diagnostic framework summarizes the reasoning behind the strategic principles of leadership we have explored: identifying the adaptive challenge, regulating distress, directing disciplined attention to the issues, and giving the work back to people.

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The confrontation began on an intellectual level, gradually became less intellectual, and ultimately degenerated into personal attacks. Jackson finally fled the scene.
In his bruised state of mind Jackson concluded that he had been the victim of a racially motivated committee-room lynching. Over time, however, he began to acknowledge that there had been other people in the room, including some black students. Jackson had to wonder why the rest of the group, including the black members, had, in effect, colluded in what had happened to him.
In retrospect, Jackson realized that as the informal authority in the group, he had become the lightning rod for the tensions that built up. What were these tensions?

Note:kenwyn group dynamics tensions

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We can distill them into a set of basic questions for gaining a balcony perspective:

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What's causing the distress?
What internal contradictions does the distress represent?
What are the histories of these contradictions?
What perspectives and interests have I and others come to represent to various segments of the community that are now in conflict?
In what ways are we in the organization or working group mirroring the problem dynamics in the community?

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What are the characteristic responses of the community to disequilibrium-to confusion about future direction, the presence of an external threat, disorientation in regard to role relationships, internal conflict, or the breaking up of norms?
7. When in the past has the distress appeared to reach a breaking
point-where the social system began to engage in self-destructive behavior, like civil war or political assassination?
8. What actions by senior authorities traditionally have restored equilibrium? What mechanisms to regulate distress are currently within my control, given my authority?

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instead of saying, "We are avoiding the issues here," which would annoy people to no end, one might say, "We are working, perhaps too indirectly, on a difficult issue; let's address it more directly," which affirms the effort.

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to counteract patterns of work avoidance, we ask the following additional questions:
9. What are the work and work avoidance patterns particular to this community?
10. What does the current pattern of work avoidance indicate
about the nature and difficulty of the present adaptive challenge and the various work issues that it comprises?
11. What clues do the authority figures provide?
12. Which of these issues are ripe? What are the options for tackling the ripe issues, or for ripening an issue that has not fastened in people's minds?

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In order to identify the relevant parties, the nature of their adaptive work, and the pitfalls of shielding them from responsibility, we ask these questions:
Changes in whose values, beliefs, or behaviors would allow progress on these issues?
What are the losses involved?
Given my role, how am I likely to be drawn into work avoidance?

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King repeatedly reinforced the message that the conflict was not between white Americans and him, nor even between black and white Americans. It was a conflict between American values and American reality.

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Robert got President Kennedy to pause and reflect by passing him a note: "I know now how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor." Robert had no interest in seeing his brother go down in history as another Tojo-acting without warning, and risking the start of war.22

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A leader from below or outside the authority structure needs protection, encouragement, and warning. He must seek senior allies, yet he will unnecessarily feel frustrated and betrayed if he forgets that the more authoritative ally has to contend with a larger circle of expectations and pressures.

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Consequently, an authority should protect those whom he wants to silence. Annoyance is often a signal of opportunity.

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Curiosity was a virtue. Indeed, he considered only a life of ongoing examination worth living.

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Getting annoyed signaled the need to listen.

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the practice of leadership requires, perhaps first and foremost, a sense of purpose-the capacity to find the values that make risk-taking meaningful.

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Without the personal freedom to change, however, the loss of a prized and familiar job and direction can lead to disorientation and despair. Often, to avoid the loss, we limit our sights instead and, staying in place, give up leading.

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