Overview
Ronald Heifetz an expert in the field of leadership who has published many books on the topic explains in his words what a leader is and what it isn’t
“Practicing leadership, namely, facilitating the output of others for the sake of the essential work, necessitates that we not only become better listeners, but that we learn to deploy ourselves in ways that are situationally appropriate. ”
Definitions and Explanations
“The reason why we’re going to anchor our concept of leadership in the work to be done, the problem to be solved, the challenges to be met is because if we were only to focus on the hands that it takes, the personal abilities, we would begin to quickly discover that these physical or personal abilities are not specific.”
“People start the conversation about leadership by focusing on here are the personal capacities, this is what it means to become a leader, to be a leader, independent of the challenge we’re facing, it very quickly becomes a, like in psychology, we would call it a Rorschach test or a projection where people begin to project into this all of their favorite qualities.”
Imagine that this is a dance floor and we’re in motion. And you may notice that there’s some people who are sitting out the dance all the time. But the balcony is a place from which you can step back, even emotionally, a little bit more detached and observe and try to then, in a diagnostic, way make sense of where are we now? What’s happened? So that you can then go back onto the dance floor and make your next move. And in leadership, the capacity to move from action to reflection back to action back to reflection, to move from the dance floor of action to the balcony of reflection and back and forth is really critical. Because without that capacity, you can’t take corrective action. You can’t mid-course correct. So you end up compounding your mistakes. And in leadership, people make mistakes every day. Sometimes they’re small tactical mistakes. Again, the way they framed an issue or the sequence in which they talk to people. Or the fact that they didn’t collect information over here about the situation. And we find then, in leadership, that actually, the most common sources of failure are diagnostic. If you get the problem wrong, generally, the action is going to be wrong.
Ron explains how he’d run emergency rooms early in his career, “I don’t think that required leadership on my part. I think it required some managerial expertise, a fair amount of authoritative expertise. Mainly, I was just doing my job. I was doing what I was trained to do, what I had learned how to do. And basically, I was deploying a set of state of the art routines, applying knowledge that had already been developed to treat that situation. You don’t need leadership if you’re just doing what you know how to do already. Now again, that doesn’t make leadership more important. There’s nothing more important than saving a life.”
Leadership then requires a deep respect for the pains of change. You have to understand what you’re asking of people when you ask them to change. Often the only way to meet an adaptive challenge is to accept losses as part of the change often in ways that involve tough choices requiring sacrifice. These are the challenges that I believe call for leadership. When there are no easy answers and when capacity building requires sifting through what to conserve, what to give up, and what innovations will enable us to take the best from our history into the future. Change is at the root of adaptive work, and that change often involves loss in many forms.
Technical problems were once adaptive challenges.
I don’t believe a persuasive visionary leader can step in and solve the adaptive challenges people are facing. The difficult work of deciding how to interpret and balance overlapping values, which losses to accept, which ways of doing things to change, which new capacities to build, and how to do so– that’s the work that must be done to meet an adaptive challenge.
If adaptive solutions are situations where the gap between desires and reality can only be closed by people themselves internalizing the change to make the change real for themselves, then we need an idea of leadership that effectively supports this systemic kind of work. Leadership then, as we will use the term in this course, is this practice of adaptive work.
My thoughts:
- What desires need to be internalized?
- Can the overarching desire of 100 million dollar company be broken down into smaller desires?
- How do you get people to internalize change?
- What changes have we done that have indeed been internalized?
“We use the term adaptive challenges to describe the second type of gap, the kind we don’t yet know how to close, or at best, know only partially how to narrow. We could call these innovative challenges or transformative pressures.”-Ronald Heifetz
Although our categories for thinking about types of work seem straightforward, in reality, work comes bundled. It can exhibit characteristics of both technical and adaptive work. Greater diagnostic effort is needed to separate out the various types of work.
By separating technical problems from adaptive challenges, you’ll be able to better identify the new learning and competencies needed (not to mention the problem to be solved).
You can’t effectively mobilize people to work through an adaptive challenge unless you are able to recognize when a challenge is adaptive or has adaptive parts.
The success of your leadership depends on your ability to distinguish challenges that are technical–problems that can be solved by authoritative and managerial expertise–from challenges that are adaptive, and thus require the building of new capacities.
Like in medicine, if you get the diagnosis wrong, you’ll get the treatment wrong. In my experience in many diverse contexts, the most common source of failure in leadership is a diagnostic failure.
People treat adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems. When people make this mistake, they approach an adaptive challenge in a problem-solving mode, failing to recognize
that what they need to provide is the mobilizing and organizing of people to create new capacity to meet the challenge. This mistake can be disastrous.
The tendency to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenge is, I think, the primary cause of low implementation rates of even good ideas and potential solutions.
First, you have to be able to–diagnostically, you have to be able to distinguish that part of the problem that is amenable to technical expertise and that part of the problem that requires new capacity.
Most problems come bundled. For example, HIV comes bundled. Part of the problem is amendable to expertise. Now for $200 a year, we can keep people alive for maybe a whole lifetime.
That’s a blessing.And it took a lot of investment and a lot of scientific know-how to discover that. But part of the problem remains adaptive.And if we treat the problem as if it were only technical,
we’re going to neglect critical parts of the problem.We won’t really meet the challenge.We’ll have a partial solution.
Think Politically
Authority vs. Leadership
We see so little leadership from people in authority. So how would you disappoint people at a rate they can stand? And that becomes a very practical and in fact common question in the practice of leadership. Because if people expect you, particularly if you’re trying to lead from an authority position, if people expect you to know, but you’re saying we don’t know, and in fact, you’re part of the problem.
My surgical handiwork can only solve part of the problem in the operating room by giving you new vessels to your heart, but the other part of the problem remains in you.
So let’s step back then and focus on trying to understand the nature of authority and put the term leadership even– let’s put it on the shelf for right now. Because leadership almost always gets practiced in some social matrix, in some social setting in which there are authority relationships. It’s like the turbulence and the gravity that you have to take into account if you’re going to fly. Leadership is usually practiced in some context. Even if you’re leading without any authority, you still need to understand that you’re leading into a social system in which there are authority structures and authority relationships. So let’s put leadership aside and just try to understand the nature of authority.
The first thing to notice here is that trusting others to provide us with service is basic to social living. This inclination to look to elders for solutions
to the fundamental challenges we face from birth is part of our design. We are born to depend on others and to trust them with our welfare in a unconscious natural covenant or social contract in which we give others power over our bodies and daily decisions with the expectation that they will provide for us with care, integrity, and competence.This natural appropriate dependency on others is I think the evolutionary basis for authority.
The second key observation is that authority is relational. It’s a property of social living.
In other words, you cannot have authority by yourself.
This becomes less automatic as we grow up and become more conscious and deliberate about whom to trust. We think about and select whom to entrust with our welfare.
We choose whom to ask for help, whom to nominate to be captain of the team, whom to choose to be head of the group or club or who should be president of our school class.
This becomes less automatic as we grow up and become more conscious and deliberate about whom to trust. We think about and select whom to entrust with our welfare.
We choose whom to ask for help, whom to nominate to be captain of the team, whom to choose to be head of the group or club or who should be president of our school class.
In defining authority, we’ve suggested that it takes the form of a basic social contract. When we entrust people with power over decisions and resources,
we expect them to perform services. We authorize people for a reason. And generally, the more significant the services, the more significant
the power and the trust.
Whether we are speaking of the president of a country or company, a hospital administrator, or the head of an advocacy organization, a middle manager, a line supervisor, or a parent,
the services of an authority figure have fundamental commonalities. We generally authorize people to provide in varying degrees three essential services–direction, protection, and order.
People in authority today are also expected to ensure order in our lives and work by maintaining the structures, processes, and reporting relationships that orient us in our roles,
by resolving our conflicts, and by reinforcing the cultural norms that inform and guide us. So every authority relationship will to some degree provide direction, protection, and order.
Formal Authority (Job Description) vs. Informal Authority
Individuals with formal authority often rely heavily on informal authority to move beyond the boundaries of their role or authority position. We look to people to represent a point of view, championed a cause, give us advice, or even bless us religiously, often without ever formalizing the arrangement. So having informal authority alone can be very powerful. On the other hand, if you are an authority figure, it can be difficult to accomplish what you set out to do without also having informal authority. Most people with formal authority rely on having some measure of informal authority.
People especially underestimate the power of subordinates, but they do so at their peril. The informal authority that subordinates give you is enormously valuable. Their respect, trust, and admiration is often crucial to any manager. Senior military officers know, for example, that they need the respect and trust of their troops to get a tough job well done. The formal authority that comes with their rank really isn’t enough.The same is true with lateral colleagues, whose collaboration is so often needed. So while formal authority brings with it the considerable and fairly consistent powers of an office, enduring success in this office usually turns on a person’s informal authority. In fact, informal authority also comes with a subtle, yet quite substantial power.
The power to extend one’s reach beyond the limits of the job description. Often, the real go-to person in an organization, the person you seek if you really want to get something done, has a lot more power than her title would suggest because she’s
gained so much trust and respect.
Your formal authority remains constant for long periods of time, changing in quantum jumps occasionally at discrete moments. At hiring, at promotion, or when you leave the job.
But because your success in meeting expectations tends to fluctuate week by week, your informal authority is in constant flux. So in practice, you need to track how your informal authority goes up and down over time. How your credibility, respect, approval, and admiration change in people’s eyes.
It is important to remember, though, that whatever powers of authority you have is only because other people have conferred them upon you. In doing so, these people have consciously or unconsciously signed a social contract and put their trust in you to serve.
Stakeholder Map
How do you visualize a web of stakeholders with differing degrees of power and conflicting views?
A stakeholder map is a simple yet powerful diagram that helps you gather and analyze key diagnostic information. We will start by drawing a large circle.
It might help to think of this as a dinner table. At the center of the circle, place the adaptive challenge, the work to be done. It’s like the meal. Next are the stakeholders or participants.
They all get a seat at the table. In a system with five stakeholders, add five circles. Place the circles around the work, but within the large circle. Feel free to label each circle to indicate the stakeholder represented. Now we add the constituencies. These are the groups represented by the stakeholders. Place constituencies outside the circle, but adjacent to the related stakeholder.
Once you’ve added your constituencies, it’s time to identify the factions. Draw an oval or curved line around each stakeholder and related constituencies to create a affection grouping.
Don’t worry if some of your factions don’t show all constituencies.Arranging these groups graphically around the adaptive challenge will help you understand the perspectives of each stakeholder
and faction. The map is iterative.
In our analysis of the structure of authority relationships, we considered how power is entrusted to an individual in exchange for a service. As we expand our understanding of authority, we’ll analyze the critical role trust plays in building and maintaining these relationships.
Trust
Trust is the pivot point, or fulcrum. In an authority relationship, we have power on one side and services on the other. When we confer power on an authority figure, we do so because we believe she will provide us with certain valued services in return.
Trust is anchored best when you and your people are facing into a complex and changing reality and understand the need to learn as you go. You’ll have to discuss the gains and the losses that people may have to sustain in a change process, a change process different from what they and you had expected.
Each occasion to reset trust is also an opportunity to prepare people to accept uncertainty and move with greater adaptability on other issues.
There is an art to disappointing people’s expectations. It’s important to respect how quickly people can absorb tough messages.
For example, in medicine, a patient may expect their good doctor to once again deliver a cure. But it may be that this time around, the doctor may have to mobilize the capacity of the patient and family to face into a tough reality with terrible uncertainty. Some patients can move fast, but others need to move more slowly to absorb such change.
What are some challenges you anticipate disappointing expectations?
People applying distrust to me based off of other peoples abuse of power would cause them to not do what is needed. Also some of the things that are needed are often more work that is asked, many people have a resistance to being given more work, often when they are already strained.
Strategies for Renewing Trust
Terms:
Adaptive challenges: Problems we don’t know or only partially how to narrow. Innovative challenges and transformative pressures. It requires you to move from old capacity to develop new capacity. A species that cannot have new adaptations then it risks dying out. We create gaps between our aspirations and reality in which we want to close.Therefore, unlike in all other places in nature, our adaptive challenges are not only produced by changes in the physical and competitive environment around us. Our adaptive challenges also come from within us.
The three main services provided by authority relationships are protection, direction, and order. Power is entrusted in those in authority roles in exchange for services.
Technical Problems: Ones that are easily solved based on the system we live in. Such as transportation or getting a meal.The know-how and systems are ready to go. Even the box of cereal you grab for breakfast gets to you at the end of a long chain– very complex agricultural, economic, legal, political, and cultural systems that took generations to design and develop.
Dysfunctions of authority relationships: maladaptive dependence and counter-dependence.
Maladaptive Dependence: Too little faith in themselves or put too much trust in others.
Counter-Dependence: Cynical and too little trust, leaves you reactive.
Independence: Grounded and free to respond deliberately. Interdependence with others.
In a kingdom, skilled kings and queens know that their power is contingent on the informal authorization of citizens and a dominant coalition of interested parties. Lose that authorization and you may lose your kingdom and your life.
Conflict
Orchestrating conflict
Scenarios:
Question:You’re a member of a sales team tasked with launching a brand new software product and reaching a revenue target that is a 20% increase over prior year. The product is not only new to you and your team, but to your customers as well. It will also require you to identify new customers.
In what ways might this be an adaptive challenge? Analyze the diagnostic indicators.
My Answer Its adaptive in the sense that I would be moving from old capacity to new because of limited product knowledge and would have to build out a new area of the product in terms of marketing it and speaking about it.
Course Answer
