- To lead is to live dangerously because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear—their daily habits, tools, loyalties, and ways of thinking—with nothing more to offer perhaps than a possibility (20)
- Adaptability has been an essential ingredient for surviving and thriving for every species of life, from life’s beginning on earth (4)
- Leadership requires not only pacing and sequencing the issues themselves to contain division, but also tending to the holding environment itself to strengthen the bonds of trust and shared interest that make the losses of compromise and innovation worth sustaining (15)
- People often undermine themselves by taking pushback, criticism, and attack personally. Self-awareness and discipline are relevant to the task of generating for yourself the freedom to respond with a nondefensive defense when the attack is personal, and with an expanded set of options when it is not (16)
- Many leadership books are all about inspiration, but downplay the perspiration. (…) By making the lives of people around you better, leadership provides meaning in life. It creates purpose (21)
- If leadership were about giving people good news, the job would be easy (…) You place yourself on the line when you tell people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear (27)
- The hope of leadership lies in the capacity to deliver disturbing news and raise difficult questions in a way that people can absorb, prodding them to take up the message rather than ignore it or kill the messenger (27)
- The deeper the change and the greater the amount of new learning required, the more resistance there will be and, thus, the greater the danger to those who lead (30)
- We see so much more routine management than leadership in our society (...) In mobilizing adaptive work, you have to engage people in adjusting their unrealistic expectations, rather than try to satisfy them as if the situation were amenable primarily to a technical remedy (30)
- When you focus your energy primarily on the technical aspects of complex challenges, you do opt for short-term rewards (34)
- Raising questions that go to the core of people’s habits goes unrewarded, at least for a while (34)
- What makes a problem technical is not that it is trivial; but simply that its solution already lies within the organization’s repertoire (…) In contrast, adaptive pressures force the organization to change, lest it decline (35)
- Without the willingness to challenge people’s expectations of you, there is no way you can escape being dominated by the social system and its inherent limits. (36) Thus, leadership requires disturbing people (37)
- To act outside the narrow confines of your job description when progress requires it lies close to the heart of leadership, and to its danger (40)
- The toughest problems that groups and communities face are hard precisely because the group or community will not authorize anyone to push them to address those problems (40)
- The rules, organizational culture and norms, standard operating procedures, and economic incentives regularly discourage people from facing the hardest questions and making the most difficult choices (40)
- Habits are hard to give up because they give stability. They are predictable (44)
- When exercising leadership, you risk getting marginalized, diverted, attacked, or seduced (47)
- Marginalization often comes in more seductive forms. For example, it may come in the guise of telling you that you are special, sui generis (52)
- Personalization tends toward marginalization. Embodying an issue may be a necessary though risky strategy, particularly for people leading without authority (54)
- Embodying an issue in your authority role ties your survival, not just your success, to that of the issue (54)
- Attacks may take the form of misrepresentation (60)
- We don’t want to minimize how hard it is to keep your composure when people say awful things about you. It hurts. It does damage. Anyone who’s been there knows that pain. Exercising leadership often risks having to bear such scars (61)
- Often, the toughest part of your job is managing their disappointed expectations (63)
- Disappointing your own core supporters, your deepest allies on your issue, creates hardships for you and for them. Yet you make yourself vulnerable when you too strongly give in to the understandable desire to enjoy their continuing approval, rather than disappoint them (63)
- Leadership, then, requires not only reverence for the pains of change and recognition of the manifestations of danger, but also the skill to respond (66)
- We call this skill “getting off the dance floor and going to the balcony,” an image that captures the mental activity of stepping back in the midst of action and asking, “What’s really going on here? (68)
- The only way you can gain both a clearer view of reality and some perspective on the bigger picture is by distancing yourself from the fray (68)
- The goal is to come as close as you can to being in both places simultaneously, as if you had one eye looking from the dance floor and one eye looking down from the balcony, watching all the action, including your own (68)
- Moving from participant to observer and back again is a skill you can learn (69)
- Don’t jump to a familiar conclusion. Open yourself up to other possibilities (69)
- Most problems come bundled with both technical and adaptive aspects (73)
- Often, organizations will try to treat adaptive issues as technical ones in order to diffuse them (74)
- First, you know you’re dealing with something more than a technical issue when people’s hearts and minds need to change, and not just their preferences or routine behaviors (75)
- Cultures must distinguish what is essential from what is expendable as they struggle to move forward (75)
- Second, you can distinguish technical problems from
adaptive challenges by a process of exclusion. If you throw all the technical
fixes you can imagine at the problem and the problem persists, it’s a pretty
clear signal that an underlying adaptive challenge still needs to be addressed (76)
- Third, the persistence of conflict usually indicates
that people have not yet made the adjustments and accepted the losses that
accompany adaptive change (76)
- Observing from the balcony is the critical first step
in exercising—and safeguarding—leadership (79)
- Once you find out where people are coming from, you can connect with them and engage them in change. But hearing their stories is not the same as taking what they say at face value (80)
- Authority figures sit at the nodes of a social system
and are sensitive to any disturbances. They not only act as indicators of
social stability, but will act to restore equilibrium if change efforts go too
far (83)
- In times of adaptive stress, groups exert pressure on people in authority to solve the problems that seem to be causing it. Consequently, the behaviors of authority figures provide critical clues to the organization’s level of distress and its customary methods for restoring equilibrium (87)
- Leadership is an improvisational art. You may have an overarching vision, clear, orienting values, and even a strategic plan, but what you actually do from moment to moment cannot be scripted. To be effective, you must respond to what is happening (88)
- A plan is no more than today’s best guess. Tomorrow,
you discover the unanticipated effects of today’s actions and adjust to those
unexpected events (89)
- Sustaining your leadership requires first and foremost
the capacity to see what is happening to you and your initiative, as it is
happening. This takes discipline and flexibility, and it is hard to do (89)
- One of the distinguishing qualities of successful people who lead in any field is the emphasis they place on personal relationships (90)
- Finding real partners—people both inside and outside your organization who share the same goals—takes considerable time and energy. However, making the effort pays off (98)
- Able politicians know well, from hard experience, that
in everyday personal and professional life, the nature and quality of the
connections human beings have with each other is more important than almost any
other factor in determining results (90)
- Partners provide protection, and they create alliances for you with factions other than your own. They strengthen both you and your initiatives (93)
- With partners, you are not simply relying on the logical power of your arguments and evidence, you are building political power as well (93)
- The content of your ideas will improve if you take into account the validity of other viewpoints—especially if you can incorporate the views of those who differ markedly from you (93)
- Developing trust takes the time and the perseverance to move productively through conflicts. But without working together, your efforts incur greater risk (93)
- Even people with great authority and a powerful vision need partners when they are trying to bring about deep change in a community (96)
- Creating change requires you to move beyond your own
cohort, beyond your own constituents, your “true believers” (98)
- Too often we take the easy road, ignoring our opponents and concentrating on building an affirmative coalition (102)
- People who oppose what you are trying to accomplish are usually those with the most to lose by your success. In contrast, your allies have the least to lose (105)
- For opponents to turn around will cost them dearly in
terms of disloyalty to their own roots and constituency; for your allies to
come along may cost nothing. For that reason, your opponents deserve more of
your attention, as a matter of compassion, as well as a tactic of strategy and
survival (105)
- As you attend to your allies and opposition in advancing your issue, do not forget the uncommitted and wary people in the middle—the people you want to move (105)
- Remember that when you ask people to do adaptive work, you are asking a lot. You may be asking them to choose between two values, both of which are important to the way they understand themselves (108)
- When Lee Iacocca reduced his own salary to $1 during
Chrysler’s troubles, no one worried that Iacocca would go without dinner. But
the fact that he was willing to make a personal economic sacrifice helped
motivate employees to do likewise as part of the company’s turnaround plan (114)
- An adaptive change that is beneficial to the organization as a whole may clearly and tangibly hurt some of those who had benefited from the world being left behind (114)
- You need partners. Nobody is smart enough or fast enough to engage alone the political complexity of an organization or community when it is facing and reacting to adaptive pressures. (116)
- Differences in perspective are the engine of human progress (117)
- No one learns only by staring in the mirror. We all learn—and are sometimes transformed—by encountering differences that challenge our own experience and assumptions (117)
- The challenge of leadership when trying to generate
adaptive change is to work with differences, passions, and conflicts in a way
that diminishes their destructive potential and constructively harnesses their
energy (117)
- A holding environment is a space formed by a network of relationships that bond people together and enable them to tackle tough, sometimes divisive questions without flying apart (118)
- A holding environment is a place where there is enough cohesion to offset the centrifugal forces that arise when people do adaptive work (118)
- If you try to stimulate deep change within an organization, you have to control the temperature. There are really two tasks here. The first is to raise the heat enough that people sit up, pay attention, and deal with the real threats and challenges facing them. The second is to lower the temperature when necessary to reduce a counterproductive level of tension (124)
- Without stress, there is less stimulus for people to
tolerate difficult change (124)
- When people come to you to describe the stress you are
causing, it might be a sign that you have touched a nerve and are doing good
work (126)
- Lower the Temperature. Speak to people’s anger, fear,
and disorientation. Take action. Structure the problem-solving process—break
the problem into parts, and create time frames, decision rules, and clear role
assignments. Slow down the process. Pace and sequence the issues and who you
bring to the table. Be visible and present—shoulder responsibility and provide
confidence. Orient people—reconnect people to their shared values, and locate
them in an arc of change over time. Low-hanging fruit—make short-term gains by
prioritizing the technical aspects of the problem situation (127)
- Mental health professionals have said for a long time
that individuals cannot adapt well to too many life changes at once (135)
- Change sometimes involves loss, and people can sustain only so much loss at any one time (136)
- Pacing typically requires people in authority to let their ideas and programs seep out a little at a time, so they can be absorbed slowly enough to be tested and accepted (136)
- By answering, in every possible way, the “why” question, you increase people’s willingness to endure the hardships that come with the journey to a better place (137)
- You gain credibility and authority in your career by
demonstrating your capacity to take other people’s problems off their shoulders
and give them back solutions (139)
- By resisting attempts to personalize the issues, perhaps by fighting the urge to explain yourself, you can improve the odds of your survival. You prevent people from turning you into the issue, and you help keep the responsibility for the work where it ought to be (147)
- Generally, short and straightforward interventions are
more likely to be heard and to be accepted without causing dangerous resistance
(152)
- Four types of interventions constitute the tactics of leadership: making observations, asking questions, offering interpretations, and taking actions. In practice, they are often combined with one another (152)
- People by and large do not like to have their statements or actions interpreted (unless they like your assessment) (154)
- When you make an interpretation, you reveal that you
have spent some time on the balcony, and that makes people suspicious that you
are not “on the team” (154)
- The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the work back to the people who need to take responsibility (156)
- Place the work within and between the factions who are faced with the challenge, and tailor your interventions so they are unambiguous and have a context (156)
- Holding steady in the heat of action is an essential skill for staying alive and keeping people focused on the work.(156)
- In this sense, exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb (157)
- Again and again, you must train yourself to be deliberate and keep your cool when the world around you is boiling. Silence is a form of action (157)
- The challenge of exercising leadership often involves
taking intense heat from people whose support you value and need. Neither of
them could have accomplished their aims without the help of those they were
frustrating and disappointing (161)
- Receiving people’s anger without becoming personally defensive generates trust. If you can hold steady long enough, remaining respectful of their pains and defending your perspective without feeling you must defend yourself, you may find that in the ensuing calm, relationships become stronger (…) all gained extraordinary credibility and moral authority by receiving anger with grace (161)
- You probably have had a similar experience, raising an issue in a meeting and having it fall on deaf ears, only to see the same issue come up again later and dominate the conversation. Though the process may confuse you and generate dismay, notice the outcome: The issue became ripe (162)
- Sometimes you can get a better hearing by postponing
your issue to a later time (164)
- Sometimes, fortuitous events ripen an issue by heightening the severity of a problem. Used properly, a crisis can provide a teaching moment. (165)
- The lack of knowledge on an issue is almost always in direct proportion to its lack of ripeness. A crisis can change this quickly. (167)
- Because crises and tragedies generate the urgency to
tackle issues, sometimes the only way to bring focus to an issue and move it
forward is to create a crisis (167)
- It is crucial to get to the balcony repeatedly to regain perspective, to see how and why your passions are being stoked (179)
- Containing conflict and imposing order may create some of the conditions for progress, but they are not progress itself (183)
- The authority you gain is a product of social expectations (183)
- People grant you power because they expect you to provide them with a service. If you lose yourself in relishing the acclaim and power people give you, rather than on providing the services people will need to restore their adaptability, ultimately you jeopardize your own source of authority (183)
- In ancient Rome, the emperors had a man stand close to
them at all times whose job was to remind them of their mortality (184)
- Indeed, it’s in the nature of adaptive work to be on
the frontier of new and complex realities. If all were within your competence,
life would be a string of mere technical challenges (188)
- Mohandas Gandhi was quite open and explicit about his
prodigious efforts to control his sexual appetites. The same is likely to be
true among many businessmen. The struggle for that inner discipline is a
responsibility of leadership and authority (196)
- In making sexual demands, you not only violate a trust and destroy a productive working environment, but you also often sideline yourself and your issues. Even if you manage to keep your affairs secret, the workplace will never be the same (196)
- Power can be a potent aphrodisiac and source of
attraction for women just as it is for men (197)
- Ironically, it takes discipline to unplug, slow down, and create moments of transition every day. It takes deliberate care to restore ourselves so that our need for intimacy can be known and fulfilled (200)
- Indeed, no matter how perfect your upbringing and the “software” your parents, culture, and community may have given you, you need ongoing practices to compensate for your vulnerabilities. You need anchors (202)
- The roles we play in our organization, community, and private lives depend mainly on the expectations of people around us. The self relies on our capacity to witness and learn throughout our lives, to refine the core values that orient our decisions—whether or not they conform to expectations (202)
- Many people experience a rude awakening when they
leave high positions of authority. Former CEOs and politicians alike find that
their phone calls to important and busy people do not get through as easily,
their e-mails are not answered as quickly, their requests for favors and
special treatment from “friends” no longer get quick results. Such is the harsh
realization that the benefits they enjoyed in the past were at least as much a
function of the role they played, the position they held, as they were a
product of their character (202)
- Colleagues, subordinates, and bosses treat you as if the role you play is the essence of you, the real you (203)
- Confusing role with self is a trap (203)
- Do not underestimate the challenge of distinguishing role from self. When people attack you personally, the reflexive reaction is to take it personally (206)
- Being criticized by people you care about is almost always a part of exercising leadership (206)
- The key is to respond to the attack in a way that places the focus back where it should be, on the message and the issues (210)
- Your management of an attack, more than the substance of the accusation, determines your fate (210)
- A key aspect of what makes allies extremely helpful is precisely that they do have other loyalties (…) Sometimes however, we make the mistake of treating an ally like a confidant (215)
- Confidants have few, if any, conflicting loyalties (215)
- Confidants can do something that allies can’t do. They can provide you with a place where you can say everything that’s in your heart, everything that’s on your mind, without it being predigested or well packaged (215)
- You can reveal your emotions to them without worrying that it will affect your reputation or undermine your work. You do not have to manage information. You can speak spontaneously (216)
- Almost every person we know with difficult experiences of leadership has relied on a confidant to help them get through (216)
- When you need someone to talk to in difficult times,
it’s tempting to try to turn a trusted ally into a confidant as well. Not a
good idea (217)
- In our experience, when you try to turn allies into
confidants, you put them in a bind, place a valuable relationship at risk, and
usually end up losing on both counts. They fail you as a confidant, and they
begin to slip away even as reliable allies (220)
- A sanctuary is a place of reflection and renewal, where you can listen to yourself away from the dance floor and the blare of the music, where you can reaffirm your deeper sense of self and purpose (220)
- Having a readily available sanctuary provides an
indispensable physical anchor and source of sustenance (220)
- [A sanctuary] It’s different from the balcony, where you go to get a wider perspective on the dynamics of your leadership efforts (220)
- Too often, under stress and pressed for time, our sources of sanctuary are the first places we give up. We consider them a luxury. Just when you need it most, you cut out going to the gym or taking your daily walk through the neighborhood, just to grab a few more minutes at the office (221)
- We’re not peddling a particular type of sanctuary. It could be a jogging path or a friend’s kitchen table where you have tea. It could be a therapist’s office, a 12-step group, or a room in your house where you sit and meditate. It could be a park or a chapel on the route between home and workplace (221)
- Everyone seeking to exercise leadership needs sanctuaries. We all need anchors to keep us from being swept away by the distractions, the flood of information, the tensions and temptations (222)
- But we have not yet explored the root question: Why lead? If exercising leadership is this difficult, why bother? Why put yourself on the line? (223)
- The freedom to take risks and make meaningful progress comes in part from the realization that death is inevitable (223)
- The human enterprise is an experiment in love and community. As we learn to tolerate and then enjoy so much diversity, we strive to create communities in which more and more of our members can thrive together (223)
- Meaning cannot be measured (...) Yet we live immersed in a world of measurement so pervasive that even many of our religious institutions measure success, significantly, by market share (228)
- We even witness religious organizations distorting their mission to mean “reaching more people,” as if souls were a measurable commodity (228)
- Of course, measurement is a profoundly useful device, but it cannot tell us what makes life worth living (228)
- The challenge is to use measurement every day, knowing all the while that we cannot measure that which is of essential value (228)
- After all, there is powerful pressure in our culture to measure the fruits of our labors, and we feel enormous pride as we take on “greater” responsibility and gain “greater” authority, wealth, and prestige (229)
- Using measurement as a device is not the same as believing that measurement captures the essential value of anything. You cannot measure the good that you do (230)
- Measurement is an extraordinarily useful tool. We don’t mean to diminish its utility (232)
- Having bought into the myth of measurement, you cannot define new modes of loving and care, giving and mattering, unless they can be measured in the same terms as your previous work (239)
- Exercising leadership is a way of giving meaning to your life by contributing to the lives of others. At its best, leadership is a labor of love (239)
- The virtue of a sacred heart lies in the courage to maintain your innocence and wonder, your doubt and curiosity, and your compassion and love even through moments of despair (242)
- Leading with an open heart means you could be at your lowest point, abandoned by your people and entirely powerless, yet remain receptive to the full range of human emotions without going numb, striking back, or engaging in some other defense (242)
- A sacred heart allows you to feel, hear, and diagnose, even in the midst of your daily work, so that you can accurately gauge different situations and respond appropriately (242)
- A sacred heart means (…) that even in the midst of disappointment and defeat, you remain connected to people and to the sources of your most profound purposes. (244)
- Keeping a sacred heart is about protecting innocence, curiosity, and compassion as you pursue what is meaningful to you (245)
- Every day, even in a great university dedicated to learning, we see many colleagues more eager to show what they know than reveal what they do not (247)
- The fact that McNamara would write deeply thoughtful memoirs analyzing his errors of judgment should stand as an inspiration for anyone taking on the risks of leadership (248)
- To succeed in leading adaptive change, you will need to nurture the capacity to listen with open ears, and to embrace new and disturbing ideas (248)
- The practice of leadership requires the capacity to keep asking basic questions of yourself and of the people in your organization and community (249)
- Be together with someone’s pain. The prefix com- means “together with,” and the word passion has the same root as the word pain, as in the phrase “the passion of Jesus” (249)
- Like innocence and doubt, compassion is necessary for success and survival, but also for leading a whole life (250)
- Compassion enables you to pay attention to other people’s pain and loss even when it seems that you have no resources left (250)
Ronald Heifetz & Marty Linsky
Harvard Business School Press
Revised ed. 2017
252 pp.
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