"Leadership Without Easy Answers"

Ron Heifetz on the jungle of contemporary leadership

by Michael Finley

In which we learn that established "leaders," despite the silver streak going down their backs,
are less likely to point the way to a new way of working than to keep pushing buttons that no
longer work.

Ron Heifetz began his March 4 discussion of leadership in the customary place, the lush forests
and highlands of central Africa. He described the communal lifestyle of the highland gorillas that
live in the tall grasses and trees. The gorillas live in bands of 15 or 20 individuals, always with a
dominant male called a silverback because of the color of his hair. The silverback is silver
because he's older, and he's more experienced than the others in the band. The silverback is a
living example of traditional leadership -- in charge because he's been around and knows the
score.

He knows, for openers, where the berries are, and berries are the highland gorillas' business.
In the morning when the gorillas wake up, they all turn to the silverback for direction. Eventually
he too wakes up, thumps his chest, and they all follow him to the desired berry-picking site.
The silverback performs five basic tasks of leadership:

He provides direction, by helping the band find berries.

He protects the group he leads. If a leopard is in the vicinity, the leader either gathers
the band around him, so that no stray gorilla can be picked off, or he leads them in
bellowing and waving at the leopard until it slinks away.

He orients the group. There is an order to the way gorillas move, with the silverback
first, followed by nursing mothers, then older kids and males and females. Bringing
up the rear is another adult male. When it is time to rest, the band waits till the
silverback makes his nest, then they locate themselves in relation to him.

He mediates conflict. Disagreements break out even among these peaceable

creatures. The silverback reminds them that group integrity is more important than
individual issues.

He models and maintains norms of behavior. Gorillas aren't born knowing how to be
gorillas. The silverback is the shaper of group behavior.

You know what comes next, of course. We examine the skill set of the highland gorilla
silverback, and see that it is remarkably similar to the skills we expect human leaders to have. In
organizations, leaders are expected to do the same things: lead, protect, orient, mediate, set an
example, and police the ranks.

Do those things as capably and as dutifully as the gorilla, and you are some kind of leader,
right?
Up to a point, maybe. The problem is that these skills, though important to everyday survival,
are only applicable to certain kinds of situations -- the technical work that bands of gorillas and
bands of people are expected to be able to cope with in a closed system.

There is another kind of work, which Heifetz calls adaptive work, that arises from outside the
system, and that requires a dimension of leadership neither gorilla bands nor most human
bands can provide.

Technical work versus adaptive work

Technical work is problem-solving. Finding berries and breaking up fights is technical work.
Once you know how to do it, you simply repeat the process. Adaptive work, by contrast, is an
open-ended challenge. It creates a new environment in which you cannot survive by relying on
the wisdom of the old environment.

When poachers intervene in the closed gorilla universe and open fire on the band with
automatic weapons, they pose a challenge that cannot be effectively addressed using traditional
gorilla knowledge. Clustering only makes them easier targets. Chest-thumping has no effect at
all. The silverback, so useful for everyday leadership, is useless in the face of a challenge
requiring innovation. So the gorillas die, just as so many species, societies, faiths, and
organizations die.

Bad leadership applies technical work skills to adaptive work challenges.

As a trained physician, Heifetz used the analogy of doctoring. In a typical doctor's office, about
60 percent of all problems are easily identified and solved. A cut needs to be stitched, a baby
birthed, an operation scheduled, a pill prescribed. The proper actions are taken, the patient
goes home happy, the doctor feels smart.

Then there's the other 40 percent: problems whose descriptions don't pair up against anything
the doctor learned in differential diagnosis; ailments that don't clear up no matter what medicine
is prescribed; problems the doctor can't even define, much less fix. Or problems the doctor can
define, but can't enlist the patient's help in treating.

Say a hard-charging male executive is experiencing chest pain. Tests show he is experiencing
95 percent blockage of a major coronary artery. There's a lot medicine can do for this man,
Heifetz said, but a lot it can't do, either. Doctors can perform a bypass or angioplasty. But only
the patient can make the changes that will ensure long-term survival -- eating right, quitting
smoking, working less, learning to breathe, smelling the roses.

Those changes -- these adaptive tasks -- are real change, and they come at the individual
almost from another universe. And as we know, they are very difficult to effect.

The silverback in you -- wisdom as already-learned experience -- may not be able to make the
crossing to the new life. So you must generate new capacities to survive in the ecosystem in
which you find yourself. You must learn all over again.

Hail to the Silverback

Heifetz compared President Bush to the forlorn gorilla leader when Bush, a known free
marketer, traveled to Japan in 1989 with the heads of the Big 3 car companies in tow. The
mission was not to expand free trade but to appeal to the Japanese for protection for U.S. car
companies. Bush was in an impossible position, advocating something he was on record as
being against. Perhaps it was this ideological disconnect that led to a fevered Bush hurling in
the arms of Japan's prime minister.

The "leadership speech"

Heifetz told a scorching tale of the limits of authority. In 1989, newly elected president and
hoping to put his "wimp" image behind him, George Bush decided to take on a hot issue and bat
it into the upper bleachers. He wound up giving a speech to the American public that did just
that. He vowed total war against drug-runners, added $9 billion to federal anti-drug budgets,
threw in some prevention and education funding, and appointed a respected official, Bill
Bennett, to be America's "drug czar."

The speech was a success, in the sense that Bush's approval rating rose afterwards. But,
Heifetz said, the speech was the wrong speech. None of the interventions Bush promised had
any chance at changing the realities of drugs in American life. It was a "leadership speech" in
form alone, because instead of plotting a course that would change the way Americans deal
with drugs, he plotted a safe, popular, "tough-sounding" course of action.

The real anti-drug speech would have been very different, and would have reaped contention
instead of applause. He would have said that there are many problems a president can solve,
but drugs isn't one of them. The drug problem derives less from what happens in smuggling
planes flying into our airspace under radar than from how we live together in our neighborhoods
and how we raise our children.

Teachers and clergy can do more than they are doing to assess and head off drug problems in
their students. If the Chinese could eliminate mice through community action, surely we can put
a halt to drug use among our children. But it's your work to do, Bush would have concluded, not
mine as president.

Now that would be a leadership speech, Heifetz said. Even Bill Bennett would have liked it
better; he wound up quitting in frustration after a year of drug czar duty.

But what White House aide would recommend it, knowing it would cost the president approval
points? Though it was a speech of profound leadership (pointing a pathway through change), it
would not sound like leadership, as people in a consumer democracy prefer it (put the bad guys
in jail and let me sip my martini in peace).

Bush was guilty of the classic error in leadership: treating an adaptive challenge as a technical
problem.

The authority problem

Mere authority is never enough to effect change. When patients hear news they don't like, they
often fire the doctor and seek out another's counsel. Eventually they will find a doctor who will
tell them what they want to hear. But this is the antithesis of leadership -- it is a cave-in to the
worst tendencies of the follower.
Heifetz likened the task of leadership to cooking stew in a pressure cooker. The goal is a rich
medley whose carrots, parsnips, lentils, and beets all retain their distinctive flavor while gently
contributing to the flavors they rub up against. The challenge is not to turn it into mush, or
worse, to blow the top off the pot by overheating.

In a democracy, leadership of the profound kind is nearly a structural impossibility. No sooner

does a leader take a stand contrary to the electorate's entrenched interests than they unelect
him or her. The deeper the distress caused by the change, the more alarming the situation
followers find themselves in, the more dependent they get on authorities to save them, relieve
the pressure, do something to patch over the problem so people don't have to think about it -- or
worse, change.

The most powerful thing a leader can say in the face of adaptive challenges is "I don't know."
But the higher a leader is on the chain of authority, the greater the reluctance to make this
simple admission. "You're the president. It's your job to know. If you don't show us where the
berries are, we'll get someone who will." And election after election, that's exactly what we do --
change horses instead of highways.

Heifetz used an example from his own backyard in New London, Connecticut. Post-Cold War
downsizing enabled budget cutters to put Electric Boat, a local 15,000-employee defense
contractor, on the chopping block. But the district's congressman, despite a personal history of
being antiwar, despite the utter lack of need for nuclear submarines, and despite the obvious
waste of billions of dollars that could have gone to education and infrastructure, was unwilling to
cause his 15,000 constituents that much pain. That congressman is a hero in his district, but did
he do something good for his country, or even good for his constituents, in the longer term?

The congressman looked for a brief moment like a leader, but what exercised authority, not
leadership. What leadership looks like, Heifetz said, is often the opposite of real leadership.
Real leaders inflict more pain than they rescue people from.

Authority packs a powerful paradox: It is easier to lead with authority, in the sense that people
must pay attention to you because of your position. Unfortunately, being in authority makes you
part of the establishment, which makes you an improbable leader of adaptive challenges.

The politics of leadership

Heifetz showed us a graphic illustrating the difficulty of pushing change past the competing
interests of factions within an organization.

At the center is a big dot. That's the change challenge. Around it are the leadership of five
members, each one occupying the nose cone of a silo extending beyond the current frame. In
those silos are the people each "leader" is accountable to. If the leader agrees to a change the
group behind her doesn't like, they will pull the leash on her like nobody's business, so that she
reneges on her commitments, or simply get rid of her and install a "leader" who will do as she is
told.

It is possible for the leader to return to her constituent silo and make the case for change in a
way that doesn't get her thrashed or bounced. It involves the careful manipulation of disorder --
giving people just enough adaptive work to do that they are engaged, but not so much that they
are overwhelmed.
Using the pressure cooker analogy, you use the pressure cooker to work it magic with flavors,
but you watch it carefully to avoid overcooking, or worse, explosion.

Signs that people are not seizing the adaptive gauntlet

Every organization has its favorite defense mechanisms, Heifetz said. Which of the following
sound familiar to you?

Denial. People unwilling to admit they are in need of changing eliminate any possibility of it.

Diversion. Like a fleeing party hurling garbage in the pursuer's wake, change-averse people
will use any distraction they can to keep change at bay.

Blaming. A kind of diversion, the finger-pointing game is compelling, and it helps prevent
progress on needed change. Some countries have revolutions every 20 years -- never
addressing the true dilemmas of those societies. Our society uses elections this way, focusing
less on solutions than on rotating figureheads in and out of favor.

Holding onto the past. Organizations try to hang onto the "sweet spot in time" -- the good old
days when life was good and change was unnecessary.

Phony solutions. Blue-ribbon panels of inquiry, constitutional amendments, obsession with

structure -- anything to forestall the disequilibrium change entails.
Sterile conflict. Another distraction, in which people substitute the sting of battle for the pain of
adaptation. Think of the endless wars in Yugoslavia and Lebanon, or between labor and
management.

Masters of disequilibrium

So do we despair of achieving leadership in a democratic structure? No, but we approach the

challenge delicately. Dumping adaptive challenges on a constituency, clapping the dust from
your hands, and walking away won't do.

Adaptive work, Heifetz said, is like a car engine -- in order for it to work, it must generate heat,
or stress. The true leader, as opposed to the silverback leader, is a master of disciplined
attention: how to keep one eye on the temperature gauge while steering the organization with
the other.

Heifetz provided two examples 2,000 years apart. The first involved the destruction of
Jerusalem in 69 AD and the subsequent dispersion of Jews into Asia, Africa, and Europe. There
is no way to describe reestablishing community following near total destruction as "technical
work." For over 1,000 years Jews had lived in one place, under a common law. Now they had to
start over again. What could they take with them in their new exodus across the earth?

A couple of Pharisaic teachers, Johanan ben Zakkai and Gamaliel of Jabneh, sought
permission from the Romans to open a school at Jabneh near modern-day Tel Aviv. At this
school, for several decades, rabbis discussed what was to become of Jews without a country to
call their own.
They decided that the temple as such could no longer exist, and that the people would now
build a virtual temple in each family, out of love for God and the Law. The priesthood was
shelved for the rest of history, and taking its place was the rabbinate, a class of teachers with no
institutional authority, but a higher authority, begotten of scholarship and wisdom. And they took
their libraries of literature and compressed the best, most important works into one book --
which became Torah.

The adaptive work of the school at Jabneh performed one of the most astonishing and
successful feats of adaptive work on record anywhere: the creation of a portable society, one
that could be loaded up and moved whenever any land turned inhospitable.

In one sense, the framers of this new society had an advantage over today's leaders -- the
destruction of Jerusalem had gotten every Jewish person's undivided attention. Few lived in
denial that change was necessary, as is common where we work today.

The more recent example, with many points in common, was the struggle for civil rights by
African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King had the unenviable task of
moving an entire nation out of denial and through a painful bath of awareness.

His approach typified the "managing disequilibrium" approach that Heifetz described: stimulating
people to a level of distress high enough to be unignorable, but not so high as to cause
backlash or overload.

Consummate shapers of opinion, King and his group studied protest opportunities carefully,
looking for those situations with the most potential to rub America's face in the ugliness of its
own racism. Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, Danville, Selma, and the March on Washington
were timed not just to galvanize blacks and the federal government, but also to bring public
opinion to a simmer, and then to a boil.

Too much distress and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson might not have maintained their
tentative support for the cause; too little and the millions of middle-class citizens annoyed by the
intrusion into their lives might have stopped paying attention.

TECHNICAL (Silverback Leadership)

vs
ADAPTIVE (True Leadership)

DIRECTION
Where are the berries?
vs
What do we do when there are no berries, or when we come under attack from a new
adversary?
PROTECTION
Circle the wagons, stick head in sand, call out the National Guard.
vs
Create a new approach to defending the constituency, through a new understanding of its
nature.
 ROLE ORIENTATION
Hierarchy of most valuable and most powerful current members.
vs
Define importance of all constituents, and the band's role in the larger community.
CONTROLLING CONFLICT
End fights that threaten group social order.
vs
Elicit diversity of views in order to strengthen group.
NORM MAINTENANCE
Punish violators of social norms.
vs
Set personal example and seek to broaden social norms to include useful alternatives.

Staying alive

Heifetz concluded with a series of prescriptions for leaders of adaptive change. Falling back on
the image of the pressure cooker: the organization is not the only thing that must be kept within
parameters of acceptable distress; so must you. These tips will help you retain perspective
despite the upheavals you are leading.

· Get on the balcony. People get blindsided in the change business because they are so
attuned to what is happening on one front, they don't see the forces gathering on the other front.
Heifetz compared the perspective problem to a dance hall. In the thick of the action it is
impossible to see the overall patterns. But wander up to the balcony and look down: there is the
system you are fighting to improve, laid out before you. You see all the problems, not just the
one that most engages you. In sports it is an invaluable skill to be able to see the whole game
while you are playing it: Magic Johnson, Bobby Orr, and Joe Montana are credited with the skill
of detached understanding in the midst of the action. You be that way, too.

· Use partners. You can't get up on the balcony yourself. One of the least useful mythic roles is
that of the lone warrior, fighting like Digit in Dian Fossey's story (page 2) to save an organization
single-handed. It is a recipe not just for burnout, but also for betrayal. You need help, and help
comes in two forms. The first is alliances, people you know you can work with at least some of
the time because your interests and theirs coincide. They won't always be on your side, but they
will be there when it counts. The second is confidants, people who are truly on your side, people
to whom you can cry out your innermost fears and frustrations. Allies link change to key
constituencies; confidants serve as a sounding board and a shoulder to cry on.

· Distinguish your role from yourself. Leaders who interchange their persons with the
changes they are moving through are asking for it, and they will get it. These are the people
who take resistance and compromise personally, who become workaholics because there is no
daylight between the task and the person.

· Externalize the conflict. Unwittingly, leaders who overidentify with their challenges play into
the hands of their enemies, for what easier way is there to discredit an idea than by attacking
the person proposing it? Lyndon Johnson's great mistake with Vietnam was obsessing about it,
making it "his" -- and then, when his luck ran out, insisting the war was never his. His opponents
committed the same mistake: when he retired from politics in 1968, people expected "his" war
would automatically end.
· Listen. Leadership is not barking orders. More often it is a matter of shutting up and paying
attention to what others are saying. Heifetz suggested the possibility of using your own
reactions as a barometer of the environment. Instead of reacting angrily or fearfully to a
statement or condition, acknowledge your anger or fear -- and use that new knowledge to
understand it and address it. Instant action is overrated; Heifetz cited the good judgment of Jack
Kennedy in not ordering air strikes on Cuba the moment he learned missiles there were aimed
the United States. Turns out, those missiles were armed with thermonuclear weapons.

· Manage your hungers. Leaders in large organizations easily get out of kilter in their own
habits. We become enthralled by feeling important, we enjoy wielding power, we are seduced
by our newfound attractiveness to others, and we forget we still have basic needs for intimacy
and comfort. Men get oversexed; women, Heifetz suggested, tend to go the other way,
suppressing their femininity because it implies weakness. All these hungers, left to themselves,
can destroy us. He urged leaders to come to terms with our needs now -- get a dog, take lots of
showers, learn to love our wives -- before the bad habits grow into grandiosity, abusiveness, or
the destruction of our selves.

· Maintain a sanctuary. We must have some part of ourselves that is not on the auction block,
that we return to for refreshment and restoration. Religion is an obvious sanctuary, but it could
as easily be a place to visit, or an activity that you especially prize: making music, cabinetry, or
tying flies.

· Finally, preserve a sense of purpose. Having a sense of purpose is not the same as having
a particular purpose, like being a great parent or a fair employer. A sense of purpose is the
capacity to generate specific visions and goals. One's particular purposes change in life, but the
possibility of purpose, in all its vague glory, is either there or it isn't. One day the poachers may
come, and you will have to decide whether to fight or to flee. Let your decision arise from the
totality of your nature and wisdom. It is bigger than "business" can explain.

Sidebar #2

"The Wild Man of Como Zoo"

Your challenge might be adaptive if . . .

If you've tried every trick you know and nothing works, you just might have an
adaptive challenge.

If the problem arises inside you, in your behavior, and not in some external switch
that can be flipped, chances are your challenge is adaptive in nature.

If your conflict occurs at the level of values or basic strategy, it just may be that yours
is a challenge of an adaptive nature.

One of the least useful mythic roles is that of the lone warrior, fighting to save an
organization single-handed. It is a recipe not just for burnout, but also for betrayal.