LEADERSHIP WITHOUT EASY ANSWERS

Dr. Ronald A. Heifetz

Leadership Kentucky
Drawbridge Inn, Fort Mitchell, Kentucky
November 14, 1997

Dr. Ronald A. Heifetz directs the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The author of Leadership Without Easy Answers (1994) Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, Dr. Heifetz addressed the 1997 class of Leadership Kentucky summarizing and punctuating his book's content and premise.

While he addressed the Leadership Kentucky class, graphic (mural) artist Sherrin Bennett of Interactive Associates, Point Richmond, California, depicted Dr. Heifetz's presentation and ideas in three charts. Those charts are interspersed into this summary in ¹/₃ (approximate) scale. You can click on any of those images and see the respective chart full scale.

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In this country we ascribe the myth of the love warrior to our ideal of leadership. But in fact, to be a leader you must have partners!

 The concepts I present in my book come out of listening to stories over fifteen years. After being educated as a physician, I studied music at the Julliard Conservatory of Music. While at Julliard, I supported myself as a physician at Riker's Island Prison. It was a startling, disturbing experience. The patterns of social illness I saw there were striking and undeniable-they all experienced poverty, injustice, prejudice, and so forth. I "burned out" in six months, but I came away wanting to address larger social issues.

 Then I took a job at a clinic for CEOs in a Manhattan skyscraper. Most of the CEOs I examined were stressed out and living unhealthily-family- and health-wise. I listened to the stories of those CEOs. Afterward, I studied psychiatry.

 Then I came to the Kennedy School. The typical students there have thirty to forty years working experience. They have many "scars" by which to examine their own leadership failures.

 I've listened and distilled "leadership" from these varied sources and others. I've concluded that leadership is more than personality and skills. One may "lead" one place and not another because different environments call out different skills. Many of the leaders I've interviewed fail, for example, at family leadership.

 My distillations of these stories:

There is confusion between leadership and authority.

We know intuitively these are not the same. We know many times "authority" does not exercise leadership-although many times, too, those in authority do exercise it. Many exercise leadership without authority-even without credibility or a following...or when no one wants to pay them attention. And "attention is the currency of leadership."

 We are not unlike the higher forms of animals. Animals of some species live their lives alone-with their own kind of problems, but many are inherently social. We are social beings; that's how God and evolution designed us, as social creatures. There are also problems and challenges with that.

 Chimps and gorillas have 97% of our genes. Chimps live in large groups (around 100 or more) with subgroups, some dominated by females, some by males. The alpha female/male is "role related," not gender related. Their "dominance hierarchy" is related to our equivalent.

 Among the smaller gorilla bands Silverback gorillas dominate. What makes him dominant is his age-he's older, wiser, experienced. But if he does not perform, the band leaves him. When he decides to lead, the band follows. Every day he must "find the berries"-the food and water the band requires. So this illustrates that the first critical social function is direction.

 If leopards threaten to attack the gorilla band and the danger is spotted by some member of the band and an alert is given, all members look to the Silverback who decides the appropriate response from a number of options-clustering, posturing, etc. This illustrates, then, that the second critical social function is protection.

 Animals also must maintain order-the third central social function. Gorillas employ three mechanisms in the way they order themselves in their protection grouping/groups. Silverbacks orient (order) the band's members in some order, usually himself in the center, females and babies nearby, and others-usually the teen males, "the traditional cannon fodder-in the outer circle. We, too, spend a lot of time orienting ourselves. And when changes occur, people will get disoriented. People care a lot as to where they are situated in the structure." Control of conflict gets high priority attention. Among gorillas, individuals turn to the Silverback. He doesn't care about facts; he just wants to restore order.

 Norms and culture are modeled, established, and enforced by some dominant authority.

 Most problems (60-70%) are routine, technical problems where experience tells you what to do. When you face something you don't know about, though, you still do what you know to do. So when an "adaptive challenge" must be faced, sometimes they go extinct-that is, the challenge they face goes beyond their adaptive capacity. They can't learn fast enough, so they die-both as a community and as individuals.

 The tendency in these social groups is to keep looking to authority to know the way to master the adaptive challenge. So what do authority figures do in these situations? Why, they come up with an "answer." A guess. A fake. (It doesn't immediately matter.) This is why we see a "failure of leadership" by persons of authority. Their error? They treat adaptive challenges as technical problems.

 Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the community of New London, Connecticut, faced such a challenge. New London is the home of Electric Boat which builds nuclear submarines. It's the city's critical industry. But the Cold War is now over. Now what? Well, the Congressman elected from that area is a former anti-war activist named Sam. He tried to reassure the people of New London against the threat they faced. He championed their cause-the continued building of submarines, promising to protect them against the end-of-the-Cold-War "threat" they faced. And Sam the former anti-war activist did go all out to try to retain New London's critical industry. This is what authority figures are authorized to do-to protect, not challenge; to give answers, not uncertainties or new directions.

President George Bush delivered a major Presidential in 1989 on drug abuse. It was his chance to show his leadership, that he was not, as he had been labeled, a "wimp." So President Bush laid out his $96 billion program; he presents America's new "Drug Czar," William Bennett, "a real Silverback kind of a guy."  Bush's approval ratings went up following his address-a safe, reassuring kind of presentation, as he was advised by many of his inner circle to deliver. Other advisors, though, wanted him to challenge people-for them to win the war on drugs. He might "reassure" the people that the government can help, but ultimately it's your work (the people's) to do so. In effect to say, "I wish I could take this problem off your shoulders, but I can't, so good luck."

 What we consider to be leadership is not to push the work back on the people but to provide solutions.

 Leaders must "pace the challenge" according to the people's ability to bear it. We don't vote leadership, but protection. So how can you lead and still "stay alive?" "Before we can get inspiring we must also get sober." We must be prepared when they want answers rather than questions. The following chart depicts the problem.

Modern society has transformed many adaptive problems-like life-saving-into technical problems handled by fire, health, crime-fighting agencies. True adaptive problems take time to solve. How do you keep them in a "productive range of sustained stress" over time? That's the leaders' challenge. So often people do "work avoidance"-usually something that mimics a solution to a technical problem.

Among the Work Avoidance Mechanisms that might be employed are:

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Conflict is about passionate differences. There's nothing evil about conflict. Without it there's no new ideas or learning. But often, the conflicts are never engaged productively. I liken it to cooking in a pressure cooker. You can blow a pressure cooker up. I did it during my residency. We know things can get unproductive, unhappy, so we tend to "turn the heat down."