• Democratic Institutions and Politics
• International Relations, Science and Security
• Markets and Methods
• Management and Leadership
• Social Policy

Ronald Heifetz on Leadership and Adaptability

In contemporary America, a traditionally respectful and idealistic view of people in positions of power is changing. High-profile scandals and abuses of power have undermined the public's perception of its leaders in both the political and business worlds, realigning the very ideal of leadership. What sort of behavior makes for effective leadership in today's world?

The work of Ronald Heifetz provides insight into this question. Heifetz is cofounder of the Center for Public Leadership and is the King Hussein bin Talal lecturer in public leadership at the Kennedy School of Government. His book 'Leadership Without Easy Answers' (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1994) is in its 13th printing. He coauthored the bestselling book 'Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading' with Marty Linsky (Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

Q: How has the role of leader changed in our modern world? What characteristics best serve today's strong and effective leaders?

Heifetz: Today's world has generated a level of interdependency that makes nearly all people at a local level feel less in control of their domains in their lives. That puts enormous pressure on people in high positions of authority to both prepare people for the adaptability they need in an interdependent world and at the same time regulate or manage the level of disturbance, uncertainty or disorder that people feel in their lives so that they don't move into a panic and regress into more primitive modes of functioning.

So the challenge of leadership today is to be able to stay calm in the midst of ambiguity, to maintain poise in the midst of uncertainty, to be able to keep people's eyes on the larger values that you hope will be enduring and for which it's worth suffering through changes and disorders, and responding with faith and creativity.

Q: In a technological society that is remarkable for the ever-increasing rate of change in all aspects of life, what is the leader's relationship to a rapidly changing reality? How does a leader help followers to adapt?

Heifetz: In a sense, the challenge for today's leaders is to develop an adaptive capacity in our local societies that makes people capable of succeeding in a highly interdependent world in which there is no single person in control of the enterprise.

Adaptation is a metaphor taken out of biology. In a sense, a successful adaptation takes the best DNA of your past and preserves it, holds on to it. It also sifts through what DNA to discard. It generates experimentation in which innovations can be married to the DNA of your past so that you can carry the best of your history into the future.

In that sense leadership is conservative and not just about change or progress. It's progressive to the extent that you can both hold on to what is precious and essential from the past and discard what's no longer serviceable. Today's technological world enables us to inform people of the kinds of realities they have to wrestle and contend with, realities that force us to sift through what we can keep from our past and what we have to leave behind. These realities then challenges us to innovate, not only in a technological sense, but in our ways of organizing, working across boundaries, defining our spheres of care, and ways of thinking.

Q: You describe leaders with formal authority and those with informal authority, such as grass roots leaders. What is the difference in the skills and approach each needs to lead effectively? Is there a different role for grass roots leaders in a time of crisis in formal authority?

Heifetz: When we investigate the adaptability of organizations or the adaptability of societies, we find that there is a critical role for people in high positions of authority in serving as the containing vessel, particularly in times of crisis or distress, to keep people productive rather than panicking. On the other hand, we also see that the adaptability of organizations and societies is enormously increased if we have a disseminated leadership. That is, leadership bubbling up from many different places, high, low and in the middle within organizations or within our communities.

If we rely only on people in high positions of authority to get it right, then we become enormously dependent on the particular genius or competence of that individual, and that makes us vulnerable. Whereas, if we begin to distinguish leadership from authority, we begin to see that in fact there are people exercising leadership all over our communities every day.

For example, right now we're honoring Rosa Parks, who died recently at the age of 92. Back in 1955, she decided not to move her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama. That was an act of local leadership. Now, she didn't do it as a whimsical initiative, she was actually part of an organizational network in that community through the NAACP - her husband was the local chairman - and there was already a group of clergy and people in the community who were actively involved and looking for ways to promote civil rights and bring it to the public's attention. But that issue never would have moved forward had it not been for the local leadership, the grassroots leadership, people leading from many places, without waiting for authorization, without waiting for appointment or election.

The adaptability of our communities requires a disseminated leadership because this enables us to have a disseminated intelligence, and in a sense that's what we learn also from biological adaptation. Biological adaptations occur through a disseminated intelligence in which sexual reproduction generates great diversity in the gene pool increasing the odds that as the environment changes, there will be some capacity in the diverse population that will enable a species to thrive into the future and to make it in a new environment. In contrast, a cloning model gives you perfect and plentiful replicas, but with a much slower rate of experimentation. This actually works very well except when the ecosystem or environment changes, generating a crisis. Then you either have the right stuff or you don't have the right stuff, in a binary way, and therefore the all-too-uniform becomes enormously vulnerable to changes in the environment.

Adaptability enables an organization to have an increased likelihood that somebody's going to have the keys to the future. An example of that in business is the chemist who invented Post It Notes for 3M. As you may know, he was trying to invent a strong glue, and ended up, by mistake, generating this weak glue. He began to play with it and experiment with it for his own purposes at his own desk and low and behold, invented a product which now is one of the leading profit centers for that large, multi-national company.

It's the disseminated intelligence that enables the adaptability of an organization or a society, and that's why we depend on grassroots leadership. That is indeed one key aspect of the secret of democratic success.

Q: What are the unique challenges for leaders in a globalized society?

Heifetz: Global leadership is a leadership that can manage a huge degree of systemic complexity, and that somehow in that systemic complexity can still engage processes with people that can sift through and glean what's most precious and most essential. What are the orienting values that we want to sustain and hold dear and maintain into the future? A global leader then has to be able to speak to those overarching values in the way that Jean Monnet spoke to overarching values in being able to create a vision of a European Union, which, to my mind is perhaps the most exciting experiment going on in today's world of governance: building a central governance structure that enables an architecture for diversity at the international level in the same way that the United States, at the national level, generated an architecture for diversity in creating a federal system with state and local governments.

If we look into the heart and mind of Jean Monnet, we see somebody coming out of World War II with the deepest sense of the wasteful pain and costs of a world gone awry when it loses its overarching sense of interconnectedness and when it loses its sense of the values of inclusion and humanity. These values, though they represent themselves in local ways, in a myriad of different languages, nevertheless have a common trunk and a common root.

That capacity to anchor a diverse set of constituencies to a strong, common root then enables you to have many branches that can sway in the breeze and move, depending on the strength of the wind and the season of the year, without toppling over and without becoming uprooted.