• Embed Doc
  • Copy Link
  • Readcast
  • Collections
  • CommentGo Back
Download
 
Leaders do not need to know all the answers.They do need to ask the right questions.
The Work of Leadership
by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie
To stay alive, Jaek Pritehard had to change hislife. Triple bypass surgery and medication couldhelp, the heart surgeon told him, but no tt^chnicalfix could release Pritehard from his own respon-sibility for changing the habits of a lifetime. Hehad to stop smoking, improve his diet, get someexercise, and take time to relax, remembering tobreathe more deeply each day. Pritchard's doctorcould provide sustaining technical expertise andtake supportive action, but orily^Pritchard could^3apt bis ingrained habits to improve his]ong-termhealth. The doctor faceci the leadership task of mo-bilizing he patient to make critical behavjoralchanges; Jack Pritehard faced the adaptive workjsLfiguring out which spccihc changes to make andhow to inciMpiir;itL' tlicm into his daily lifeCompanies today face challenges similar to theones confronting Pritehard and his doctor. Th.eyface
adaptive challenges.
Changes in societies,markets, customers, competition, and technologyaround the globe are forcing organizations to clar-ify their values, develop new strategies, and learnnew ways of operating. Often the toughest task forleaders in effecting change is mobilizing peoplethroughout the organization to do adaptive work.Adaptive work is required when our deeply heldbeliefs are challenged, when the values that madeus successful become less relevant, and when legit-imate yet competing perspectives emerge. We seeadaptive challenges every day at every level of theworkplace-when companies restructure or reengi-neer, develop or implement strategy, or merge busi-nesses. We see adaptive challenges when marketinghas difficulty working with operations, when cross-functional teams don't work well, or when seniorexecutives complain, "We don't seem to be able toexecute effectively." Adaptive problems are oftensystemic problems with no ready answers.Mobilizing an organization to adapt its behaviorsin order to thrive in new business environments iscritical. Without such change, any company todaywould falter. Indeed, getting people to do adaptivework is the mark of leadership in a competitiveworld. Yet for most senior executives, providingleadership and not just authoritative expertise isextremely difficult. Why- We see two reasons.First, in order to make change happen, executiveshave to break a long-standing behavior pattern oftheir own: providing leadership in the form of solu-tions. This tendency is quite natural because manyexecutives reach their positions of authority byvirtue of their competence in taking responsibilityand solving problems. But the locus of responsibili-ty for problem solving when a company faces anadaptive challenge must shift to its people. Solu-tions to adaptive challenges reside not in tbe execu-tive suite but in the collective intelligence of em-ployees at all levels, who need to use one another asresources, often across boundaries, and learn tbeirway to those solutions.Second, adaptive change is distressing for thepeople going through it. They need to take on newroles,new relationships, new values, new behav-iors,and new approaches to work. Many employeesare ambivalent about the efforts and sacrifices re-quired of them. They often look to the senior exec-utive to take problems off their shoulders. But
Ronald A. Heifetz is the director of the Leadership Edu-cation Project at Harvard University's John
F.
KennedySchool of Government in Cambridge, Massachusetts.Donald L. Laurie is managing director of Laurie Inter-national Limited, a management consulting firm inBoston, Massachusetts, that focuses on leadership andstrategic change. This article is based in part on Heifetz's
Leadership Without Easy Answers
(Belknap
Press
of Har-vard University Press, 1994).
124
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW January-February 1997
 
those expectations have to be unlearned. Ratherthan fulfilling the expectation that they will pro-vide answers, leaders have to ask tough questions.Rather than protecting people from outside threats,leaders should allow them to feel the pinch of real-ity in order to stimulate them to adapt. Instead oforienting people to their current roles, leaders mustdisorient them so that new relationships can de-
velop.
Instead of quelling eonfliet, leaders have todraw the issues out. Instead of maintaining norms,leaders have to challenge "the way we do business"and help others distinguish immutable values fromhistorical practices that must go.Drawing on our experience with managers fromaround the world, we offer six principles for leadingadaptive work; "getting on the balcony," identify-ing the adaptive challenge, regulating distress,maintaining disciplined attention, giving the workback to people, and protecting voices of leadershipfrom below. We illustrate those prineiples with anexample of adaptive change at KPMG Netherlands,a professional-services firm.
Get on the Balcony
Earvin "Magie" Johnson's greatness in leadinghis hasketball team came in part from his ability toplay hard while keeping the whole game situationin mind, as if he stood in a press box or on a balconyabove the field of play. Bobby Orr played hockey inthe same way. Other players might fail to reeognizethe larger patterns of play that performers likeJohnson and Orr quickly understand, beeause theyare so engaged in the game that they get carriedaway by it. Their attention is captured by the rapidmotion, the physical contact, the roar of the erowd,and the pressure to exeeute. In sports, most playerssimply may not see who is open for a pass, who ismissing a block, or how the offense and defensework together. Players like Johnson and Orr watchthese things and allow their observations to guidetheir aetions.Business leaders have to be able to view patternsas if they were on a balcony. It does them no goodto be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have tosee a context for ehange or ereate one. Tbey shouldgive employees a strong sense of the history of theenterprise and what's good about its past, as well asan idea of the market forces at work today and theresponsibility people must take in shaping the fu-
ture.
Leaders must be able to identify struggles overvalues and power, recognize patterns of work avoid-
ance,
and watch for the many other functional anddysfunctional reactions to change.Without the capacity to move back and forth be-tween the field of action and the balcony, to reflect
Business leaders need to get on the balcony if they want to see all the patterns.
DRAWINGS BY MICHAEL KLEIN
125
 
THE WORK OF LEADERSHIP
day to day, moment to moment, on the many waysin which an organization's habits can sabotageadaptive work, a leader easily and unwittingly be-comes a prisoner of the system. The dynamics ofadaptive change are far too complex to keep trackof, let alone influence, if leaders stay only on thefield of play.We have encountered several leaders, some ofwhom we discuss in this article, who manage tospend mueh of their precious time on the baleonyas they guide their organizations through change.Without that perspective, they probably wouldhave been unable to mobilize people to do adaptivework. Getting on the balcony is thus
a
prerequisitefor following the next five principles.
Identify the Adaptive Challenge
when
a
leopard threatens
a
band of chimpanzees,the leopard rarely succeeds in picking off a stray.Chimps know how to respond to this kind of threat.But when a man with an automatic rifle eomesnear, the routine responses fail. Chimps risk ex-tinction in a world of poachers unless they figureout how to disarm the new threat. Similarly, whenbusinesses cannot learn quickly to adapt to newchallenges, they are likely to face their own form
of
extinction.Consider the well-known case of British Air-
ways.
Having observed the revolutionary changesin the airline industry during the 1980s, then chiefexecutive Colin Marshall clearly recognized theneed to transform an airline nicknamed BloodyAwful by its own passengers into an exemplar of
to adaptive challengesreside not in the executive suitebut in the collective intelligenceof employees at all levels.
customer service. He also understood that thisambition would require more than anything elsechanges in values, practices, and relationshipsthroughout the eompany. An organization whosepeople clung to funetional silos and valued pleasingtheir bosses more than pleasing customers eouldnot beeome The World's Favourite Airline. Mar-shall needed an organization dedicated to servingpeople, acting on trust, respecting the individual,and making teamwork happen across boundaries.Values had to change throughout British Airways.People had to learn to collaborate and to develop acollective sense of responsibility for the directionand performanee of the airline. Marshall identifiedthe essential adaptive challenge: creating trustthroughout the organization. He is one of the firstexecutives we have known to make "creatingtrust" apriority.To lead British Airways, Marshall had to get hisexecutive team to understand the nature of thethreat created by dissatisfied customers: Did it rep-resent a technical challenge or an adaptive chal-lenge? Would expert adviee and technical adjust-ments within basic routines suffice, or wouldpeople throughout the company have to learn newways of doing business, develop new competeneies,and begin to work collectively?Marshall and his team set out to diagnose inmore detail the organization's challenges. Theylooked in three places. First, they listened to theideas and concerns of people inside and outsidethe organization - meeting with crews on flights,showing up in the 350-person reservation center inNew York, wandering around the baggage-handlingarea in Tokyo, or visiting the passenger lounge inwhatever airport they happened to be in. Their pri-mary questions were. Whose values, beliefs, atti-tudes, or behaviors would have to change in orderfor progress to take place? What shifts in priorities,resources, and power were neeessary? What sacri-fiees would have to he made and by whom?Seeond, Marshall and his team saw conflicts asclues-symptoms of adaptive challenges. The wayconflicts across functions were being expressedwere mere surface phenomena: theunderlying confliets had to be diag-nosed. Disputes over seeminglytechnical issues such as procedures,schedules, and lines of authoritywere in faet proxies for underlyingeonflicts about values and norms.Third, Marshall and his team helda mirror up to themselves, reeogniz-ing that they emhodied the adaptivechallenges facing the organization.Early in the transformation of British Airways,competing values and norms were played out onthe exeeutive team in dysfunctional ways that im-paired the capacity of the rest of the company toeollaborate across functions and units and makethe necessary trade-offs. No executive ean hidefrom the fact that his or her team refleets the bestand the worst of the company's values and norms,and therefore provides a ease in point for insightinto the nature of the adaptive work ahead.
126
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW January-February 1997
of 00

Leave a Comment

You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...
You must be to leave a comment.
Submit
Characters: ...