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| Women in Leadership |
| Citizen Leaders: The key to effective democracy Dr. Jan Secor, Fulbright Scholar, June 7, 2000 Siberian Academy for Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia |
| On December 1, 1955, tired after a long day of work, Rosa Parks sat down in a seat at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. When the bus driver ordered her to give up her seat for a white man, she refused. When she continued to refuse to move to the back of the bus, she was arrested because her behavior was in violation of Montgomery’s strict racial segregation laws. 381 days later, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled such segregation unconstitutional, the civil Rights movement was in full swing across the Southern U.S. with lunch counter sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts, and demonstrations. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor of the church Rosa Parks attended, had risen to national prominence. America was on its way to significant change. |
| Rosa Parks was not just an ordinary black woman who earned her living cleaning white folks homes. She was a citizen leader. She was active in her church and highly respected in her community. She had been teaching reading and writing and democratic values in “freedom schools” for many years. When Rosa Parks was arrested, her community clearly understood that this act was unjust. They reacted. Citizen leaders exist in every community and society. Under some forms of government they are labeled dissenters or troublemakers and imprisoned or even executed. In other forms of government, they are encouraged or at least tolerated. In a democracy they should be encouraged, though that is not always the case, because citizen leaders ask a community to address issues and problems it would prefer to ignore. These are the very problems that may prevent a community from creatively adapting to changing circumstances. If ignored, these problems can ultimately cause a society to decay and even collapse. Richard A. Couto defines the citizen leader as one who facilitates organized and sustained action to bring about change that will permit continued or increased well-being for a group or community. These people usually do not seek leadership. They seek instead to change a condition or solve a problem. When they begin, they expect to achieve their purpose quickly and return to private matters. “Customarily, their first action is to approach the people in charge to get something done about a specific problem. It is only when they are rebuffed or rebuked that citizen leaders go farther, eventually entering into a chain of events and actions that leads to the achievement of their original purpose” or perhaps much more. Somewhere in that chain of events the people with whom they work bestow upon them the mantle of leadership. Ronald A. Heifetz in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers states that “we attribute our problems too readily to our politicians and executives, as if they were the cause of them. We frequently use them as scapegoats . . . Furthermore, in a crisis we tend to look for the wrong kind of leadership. We call for someone with answers, decisions, strength, and a map of the future . . . we should be calling for leadership that will challenges us to face problems for which there are no simple, painless solutions—problems that require us to learn new ways.” Why, because it is only by learning new ways that we adapt to new circumstances. Heifetz sees leadership as mobilizing people to tackle tough problems, problems which are generally embedded in complicated interactive systems. If these problems had an obvious or easy answer then only a technician would be needed to implement the solution. But, challenging social problems do not have easy answers because at the heart of these problems are competing values—jobs vs. health, freedom vs. safety, current needs vs. long term consequences, etc. Adaptive work always involves clarifying competing values and purposes as well as facing the painful trade-offs and adjustments required to move toward solutions that work for everybody. Heifetz is a physician and a psychiatrist. He is also a lecturer in public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University where he directs the school’s Leadership Education Project. As a physician, he identifies two ideas from biology that underlie his work. The first is the idea “that many problems are embedded in complicated and interactive systems.” The second is “that much of behavior results from the organism’s ability to adapt to a changing environment; sometimes slowly, sometimes in dramatic leaps. In transferring the idea of biological adaptation to the social realm, Heifetz introduces the concept of adaptive work. “By adapting socially, I mean developing the organizational and cultural capacity to meet problems successfully according to our values and purposes.” When there are conflicts over values and purposes, “the clarification and integration of competing values itself becomes adaptive work.” Adaptation does “not mean accepting the status quo, or resigning ourselves to a new and bad situation.” Adaptation is more than just coping with a situation. It also involves learning new attitudes and behaviors. Psychiatry tells us that people adapt more successfully by facing painful circumstances where they can learn to distinguish reality from fantasy, resolve internal conflicts, and put harsh events into perspective. They learn to live with things that cannot be changed and take responsibility for those that can be changed. In the process they improve their general adaptive capacity for future challenges. Societies also must do adaptive work. Communities “interpret and analyze problems, distinguishing cause from effect, fact from fiction, and formulating . . . possible solutions." A leader can challenge the community ot do the necessary adaptive work with or without authority, with our without an official position, from inside or outside government. If we know the answer to a problem then a technician can apply the needed remedy. Leadership is not required. It is only when we do not have a solution that leadership is required because leadership “will push the society to do the hard work of clarifying its competing values and purposes, and of facing the painful trade-offs and adjustments required to narrow the gap between current conditions and purposes.” Whenever adaptive work is required, the citizen leader becomes important and valuable to the community. The citizen leader can spark debate and keep the pressure up until the community begins to tackle the tough issue presented. This is a difficult proposition because the identifier of a distressing problem may come to be seen as the source of the distress itself. A major challenge for the citizen leader is to draw attention and then to deflect it from himself to the questions and issues that need to be faced. If the leader becomes the issue, his purpose of mobilizing people to do adaptive work is defeated. “Adaptive work requires adjustments, learning, and ocmpormise on the part of many among the dominant” and complacent as well as the disadvantaged and beleaguered. Thus, the first step of the citizen leader is the education of himself as well as his supporters. The leader has to define a context for action. The audience needs to readily comprehend the purpose of unusual or defiant behavior so that it focuses less on the behavior itself and more on its meaning. For nay defiant act there are at least three audiences: the authorities being challenged, the supporters standing behind the leader, and the uninvolved spectators. In the long run, it is the spectators whose attitudes and behaviors will determine the outcome of the confrontation between the authorities and the challengers. As their attitudes change, they may either switch allegiance increasing the ranks of supporters and/or bring pressure to bear on the authorities to change public policy. According to Couto, the citizen leader’s assertion of social responsibility for the human condition becomes exceedingly troublesome to those in charge because it means giving voice and stature to groups of people without political influence. It means entering human conditions into economic calculations in which these conditions have no monetary value. Citizen leadership means making a political, economic, and social system accountable for whom it serves and fails to serve. This is known as the politics of inclusion but Heifetz points out that inclusion is not just listening to everyone’s point of view, though that is important. “Inclusion may mean challenging people, hard and steadily, to face new perspectives of familiar problems, to let go of old ideas and ways of life long held sacred.” Inclusion does not mean that each party will get its way. Returning to Rosa Parks and segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, inclusion meant changing attitudes that kept blacks in a subordinate role to all whites. As Americans soon found out, the elimination of segregation on buses, lunch counters, and other public accommodations in the South was the easy part in moving toward equality. Sharing political power by granting long overdue voting rights proved to be more difficult, but was achieved at least by statute in 1965. The sharing of economic power by eliminating disproportionate rates of poverty in the African American community continues to elude American society. Adaptive work requires learning at the emotional as well as the intellectual level. Logical argument is rarely enough. The parties involved must sort through the old and fashion the new, which requires dealing with habit, tradition, and pride. Heifetz describes leadership as “a special sort of educating in which the teacher raises problems, questions, options, interpretations, and perspectives, often without answers, gauging all the while when to push through and when to hold steady.” In other words, pacing is critical. The leader needs to understand how much his community can handle and when they have had too much. For the citizen leader this means monitoring both the reaction of authorities and of supporters to each new challenge. The challenger wants to keep the challenge “above the threshold for stimulating public and political engagement with the issues, but below the breaking point.” At all costs he wants to avoid universal work avoidance where those who need to do adaptive work rationalize away the problem and turn against the challengers. Leaders are always failing somebody. Adaptive work often demands loss and certainly demands change. “Leadership requires compassion for the distress of adaptive change, both because compassion is its own virtue, and because it can improve one’s sense of timing. Knowing how hard to push and when to let up are central to leadership.” “The long-term challenge of leadership is to develop people’s adaptive capacity for tackling an ongoing series of hard problems. The point is not to foster dependency but to counteract the inappropriate dependency on authority that distress tends to produce in adaptive situations.” Over time, a leader has to help people let go. The leader has to step aside to let others move forward. “The strategic challenge is to give the work back to the people without abandoning them. Overload them and they will avoid learning. Underload them and they will grow too dependent, or complacent.” How do we get the citizen leaders we need to help us do the adaptive work that will ensure our survival and growth as a civilized species? Cheryl Mabey and Roland Heifetz agree that we must take our eyes off the leader as authority figure, solver of problems, maker of meaning, creator of the vision. Instead we must look toward developing interactive systems in which every citizen will lead. Where citizen participation is not an elective but a given. Where citizens take responsibility for tackling the tough problems facing their neighborhood, place of business or work, city, region, nation, and the world. Public officials and schools can help to create effective citizen leaders. Citizen leaders must obtain knowledge about the issues that concern them. They must also understand how the system operates. How to find information and how the system operates are subjects that can be taught in school, in workshops ofr adults, and through the mass media. Public officials can make information available in a timely fashion on their budget, on their public policy deliberations, on how the system works, and on what they are doing. NGOs and citizens’ groups can make community service opportunities available so people can become involved. Time spent working with groups is critical to skill building for the citizen leader. Also necessary for the citizen leader are skills in conflict resolution, in asking effective questions, in facilitating discussion, in cross-cultural communication, and in listening well. The citizen leader must also develop the skills of critical thinking including the capacity for brainstorming and recognizing possibilities. Also essential is what I call “both/and” thinking. This is thinking that entertains opposing ideas simultaneously and builds a bridge between them instead of widening the divide by hardening opposing positions. These skills are valuable for everyone; they are critical for both authority figures and citizen leaders. They are skills that can be taught but are never fully learned. In summary, Ronald Heifetz gives us the following five strategic principles of leadership: 1. Identify the adaptive challenge. Diagnose the situation in light of the values at stake, and unbundle the issues that come with it. 2. Keep the level of distress within a tolerable range for doing adaptive work. To use the pressure cooker analogy, keep the heat up without blowing us the vessel. 3. Focus attention of ripening issues and not on stress-reducing distractions. Identify which issues can currently engage attention; and while directing attention to them, counteract work avoidance mechanisms like denial, scapegoating, externalizing the enemy, pretending the problem is technical, or attacking individuals rather than issues. 4. Give the work back to people, but at a rate they can stand. Place and develop responsibility by putting the pressure on the people with the problem. 5. Protect voices of leadership without authority. Give cover to those who raise hard questions and generate distress—people who point to the internal contradictions of the society. These individuals often will have latitude to provoke rethinking that authorities do not have. I would add one more—compassion. Anthropologist Richard Leakey once said that it is not the human brain that differentiates us from the animals, it is instead our capacity for compassion. He came to this conclusion by studying the bones of our earliest ancestors. In those bones he observed evidence of broken legs that had healed long before the person died. Now, a two-legged animal with a broken leg is pretty much helpless and will starve unless someone cares for him. I’ve experienced tow broken legs so can attest to the pain and helplessness. However, our ancestors cared for a member of their group who had broken a leg. This enabled our species to survive and to evolve and to learn and to create. Do we have the compassion of our ancestors? Do we have the compassion to do the adaptive work that will enable us to evolve as a species? There are no magic formulas, but there is work to be done creating new ideas, new applications of old ideas, and learning new attitudes and behaviors while we also practice loving compassion for those of our group with broken legs. So, we must accept both that no one has the answer to our problems and that together with compassion we can find answers more elegant than our wildest dreams currently suggest. As Ronald Heifetz puts it “Tackling tough problems—problems that often requires an evolution of values—is the end of leadership; getting that work done is its essence.” |