When Leadership Means
Saying ‘I Am Part of the Problem Here’
Before they fix it, leaders need to ask themselves how they broke it in the first
place. In this excerpt from their new book, Leadership on the Line, Ronald A. Heifetz
and Marty Linsky from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government
offer their help.
by Ronald
A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky
Leadership
in Real Life
Martha
Lagace: Your book with Ronald A. Heifetz describes the personal, often wrenching,
challenges of leadership. You mention that the word “lead” has an Indo-European
root meaning “to go forth, die.” Why aspire to leadership?
Marty Linsky: Good question. In
listening to the stories of literally thousands of men and women over the past quarter
century of doing this work, we have found that people aspire to exercise leadership
because it gives meaning and purpose to their lives. Exercising leadership involves the
pursuit of objectives that go beyond an individual’s personal aggrandizement or
material gain. Leadership cannot be disconnected from purpose. The risks are only worth
taking, the dangers are only worth confronting, because there is an objective that you
believe in and care deeply enough about to put yourself on the line.
Q:
New leaders in large organizations are often resented for rocking the boat. How should
someone in a leadership role keep a level head when conflict becomes personalized, as it
often does?
A: One of the most important keys to
survival is to separate yourself from your role when you are carrying a controversial
issue in your organization. People seeking to raise difficult questions are resented
because they are creating distress. A system in such disequilibrium can employ many
different tactics to try to restore calm, but one of the most tried and true is to
personalize the issue so that the person carrying it becomes the subject of the
conversation, and not the issue itself.
No one criticizes your style when you are
handing out checks; it’s only when you are delivering some disturbing news that
people come after you personally. It’s difficult to resist responding in kind;
that’s why going after you personally is an effective way to get you to take your eye
off the ball. But when you respond personally, you collude with those who are trying to
take your issue off the table. Remind yourself that the attack is not about you, even
though it is framed that way. It is about the issue you represent.
Q:
You write about four basic dangers that people can encounter when they take on a new
leadership role: marginalization, diversion, attack, and seduction. How do these dangers
come into play, and what tools or attitudes can a leader use to overcome these particular
dangers?
A: What is common to all of these
dangers is that they stem from a desire on the part of the group or community or
organization to take you out of your game plan, to restore the status quo by shoving the
difficult issue you are trying to surface back under the table where it cannot disturb
anyone.
What we found is that the most consistent
reason people trying to exercise leadership get taken out is that they did not see it
coming. Systems do not announce that they are out to get you. They seek out your
vulnerabilities and come after you in a way that is most likely to succeed.
The first rule for survival is to get off
the dance floor and onto the balcony so you can see what is really happening around you.
That is often hard to do. You may need help from confidantes who have no stake in the
issue, but who are worried about you. You need to listen carefully to the song behind the
words people are whispering in your ear, rather than taking literally what they say. You
need to stay close to the people who your initiative is threatening the most, but also
watch carefully your most zealous supporters who may unwittingly push you into a
vulnerable spot as their applause and enthusiasm encourages you to step further and
further out onto thin ice.
Q:
What particular leadership challenges (if any) do you see affecting business people as
opposed to government leaders and others in public life?
A: Let me suggest two generic
leadership challenges that seem to us to be more applicable in business settings than in
the public sector. First, the private sector is characterized by a clear measure of
success: the bottom line. People who raise issues that might challenge the bottom line in
the short run or represent competing values make themselves very vulnerable to being
marginalized, because the most important organizational value is so widely shared.
Secondly, most but by no means all
businesses are more or less hierarchical in structure. People who seek to exercise
leadership who are not at the top of the pyramid—leadership without
authority—put themselves very much at risk, especially in difficult economic times
when there is great insecurity and plenty of people willing to replace them and toe the
line.
Q:
In your book, you write that it is important for leaders to listen carefully to the
positive feedback they receive as well. Why? And how?
A: We have noticed that many people
seeking to exercise leadership are brought down by people who are ostensibly on their
side. This can happen in many ways, but two are most common.
First, people in your own faction are
likely to condition their support for you on your willingness to push harder and harder.
This is the bind in which labor leaders often find themselves. Rank-and-file union members
do not experience the conflicting pressures that the leadership is under. They do not see
the legitimacy of other, conflicting interests. And there is always someone else ready to
replace the less-than-zealous person out front. People seeking to exercise leadership
often respond to these pressures by going further and further out on a limb until they
find themselves completely vulnerable to being disregarded because of their
unreasonableness. This might be one way of understanding the bind that is trapping
Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Leadership can be understood, in part, as
about disappointing your own people at a rate they can absorb, as you get them to face the
need to make tough trade-offs. A second danger from your own folks is that you might be
turning up the heat on them more than they can stand, and the way they will manifest their
discomfort is by trying to lull you into inaction by heaping on the accolades. Be careful
when you hear all that praise and there’s a voice inside of you saying,
“I’m terrific, but I’m not that terrific.” It’s a signal.
Paradoxically, one of the ways
organizations try to ensure that people do not exercise leadership, do not raise difficult
and disturbing issues that challenge basic values and beliefs, is by calling them
“leaders.” The hidden contract is that as long as you make us happy, we’ll
keep calling you by that name you so aspire to; but if you start upsetting us by asking
questions we don’t want to address, we won’t call you “leader”
anymore.
— Martha Lagace, Senior Editor, HBS
Working Knowledge
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When you belong to the
organization or community that you are trying to lead, you are part of the problem. This
is particularly true when you have been a member of the group for some time, as in a
family. Taking the initiative to address the issue does not relieve you of your share of
responsibility. If you have been in a senior role for a while and there's a problem, it is
almost certain that you had some part in creating it and are part of the reason it has not
yet been addressed. Even if you are new, or outside the organization, you need to identify
those behaviors you practice or values you embody that could stifle the very change you
want to advance. In short, you need to identify and accept responsibility for your
contributions to the current situation, even as you try to move your people to a
different, better place.
In our teaching, training,
and consulting, we often ask people to write or deliver orally a short version of a
leadership challenge they are currently facing in their professional, personal, or civic
lives. Over the years, we have read and heard literally thousands of such challenges. Most
often in the first iteration of the story the author is nowhere to be found. The
storyteller implicitly says, "I have no options. If only other people would shape up,
I could make progress here."
When you are too quick to
lay blame on others, whether inside or outside the community, you create risks for
yourself. Obviously, you risk misdiagnosing the situation. But you also risk making
yourself a target by denying that you are part of the problem and that you, too, need to
change. After all, if you are pointing your finger at them, pushing them to do something
they don't want to do, the easiest option for them is to get rid of you. The dynamic
becomes you versus them. But if you are with them, facing the problem together and each
accepting some share of responsibility for it, then you are not as vulnerable to attack.
Leslie Wexner, founder and
CEO of The Limited, faced that challenge in the early 1990s, when his company began
"spinning," as he recalls. "We were working hard but going nowhere."
He had taken the corporation to great heights, going from four employees to 175,000, but
his strategy was no longer producing growth. After a terrific fourth quarter in
1992, the company experienced two down years.
Wexner hired a consultant,
a Harvard Business School professor named Len Schlesinger, to take a very deep look at the
company's problems and to assess what it would take to turn things around.
The consultant returned
with three messages. First, strengthen the brands; that made sense to Wexner. Second,
Wexner would have to fire a significant portion of the corporation's workforce, perhaps as
many as one third of his people. But Wexner had run the company as a family since its
inception in 1963. He had never been in the habit of firing people. He thought this part
heretical.
Beyond clarifying the values at stake and the greater purposes
worth the pain, you also need to name and acknowledge
the loss itself. |
— Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky |
The third message cut even
deeper. Schlesinger told Wexner that he was part of the problem. The company could make a
transition with him or without him, the consultant said, but if the former, he would have
to take responsibility. He would have to make substantial, significant changes in his own
beliefs and behaviors. Without that, the remaining employees, the shareholders, and the
company's corporate board would be able to successfully resist the needed transformation.
Wexner found the message
difficult to hear. He had started the company in 1963 with a loan of $5,000 from his aunt.
That was enough to open one women's clothing store in a suburban shopping mall in
Columbus, Ohio. His goal then was to earn a salary of $5,000 a year and have enough left
over to buy a new car every few years. First-year sales were $165,000. From that point on,
he had enjoyed nearly thirty years of significant annual growth, and his one store had
burgeoned into a retailing colossus. He was accustomed to accepting plaudits for success,
not for throwing overboard values and practices that had been near the heart of his self
image. Besides, he was fifty-eight years old, and questioned his capacity to admit error
and to mend his own ways.
Wexner uses a metaphor to
describe the feeling: "I was an athlete trained to be a baseball player. And one day
someone taps me on the shoulder and says 'football.' And I say, 'No, I'm a baseball
player.' And he says, 'football.' And I say, 'I don't know how to play football. I'm not
6'4" and I don't weigh 300 pounds.' But if no one values baseball anymore, the
baseball player will be out of business. So, I looked into the mirror and said, 'Schlemiel,
nobody wants to watch baseball. Make the transformation to football.'"
He believed in Schlesinger
and so, painfully, he began to accept his piece of the mess. He committed himself to a
personal as well as a corporate makeover. He hired an executive coach to help him learn
new ways and to stay on track. People in the company as well as shareholders and lenders
noticed. They saw the changes he was making and began to understand that he was on their
side, facing up to difficult issues, taking responsibility and risks, and facing an
uncertain future. He embodied his message, and thereby avoided becoming a target for
attack for most of the long turnaround period. His personal commitment helped to sway the
vast uncommitted.
Wexner changed, survived,
and thrived. So did The Limited. Between 1996 and 2001, the corporation increased sales by
50 percent and its operating margin by 4 percent, with 1,000 fewer stores, and a reduced
workforce of 124,000 employees.
Acknowledge their loss
Remember that when you ask people to do adaptive work, you are asking a lot. You may be
asking them to choose between two values, both of which are important to the way they
understand themselves. Any person who has been divorced with children understands how
difficult this is. Most of us shudder at the prospect of having to choose between our own
happiness and what's best for our children. We might try to convince ourselves that we are
serving the children's happiness by ending a dysfunctional or unsatisfying marriage, but
usually the children would not agree and neither would many of the experts.
You may be asking people to
close the distance between their espoused values and their actual behavior. Martin Luther
King, Jr. challenged Americans in that way during the civil rights movement. The abhorrent
treatment he and his allies received in marches and demonstrations dramatized the gap
between the traditional American values of freedom, fairness, and tolerance and the
reality of life for African-Americans. He forced many of us, self-satisfied that we were
good people living in a good country, to come face-to-face with the gulf between our
values and behavior; once we did that, we had to act. The pain of ignoring our own
hypocrisy hurt us more than giving up the status quo. The country changed.
Of course, this takes time.
Confronting the gaps between our values and behavior—the internal contradictions in
our lives and communities—requires going through a period of loss. Adaptive work
often demands some disloyalty to our roots. To tell someone that he should stop being
prejudiced is really to tell him that some of the lessons of his loving grandfather were
wrong. To tell a Christian missionary that, in the name of love, she may be doing damage
to a native community, calls into question the meaning of mission itself. To suggest to
her that, in an age of global interdependence, we can no longer afford to have religious
communities compete for divine truth and souls, calls into question the interpretation of
scripture lovingly bestowed upon her by family and teachers.
People are willing to make
sacrifices if they see the reason why. |
— Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky |
Asking people to leave
behind something they have lived with for years or for generations practically invites
them to get rid of you. Sometimes leaders are taken out simply because they do not
appreciate the sacrifice they are asking from others. To them, the change does not seem
like much of a sacrifice, so they have difficulty imagining that it seems that way to
others. Yet the status quo may not look so terrible to those immersed in it, and may look
pretty good when compared to a future that is unknown. Exercising leadership involves
helping organizations and communities figure out what, and whom, they are willing to let
go. Of all the values honored by the community, which of them can be sacrificed in the
interest of progress?
People are willing to make
sacrifices if they see the reason why. Indeed, boys go to war with the blessings of their
parents to protect values even more precious than life itself. So it becomes critically
important to communicate, in every way possible, the reason to sacrifice—why people
need to sustain losses and reconstruct their loyalties. People need to know that the
stakes are worth it.
But beyond clarifying the
values at stake and the greater purposes worth the pain, you also need to name and
acknowledge the loss itself. It's not enough to point to a hopeful future. People need to
know that you know what you are asking them to give up on the way to creating a better
future. Make explicit your realization that the change you are asking them to make is
difficult, and that what you are asking them to give up has real value. Grieve with them,
and memorialize the loss. This might be done with a series of simple statements, but often
requires something more tangible and public to convince people that you truly understand.
When the terrorists
attacked on September 11, 2001, they generated extraordinary disruption and loss to the
United States in general and to New York City in particular. People in New York were
forced, not only to grieve losses, but to face a new reality: their own vulnerability.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani seemed immediately to grasp people's struggle to adapt. He spoke
clearly, passionately, and repeatedly, giving voice to people's pain. Over and over again,
he urged people to resume their pre-September 11 activities, to go to work, use the city's
parks, and patronize restaurants and theatres, even though everyone's natural response was
to hunker down and stay out of harm's way. But as people began to heed his advice, he also
let them know that he realized what he was asking them to do. He asked them to give up
their heightened need to maintain a sense of their own personal security on behalf of
larger values: not giving in to the terrorists, and rebuilding New York City. Giuliani
went even further. He modeled the behavior he was asking of others by putting himself in
harm's way, going to Ground Zero over and over again, barely escaping being injured
himself on September 11 when the towers fell. Sometimes, modeling the behavior you are
asking of others presents itself as an even more powerful way than just words to
acknowledge their loss.