The following article is quoted from the Harvard Business Review (Best of HBR – Online Version) available at http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?articleID=R0111K&ml_action=get-article&print=true "The Work of Leadership" Read Comments | Post Your Own Comment
Followers want comfort, stability, and solutions from their leaders. But that’s babysitting. Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones. Then they manage the resulting distress. Sometimes an article comes along and turns the conventional thinking on a subject not upside down but inside out. So it is with this landmark piece by Ronald Heifetz and Donald Laurie, published in January 1997. Not only do the authors introduce the breakthrough concept of adaptive change—the sort of change that occurs when people and organizations are forced to adjust to a radically altered environment—they challenge the traditional understanding of the leader-follower relationship. Leaders are shepherds, goes the conventional thinking, protecting their flock from harsh surroundings. Not so, say the authors. Leaders who truly care for their followers expose them to the painful reality of their condition and demand that they fashion a response. Instead of giving people false assurance that their best is good enough, leaders insist that people surpass themselves. And rather than smoothing over conflicts, leaders force disputes to the surface. Modeling the candor they encourage leaders to display, the authors don’t disguise adaptive change’s emotional costs. Few people are likely to thank the leader for stirring anxiety and uncovering conflict. But leaders who cultivate emotional fortitude soon learn what they can achieve when they maximize their followers’ well-being instead of their comfort. Mobilizing an organization to adapt its behaviors in order to thrive in new business environments is critical. Without such change, any company today would falter. Indeed, getting people to do adaptive work is the mark of leadership in a competitive world. Yet for most senior executives, providing leadership and not just authoritative expertise is extremely difficult. Why? We see two reasons. First, in order to make change happen, executives have to break a longstanding behavior pattern of their own: providing leadership in the form of solutions. This tendency is quite natural because many executives reach their positions of authority by virtue of their competence in taking responsibility and solving problems. But the locus of responsibility for problem solving when a company faces an adaptive challenge must shift to its people. Solutions to adaptive challenges reside not in the executive suite but in the collective intelligence of employees at all levels, who need to use one another as resources, often across boundaries, and learn their way to those solutions. Reprint: R0111K. |
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