Leadership Without Easy Answers

Ronald A. Heifetz

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780674038479
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

The economy uncertain, education in decline, cities under siege, crime and poverty spiraling upward, international relations roiling: we look to leaders for solutions, and when they don't deliver, we simply add their failure to our list of woes. In doing do, we do them and ourselves a grave disservice. We are indeed facing an unprecedented crisis of leadership, Ronald Heifetz avows, but it stems as much from our demands and expectations as from any leader's inability to meet them. His book gets at both of these problems, offering a practical approach to leadership for those who lead as well as those who look to them for answers. Fitting the theory and practice of leadership to our extraordinary times, the book promotes a new social contract, a revitalization of our civic life just when we most need it.Drawing on a dozen years of research among managers, officers, and politicians in the public realm and the private sector, among the nonprofits, and in teaching, Heifetz presents clear, concrete prescriptions for anyone who needs to take the lead in almost any situation, under almost any organizational conditions, no matter who is in charge, His strategy applies not only to people at the top but also to those who must lead without authority—activists as well as presidents, managers as well as workers on the front line.

Part I

Setting the Frame

1

Values in Leadership

Leadership arouses passion. The exercise and even the study of leadership stirs feeling because leadership engages our values. Indeed, the term itself is value-laden. When we call for leadership in our organizations and politics, we call for something we prize. If one asks: “Would you rather be known as a leader or a manager? A follower or a leader?” the response is usually “a leader.” The term leadership involves our self-images and moral codes.

Yet the way we talk about leadership betrays confusion. On one hand, we use the word to denote people and actions of merit. During an election year, we want “a leader” for President, rather than “another politician.” In our organizations, we evaluate managers for their “leadership,” by which we mean a particular constellation of valued abilities. When we look abroad, we fasten the term to people like Gorbachev, Walesa, De Klerk, or Mandela, people we admire for their values, courage, commitment, and skill. On the other hand, we insist that the word leadership is value-free. We say that Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellin drug cartel, was a “leader,” even if we detested his values, because he motivated followers to realize his vision.¹ Our media routinely use the term leader to denote people in authority or people who have a following. We talk about the leader of the gang, the mob, the organization—the person who is given informal or formal authority by others—regardless of the values they represent or the product they play a key part in producing.

We cannot continue to have it both ways. We may like to use the word leadership as if it were value-free, particularly in an age of science and mathematics, so that we can describe far-ranging phenomena and people with consistency. Yet when we do so, we ignore the other half of ourselves that in the next breath speaks of leadership as something we desperately need more of. We cannot talk about a crisis in leadership and then say leadership is value-free. Do we merely mean that we have too few people in our midst who can gather a following? Surely, we are not asking for more messiahs of Waco and Jonestown who meet people’s needs by offering tempting visions of rapture and sacrifice.² The contradiction in our common understanding clouds not only the clarity of our thinking and scholarship; it shapes the quality of leadership we praise, teach, and get.³

Understandably, scholars who have studied “leadership” have tended to side with the value-free connotation of the term because it lends itself more easily to analytic reasoning and empirical examination.⁴ But this will not do for them any more than it will do for practitioners of leadership who intervene in organizations and communities everyday. Rigor in social science does not require that we ignore values; it simply requires being explicit about the values we study. There is no neutral ground from which to construct notions and theories of leadership because leadership terms, loaded with emotional content, carry with them implicit norms and values. For example, when we equate leadership with holding high office or exerting great influence, we reinforce a tendency to value station and power. We are not simply studying or using power; we unwittingly communicate that power has intrinsic worth.

We have to take sides. When we teach, write about, and model the exercise of leadership, we inevitably support or challenge people’s conceptions of themselves, their roles, and most importantly their ideas about how social systems make progress on problems. Leadership is a normative concept because implicit in people’s notions of leadership are images of a social contract. Imagine the differences in behavior when people operate with the idea that “leadership means influencing the community to follow the leader’s vision” versus “leadership means influencing the community to face its problems.” In the first instance, influence is the mark of leadership; a leader gets people to accept his vision, and communities address problems by looking to him. If something goes wrong, the fault lies with the leader.⁵ In the second, progress on problems is the measure of leadership; leaders mobilize people to face problems, and communities make progress on problems because leaders challenge and help them do so. If something goes wrong, the fault lies with both leaders and the community.

This second image of leadership—mobilizing people to tackle tough problems—is the image at the heart of this book. This conception builds upon, yet differs from, the culturally dominant views. For example, in popular conceptions of politics, leadership generally refers to the exercise of influence: the leader stands out in front—usually in high office—influencing others. The person may also be the most influential member of a popular movement operating with little if any formal authority, such as Lech Walesa or the Ayotollah Khomeini (before they took political office).

In business, we see an evolution of the concept of leadership. For decades, the term leadership referred to the people who hold top management positions and the functions they serve. In our common usage, it still does. Recently, however, business people have drawn a distinction between leadership and management, and exercising leadership has also come to mean providing a vision and influencing others to realize it through noncoercive means.⁶

In the military, the term leadership commonly refers to people in positions of command, who show the way. Perhaps because warfare has played a central role historically in the development of our conceptions of leadership and authority, it is not surprising that the ancient linguistic root of the word “to lead” means “to go forth, die.”⁷ In our time, leadership in the military aims to draw forth a person’s highest qualities, by influence more than coercion. “Be all that you can be” implies preparation based on the potential that resides in the enlistees when they enter. In the final test, however, the troops achieve the goals prescribed by the leaders in command.⁸

In biology, leadership is the activity of flying at the front of a flock of geese, or maintaining order in social relations and food gathering among primates. The leader has a particular set of physical attributes (big, colorful, fast, assertive). The leader functions as a focal point of attention by which the rest of the group instinctively organizes itself. Leadership is equated with prominence and dominance.

In horse racing, a field some would say bears a resemblance to politics, leading simply means being out in front. The jockey of the lead horse is leading nobody, except perhaps unintentionally to the extent that other jockeys set strategy and strive harder to overtake him.

There seem to be two common denominators of these various views: station and influence. Hence, many scholarly approaches to the study of leadership during the last two hundred years focus on the phenomena of prominent and influential people.⁹ Theorists ask the following important questions: How and why do particular individuals gain power in an organization or society? What are their personal characteristics? What functions do they serve? How do they realize their vision? How do they move history, or does history move them? What motivates them and how do they motivate others?¹⁰

Hidden Values in Theories of Leadership

Perhaps the first theory of leadership—and the one that continues to be entrenched in American culture—emerged from the nineteenth-century notion that history is the story of great men and their impact on society. (Women were not even considered candidates for greatness.) Thomas Carlyle crystallized this view in his 1841 volume On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Although various scientific studies discount the idea, this trait approach continues to set the terms of popular debate.¹¹ Indeed, it saw a revival during the 1980s.¹² Based on this view, trait theorists since Carlyle have examined the personality characteristics of “great men,” positing that the rise to power is rooted in a “heroic” set of personal talents, skills, or physical characteristics. As Sidney Hook described in The Hero in History (1943), some men are eventful, while others are event-making.¹³

In reaction to the great-man theory of history, situationalists argued that history is much more than the effects of these men on their time. Indeed, social theorists like Herbert Spencer (1884) suggested that the times produce the person and not the other way around. In a sense, situationalists were not interested in leadership per se. “Historymakers” were interesting because they stood at the vortex of powerful political and social forces, which themselves were of interest. Thus, the more or less contemporaneous emergence of the United States’ first great leaders—Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Monroe, Benjamin Franklin—is attributed not to a demographic fluke but to the extraordinary times in which these men lived. Instead of asserting that all of them shared a common set of traits, situationalists suggest that the times called forth an assortment of men with various talents and leadership styles. Indeed, many of them performed marvelously in some jobs but quite poorly in others.¹⁴ Thus, “What an individual actually does when acting as a leader is in large part dependent upon characteristics of the situation in which he functions.”¹⁵

Beginning in the 1950s, theorists began (not surprisingly) to synthesize the trait approach with the situationalist view. Empirical studies had begun to show that no single constellation of traits was associated with leadership. Although this finding did not negate the idea that individuals “make” history, it did suggest that different situations demand different personalities and call for different behaviors. Primary among these synthetic approaches is contingency theory, which posits that the appropriate style of leadership is contingent on the requirements of the particular situation. For example, some situations require controlling or autocratic behavior and others participative or democratic behavior.¹⁶

The field of inquiry soon expanded into the specific interactions between leaders and followers—the transactions by which an individual gains influence and sustains it over time.¹⁷ The process is based on reciprocity. Leaders not only influence followers but are under their influence as well.¹⁸ A leader earns influence by adjusting to the expectations of followers. In one variant of the transactional approach, the leader reaps the benefits of status and influence in exchange for reducing uncertainty and providing followers with a basis for action.¹⁹ In another variant, bargaining and persuasion are the essence of political power, requiring a keen understanding of the interests of various stakeholders, both professional and public.²⁰

Each of these theories is generally considered to be value-free, but in fact their values are simply hidden. The great-man or trait approach places value on the historymaker, the person with extraordinary influence. Although the approach does not specify in what direction influence must be wielded to constitute leadership, the very suggestion that the mark of a great man is his historical impact on society gives us a particular perspective on greatness. Placing Hitler in the same general category as Gandhi or Lincoln does not render the theory value-free. On the contrary, it simply leaves its central value—influence—implicit.²¹

The situational approach, ironically, does something similar. It departs radically from the great-man view by suggesting that certain people emerge to prominence because the times and social forces call them forth. Yet leaders are still assumed to be those people who gain prominence in society. The people that a trait theorist would select to study from history, the situational theorist would select as well.

Contingency theory, synthesizing the great-man and situational approaches, also began with a value-free image of itself. It examines which decisionmaking style fits which situational contingency in order for the decisionmaker to maintain control of the process. Sometimes a directive, task-oriented style is the most effective, and at other times a participative, relationship-oriented style is required. Yet even in this more specific rendition of the traditional view, the mark of leadership is still influence, or control.²²

Advocates of transactional approaches, focusing on how influence is gained and maintained, also see themselves as value-neutral. Although they describe elegantly the relational dynamics of influence, they do not evaluate the purpose to which influence is put or the way purposes are derived. By stating that the mark of leadership is influence over outcomes, these theorists unwittingly enter the value realm. Leadership-as-influence implicitly promotes influence as an orienting value, perpetuating a confusion between means and ends.²³

These four general approaches attempt to define leadership objectively, without making value judgments. When defining leadership in terms of prominence, authority, and influence, however, these theories introduce value-biases implicitly without declaring their introduction and without arguing for the necessity of the values introduced.²⁴ From a research point of view, this presents no real problem. Indeed, it simplifies the analytic task. The problem emerges when we communicate and model these descriptions as “leadership” because “leadership” in many cultures is a normative idea—it represents a set of orienting values, as do words like “hero” and “champion.”²⁵ If we leave the value implications of our teaching and practice unaddressed, we encourage people, perhaps unwittingly, to aspire to great influence or high office, regardless of what they do there.²⁶ We would be on safer ground were we to discard the loaded term leadership altogether and simply describe the dynamics of prominence, power, influence, and historical causation.²⁷

Although these theories were designed primarily for value-free description and analysis, they still shed light on how to think about practice. For example, the trait theorists encourage us to believe that individuals can indeed make a difference. No activist can operate without that assumption. Furthermore, the decades of scholarship devoted to sifting and analyzing generic skills provide us with some basis to defi...