Just Finished Reading: Leadership on the Line by Ron Heifeitz and Marty Linsky

This is a book closely related to “Leadership without Easy Answers,” since it’s at least one of the same authors, and on the same subject. It’s a follow-up focused more intently on how to stay in the game as a leader – how to keep from being sabotaged, assassinated, sidelined, or otherwise decommissioned.

The reason why leaders need this book is to be able to lead through adaptive change. This is a key concept – there’s technical change that communities go through – basically things we know how to do, and just need to apply a technique for, and adaptive change which requires examination of our values, and letting go of values that are important for us in favor of other important values. It means making painful tradeoffs. Example: You go to the doctor for leg pains, and you get a prescription for a pill to take for two weeks. You take the pill for two weeks and the pain goes away. That’s technical change.

Adaptive change is: the doctor tells you to lose weight. That means not just putting down the sandwich and taking a lap, but changing eating and cooking habits, making time in your schedule for exercise, and possibly shifting relationships with the people who you either cook for or who cook for you, or who just like to eat delicious food together with you. Food has social and emotional meanings and values beyond the physical act of eating. No wonder diet pills are so popular!

So, imagine that you are a leader trying to convince a bunch of people not only that they need to lose weight, but you’re also in charge of being sure it actually happens. This book is about dealing with the inevitable resistance when groups need to do adaptive work.

The Response:

1.      Get on the balcony – in the heat of the moment, when someone is yelling at you, or working behind your back to undermine you, or people are pressuring you to slow down the pace of change, it’s important to be able to take a step back, and see things from a global perspective. In this metaphor, you have to be both a dancer, and someone analyzing the dance from above, sitting in the balcony.
2. Think politically – relationships are more important than ideas when it comes to motivating people and protecting yourself from sabotage. Reach out and develop allies – people who are with you on the issues. Pay close attention to authority figures. They will give you clues to how much stress is in the system. Stay connected and listening to people who have the most to lose in the changes you see as necessary. To win over the people in the middle, take these steps:

a.      Acknowledge your part in the problem everyone has to face together. If you’re the leader and you’ve been there a while, you will have some things to admit to.

b.      Acknowledge what people are losing in the change you are asking for

c.      Model the behavior you want to see.

d.      Accept casualties. There may be people for whom the change is too much, and they are just not willing to go in the new direction. If that’s the case, don’t try to keep them at the cost of making the needed changes. It’s very difficult, but shows you’re serious.

     3. Orchestrate the conflict – the goal here is to manage the pace of change and the amount of stress in the system. They use a temperature metaphor. It needs to be hot enough that there is attention and motivation for addressing the issue, but not so hot that people are just mad & in their reptile brain and can’t get any productive work done.

a.      Orchestrating the conflict includes creating a “holding environment” that contravenes the tendency of people or organizations in conflict to blow apart. Example: the strong traditions of the military. Example: an off-site retreat. Example: a marriage covenant.

b.      Ways to raise the heat: *Draw attention to the tough questions *Give more responsibility than people feel comfortable with *Surface conflicts *Protect people outside the norm who do similar things

c.      Ways to lower the heat (normally, systems are pretty good at lowering the heat on their own, although sometimes that will be by marginalizing the person pushing for change) *Do the technical parts first *Break the problem into pieces, make time frames, create a structure for decisions *Temporarily take back responsibility *Work avoidance mechanisms *Slow things down.

d.      Make sure people have a clear vision of what the future looks like once they’ve addressed this problem.

      4. Giving the work back – basically, don’t make decisions for the people with the problem or otherwise become the subject of the conflict that allows them to avoid facing the real issue at hand. The people with the problem need to be the ones who figure out which values to trade off – what the best choice is.

      5. Hold steady – sometimes you have to avoid commenting on what’s going on, or hold onto an ambiguous position, or otherwise maintain an unpopular stance to make time and keep pressure on the people who need to be addressing the issue.

Heart

All this takes a lot out of a person, personally, emotionally and physically, which leaves us vulnerable to taking ourselves out of the game. Example: Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky apparently started during the government shutdown, which was at a low point in his presidency, most of his staff was out of the office, and Hilary happened to be out of town. Not an excuse, but an example of how important it is to have people keeping you anchored at vulnerable times. Time anchors – a sanctuary or a daily reflection time.

Sex! This gets a good chunk of a chapter. Everyone has needs for intimacy, and power makes people feel sexier and the role makes them more attractive. Back to Bill/Monica – if he had just been a regular guy in a grocery store, she never would have given him the time of day. So…. Be sure to attend to those needs where they belong – drink from your own well, to quote the Bible….

Other notes – confidants. A confidant would be someone who can listen to your ideas and not have to hear things in a finished form and be a good sounding board, and have no other agenda beyond wanting to support you. A sister in California = a good confidant. Someone you’re supervising = not a good confidant, even if they may be an ally in the change you’re trying to bring at the workplace. Allies will have other people they need to be loyal to – confiding in them can make for distance between you because you’re asking them to choose between you and their other constituencies.

Finally – leadership takes heart. Staying present emotionally, feeling the costs and pain of it, and still caring and working all take heart. Jesus with his arms open on the cross, saying “Why have you forsaken me?” and “Father, forgive them,” at the same time.

Why do this? Love. Go with God. The world needs you.