On the season finale of On the Balcony, Michael Kohler welcomes Professor Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the book that has formed the focus of this season. Professor Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. His work addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation. He joins Michael on this episode to discuss the evolution of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the erosion and rebuilding of trust in our polarized world, and the new frontiers for his framework.
The Adaptive Challenge of Parenthood
Heifetz opens the episode by discussing how his own thinking in the last thirty years has been shaped by his role as a parent. Parenting is fundamentally a series of adaptive challenges filled with curve balls and developments unique to each child, requiring parents to develop a stance of adaptability. Parenting, therefore, provides a good model for thinking about the stances that are demanded by people practicing leadership and responding to the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges that organizations, companies, governments, and our societies as a whole are facing.
Developing Leadership Without Easy Answers
Heifetz traces the origin of his interest in leadership and authority to his identity as a Jew and his mother’s experience growing up in Nazi Germany, as well as his own experiences coming of age in the 60s when the anti-war and civil rights movements were dominant themes. This developed into considerations of the dangers of charismatic authority, the value-laden nature of the term “leadership,” and how he might teach people to be immunized against the temptations of grandiosity and power in order to practice leadership that would serve people instead of one’s personal interests.
The Virtues and Significance of Authority
While working as a young doctor, Heifetz began to see authority as an integral part of social relationships that can’t just be tossed away. He now believes that a blind spot in current thinking, especially in areas of innovation like the tech industry, is a failure to recognize the virtues and significance of people in positions of authority. Instead, there is widespread distrust of authority in society, often because the violation or abuse of trust by authority is an extremely common experience. Heifetz uses the example of politicians, who are in the business of selling their point of view in return for votes but often change their tune to pander to their constituents, thereby eroding their trustworthiness. It requires bravery on the part of a politician to stand their ground and engage with people in an attempt to change their minds, but—as seen during the COVID pandemic, when countries with the lowest trust in government suffered the highest death rates—it is a vital part of effective leadership.
The Practice of Repairing and Restoring Trust
Heifetz points out that, in these days when distrust is endemic, anybody’s authority is at risk, and even once people’s trust is given, it can be brittle and removed in an instant (as seen in the rise of cancel culture). Therefore, people in positions of authority must develop a mindset of ongoing repair, particularly those with the privilege of assuming they will be trusted. Heifetz points to himself—a white man, a doctor, and an established academic—as someone who walks into a room full of students expecting to be trusted. He admits that learning this trust is easily lost was hard. He has developed a model called the non-defensive defense, which helps him to receive anger and critique with grace and respond in a way that owns the need for amends without being overly apologetic beyond what’s true.
Activism and Mobilizing for Adaptive Work
Heifetz looks at the massive adaptive challenge of systemic racism and sexism from the point of view of an individual who wants to be an activist. Taking on such a role requires a willingness to understand what they are asking of people in wanting them to change. However, often those who are the most passionate activists are those who have been oppressed and, therefore, may find it understandably hard to engage with the world of the oppressor. Without this empathetic imagination, though, it is much less likely that sustainable change in hearts and minds will be achieved. For example, in the case of sexism or racism, activists often rely on pressure and protest which tends to create some progress, but also resistance. Heifetz, therefore, thinks we need to come up with additional strategies for working these issues and recognize that change will ultimately come when those within the system challenge it, so activists cannot afford to reject them wholesale.
The Future for Leadership Studies
Heifetz finds it enormously meaningful that people are building on his ideas, taking them to new places, and pushing the ideological frontiers. He hopes to keep encouraging that process by developing new courses on adaptive leadership and writing new works dealing with issues like renegotiating loyalty, dealing with traumatic history, and managing multiple identities. He sees the future of Leadership Studies as building from its focus on the intermediary processes of influence, persuasion, and proper managerial efforts to analyze what it takes to respond to challenges that require cultural innovation and evolution.
Listen to the season finale here: