Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

By Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky

Publishers: Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, © 2004

Reviewed by Professor S Ramnarayan, ISB

Leadership is not status, expertise, authority or popularity. Heifetz and Linsky, faculty members of the Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, point out that leadership means getting the system to tackle a difficult problem. People may have reached formal leadership positions because they had been successful in solving problems and delivering solutions through their experience and expertise. But the toughest challenges that organisations and communities face have really no ready quick-fixes.

The authors make an important distinction between technical and adaptive work. To take a simple example, when dieticians recommend a weight loss programme, or cardiac surgeons clean up clogged arteries, they do technical work for which they possess the necessary know-how and procedures. But lasting improvements can only come about when the patients change their habits, ways of working, or ways of life – for example, change how they eat, exercise, or manage stress. Unlike technical work, adaptive challenges require changes in the group’s cultural norms. They involve the emotionally demanding challenge of separating what’s precious and should be held onto, from what is expendable. As Heifetz and Linsky point out, the single most common source of leadership failure is that people treat adaptive challenges like technical problems.

Leading adaptive change is difficult because it involves telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear; challenging what people hold dear – their daily habits, loyalties and ways of thinking; help people cope with feelings of incompetence, doubt and uncertainty

as they abandon the old comfortable routines; and go against expectations by giving work back to people who must then be mobilised to adapt. That’s why there is a danger of leaders being pushed aside, undermined or eliminated. It requires courage, commitment and political savvy to lead meaningful change.

The book offers interesting strategic and tactical guidelines to lead adaptive change. For example, leaders are urged to “get onto the balcony”, i.e. step back out of the moment, and assess what’s happening from a wider perspective to avoid wrong diagnosis or jumping to familiar conclusions. There are concrete steps recommended on how to build political power on the basis of relationships. The book discusses how leaders can “hold steady” in the heat of action to prevent the disequilibrium from getting too high, and the conflict from getting destructive, and, simultaneously, to get people to address the hard questions without opting for a technical quick-fix. This would inevitably mean coping with others’ frustration, anger and personal attacks. There are useful lessons on how leaders can deal with such challenges.

Thus the book offers interesting insights on negotiating the hazards of leadership. With its reader-friendly tone and anecdotal narrative, the book appeals to a wide audience. As the authors convincingly argue, we have opportunities available everyday to exercise leadership. Rather than stay within the comfort of our area of expertise, and affirm our primary loyalties, we can put ourselves on the line, and bring about the much-needed adaptive change in our organisations and communities.