Annex 3
Personal Notes on “Leadership without easy
answers” (Heifetz) & “The powers to lead” (Nye)
Laurent Ledoux
ledoux.laurent@gmail.com – 0478 62 14 20
29/05/09
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Adaptive leadership
Notes synthesized mainly from “Leadership without easy answers”
by Ronald Heifetz – Harvard Business Press
2 key distinctions
- Technical vs adaptive problems: points to the different modes of actions required to deal
with routine problems in contrast with those that demand innovation and learning
- Leadership vs authority: provides a framework for assessing resources and developing a
leadership strategy depending upon whether one has or does not have authority.
The term leadership involves our self-images and moral codes. We cannot talk about a crisis in
leadership and say leadership is value-free.
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.
- 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 them do so. If something goes wrong, the fault lies with both leaders and the
community.
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?
Hidden values in theories of leadership: confusion between means and ends
1. Hero – Trait approach (Thomas Carlyle – 1841; Sidney Hook: The hero in history – 1943):
some men are eventful, while others are event-making: place value on the historymaker;
suggestion that the mark of a great man is his historical impact. Placing Hitler and Gandhi
in the same general theory does not render the theory value-free, it leaves its central value –
influence – implicit.
2. Situationalist view (Herbert Spencer – 1884): the times produce the person and not the
other way around. But leaders are still assumed to be those people who gain prominence in
society.
3. Contingency theory: synthesis (1950s): the appropriate style of leadership is contingent on
the requirements of the particular situation. For ex., some situations require controlling or
autocratic behavior and others participative or democratic behavior. The mark of leadership
is still influence, or control.
4. Transactional theory: field of inquiry expanded into the specific interactions between
leaders and followers – the transactions by which an individual gains influence and sustains
it over time. Based on reciprocity. But do not evaluate the purpose to which influence is put
or the way purposes are derived. Leadership-as-influence implicitly promotes influence as
an orienting value, perpetuating a confusion between means and ends.
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Prescriptive concept of leadership – 4 criteria to develop a definition of leadership
1. must sufficiently resemble current cultural assumptions: “mobilize”: motivating,
organizing, orienting, and focusing attention.
2. should be practical: activity rather than position (allows for leadership from multiple
positions and for the use of various abilities depending of the situation/culture)
3. should point toward socially useful activities: by setting goals that meet the needs of both
the leader and followers: more than influence. But what are those needs?
4. should offer a broad definition of social usefulness:
o Moral elevation? (Mc Gregor) socially useful goals not only have to meet the needs of
the followers, they also should elevate followers to a higher moral level:
Transformational leadership. Need to construct a hierarchy of orienting values: risks of
becoming too general or impractical.
o Legitimacy? based on a set of procedures by which power is conferred from the many
to the few. But leaves no room for outsiders when social progress may require that
someone push the system to its limit (Sakharov; Havel; King;…)
o Organizational effectiveness? At what?
o Adaptive work? Consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values
people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality
they face. Requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior. Mobilize people to learn
new ways. The leader intervenes in people’s lives and social systems with the aims of
increasing their adaptive capacity, their ability to clarify values and make progress on
the problems those values define.

Getting people to clarify what matters most, with what trade-offs

Orchestrating these conflicts among and within interested parties, and not just
between the members and formal shareholders of the organization – who should
play a part in the deliberations

Including competing values: not a value-free process; values are shaped and refined
by rubbing against real problems

Advancing goals and designing a strategy that promotes adaptive work

Keeping social distress within a bearable range
Hitler a leader?
If influence alone: yes
Met the needs of both leader and followers: yes – many shared his goals
Organizational effectiveness: yes – for a time at least he succeeded in restoring the German
economy
Elevate ? no. played to people’s basest needs and fears.
Legitimate authority: no. maintained his political dominance through terror.
Adaptive work: misdiagnosed Germany’s ills and brought his nation to disaster.
Advantages of viewing leadership in terms of adaptive work
- Points to the pivotal importance of reality testing: process of weighing one interpretation
of a problem and its sources of evidence against others (Hitler’s error was not only moral
but also diagnostic). To produce adaptive work, a vision must track the contours of reality;
it has to have accuracy, and not simply imagination and appeal.
- Allows us to evaluate leadership in process.
- Need not to impose our own hierarchy of human needs. Questions:
o Are its members testing their views of the problem against competing views within the
community or are they defensively sticking to a partic. perspective, suppressing others?
o Are people testing seriously the relationship between means and ends?
o Are conflicts over values and the morality of various means open to examination?
o Are policies analyzed and evaluated to distinguish fact from fiction?
- Drawbacks: connotes coping.
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To lead or to mislead
For a social system to learn, old patterns of relationship - balances of power, customary
operating procedures, distributions of wealth - may be threatened. Old skills may be rendered
useless. Humans can learn and cultures can change, but how much and how fast? Applied to
cultures, raises the question: Adapt to what, for what purpose? We perceive the problem
whenever circumstances do not conform to the way we think things ought to be. This involves
not only the assessment of reality but also the clarification of values. Typically, a social system
will honor some mix of values and the competition within this mix largely explains why
adaptive work so often involves conflict.
Example of Easter Island (Polynesia - 500 years ago):
- Abundance of palm trees
- Adaptation meant variation on known methods
- But as population grew and number of trees began to dwindle: situation that their repertoire
of responses could not master.
- Beliefs became impediments to further adaptation. Even grander stone figures. Human
sacrifice and cannibalism.
- 1722 trees were gone. Starvation.
- Could have avoided it through productive interaction of different values (relationship with
divine spirits vs. direct relationship with nature; traditionalists vs. heretics): both factions
had a grasp of some critical dimensions of reality.
- Mix of values provides multiple vantage points from which to view reality. Conflict and
heterogeneity are resources for social learning. Although people may not come to share one
another's values, they may learn vital information.
Adaptive challenge is a particular kind of problem where the gap (disparity between values
and circumstances) cannot be closed by the application of current technical know-how or
routine behavior. Leadership: taking actions to clarify values and asking questions like:
- What are we missing here?
- Are there values of competing groups that we suppress rather than apply to our
understanding of the problem at hand?
- Are there shared values that might enable us to engage competing views?
Disequelibrium dynamics – 3 forms – how to turn 2 into 3
1. current problem presents no new challenge: response from the current repertoire may
restore equilibrium successfully
2. no ready solution: still try to apply response from its repertoire; only restores equilibrium in
the short-term at the cost of LT consequences
3. learn to meet the new challenge
Why do we fail?
- Misperceive threat
- Perceive threat but the challenge exceeds the culture’s adaptive capability
- Fail to adapt because of the distress provoked by the problem and the changes it demands:
work avoidance mechanisms: blaming, scapegoating, externalizing the enemy, denying,
jumping to conclusions, finding a distracting issue
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How to distinguish work from work avoidance? How can we counteract it? Pacing the work
- Example of Father & child
- When the subject of discussion is suddenly taken off the table
- When the level of stress associated with an issue suddenly drops
- When the focus shifts from attending to the problem itself to alleviating the symptoms of
stress
- When responsibility for the problem is displaced to an easy target
The functions of dominance in primate societies – at least 5
- Choosing the direction of group movement (dominate the attention of the band, serve as a
reference point by which the rest of the band orient themselves)
- Protecting the group from predators
- Orienting members to their status and place
- Controlling conflicts (serves a control function, mediating aggression within the group and
maintaining stability)
- Maintaining norms, including norms of mating and resource allocation
Human societies
- Dominance in children: attention focus upward in the hierarchy
- Small adult groups:
o When men and women who do not know one another from a new group and undertake
a task, they routinely establish a hierarchy of roles: the authority structure establishes
places and roles for group members, and by so doing creates a coordinating and
problem-solving mechanism. When members know to whom to turn, they feel calmed.
o The group often informally selects and authorizes one of its own members to chair the
group in place of the person designated by the scientist in charge (formal and informal
authority roles do not necessarily overlap
o The group looks to its chairperson for certain services
Authority: Conferred power to perform a service – reminder of two facts
- authority is given and can be taken away
- authority is conferred as part of an exchange: Given your know-how, I give you the power
to make decisions to accomplish a service, and I’ll follow those decisions as long as it
appears to me that they serve my purposes.
Dominance:
- as theoretical types of power relations, dominance and authority can be viewed as distinct.
o Dominance relationships are based on coercion or habitual deference
o Authority relationships are voluntary and conscious
- In reality they often overlap.
o The victim does not authorize the gunman
o But all too often, power is just taken, and deference to it indicates no authorization
whatsoever. Deference over time may become authorization, even without deliberate
decision.
o Thus not all authority relationships are the product of a conscious and deliberate
conferring of power. Often, like dominance, they are produced by habitual deference.
Many of us have been so conditioned to defer to authority that we do not realize the
extent to which we are the source of an authority’s power. Many people take their
powerlessness for granted.
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o
o
We forget that we are the principals. But in authority relationships, both principals and
agents make choices. We often fail to appreciate that the relationship between the
public and its government entail an implicit exchange of services. Often, the deal to
confer power in exchange for a service is made so automatically that the phrase “social
habit” may fit better than “social contract”.
On the contrary for children for example, what was previously habitual deference may
become conference.
Authority and culture
- Our capacity to internalize the teachings of authorities enables the formation of culture and
consequently, large and flexible societies and organization. In a large social system, the
norms that guide people’s behavior have to be portable. We have to be able to act our parts
as members of a society without constant reference to an authority figure. Thus, our cultural
norms fulfill in many ways the social functions of authority.
- The existence of a robust culture, however, cannot replace entirely the need for an authority
system. The office of authority provides a position about which people’s expectations
cluster. Indeed the perpetuation of the culture requires a trustworthy network of authorities
so that children internalize a fairly coherent set of norms.
- In societies with well-established and coherent institutions, authorities may primarily play a
symbolic role as the embodiment of cultural norms. Indeed, during long periods of stability,
the role of authority may even seem to vanish. But it never disappears entirely.
- Apparently, people always need to glance, at least on occasion, toward some central figure,
even if only a figurehead. The function of the headman is to symbolize the norms and their
community.
Stress and charismatic authority
- What happens at the start-up of an organization when corporate norms have yet to be
formed, or when an established society faces an adaptive challenge and must renew itself?
- Yet, over time, as “a way of doing business” develops, the office of senior authority takes
on a life of its own. The charisma is transferred from the person to the office, where it then
rubs off on whoever holds it.
- When the stress is severe, we seem especially willing to grant extraordinary power and give
away our freedom.
- We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.
- We do not realize that the source of their charisma is our own yearning. What would have
become of Hitler had he been born in normal times?
- Charismatic authority can generate a mindless following or devolve into bureaucratic
institutions that rely on central planning and control.
- Focusing upward, people lose touch with their communities, markets, and personal
resources.
Mobilizing adaptive work
- Authority relationships are enormously productive: the social functions we call upon
authority to serve need to be met.
- Yet many of us have mixed feelings about authority. How should social functions be met in
the context of adaptive work, in times of distress?
- How can one fashion and use authority relationships to mobilize rather than hinder a
community’s adaptive efforts?
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Technical problems
- Most emergency rooms have rotations and turnover in their teams, making a comprehensive
set of norms unrealistic. Looking to the person in authority to serve critical functions
therefore seems entirely appropriate.
- The staff of an emergency room faces a kind of problem similar to many everyday
situations. These problems are technical in the sense that we know already how to respond
to them. Often, they can only be accomplished with mastery and ingenuity. They are not
easy, nor unimportant. But they are technical because the necessary knowledge about them
already has been digested. For these situations, we turn to authority with reasonable
expectations.
- For many problems, however, no adequate response has yet been developed.
- In stress situation, our inclination to look to authority may generate inappropriate
dependencies. We look to our authorities for answers they cannot provide.
- What happens then? Authorities, under pressure to be decisive, sometimes fake the remedy
or take action that avoids the issue by skirting it.
- But in the LT, some problems get worse, and then frustration arises both with the problem
situation and with those people in authority who were supposed to resolve it.
- In response to our frustration, we are likely to perpetuate the vicious cycle by looking even
more earnestly to authority, but this time we look for someone new offering more certainty
and better promises. We may rid ourselves of our current authorities in the hope that “if
only we had the right leader our problems would be solved.”
- The flight to authority is particularly dangerous for at least 2 reasons:
o because the work avoidance often occurs in response to our biggest problems and
o because it disables some of our most important personal and collective resources for
accomplishing adaptive work.
Distinguishing adaptive from technical work
The practice of medicine illustrates the distinction between technical and adaptive problems,
and the dynamics these problems generate.
Type I: situations in which the patient’s expectations are realistic: the doctor can provide a
solution and the problem (Infection) can be defined, treated and cured on the basis of
- using the doctor’s expertise
- shifting the patient’s burden primarily onto the doctor’s shoulders. The patient
appropriately depends on the doctor’s know-how, and the doctor depends on the patient’s
trust, satisfaction, and willingness to arrange payment.
Type II: the problem is definable but not clear-cut solution is available. The doctor may have
an idea, a proposal but the patient must help to create the solution. (Heart disease).
- the dependency on authority appropriate to technical situations becomes inappropriate in
adaptive ones.
- The doctor’s authority still provides a resource to help the patient respond, but beyond her
substantive knowledge, she needs a different kind of expertise – the ability to help the
patient do the work that only he can do.
Type III: the problem definition is not clear-cut, and technical fixes are not available. Learning
is required both to define problems and implement solutions (chronic illness, advanced stage of
cancer). In these situations, the doctor can continue to operate in a mechanical mode by
diagnosing and prescribing remedies (and a “remedy” of some sort can usually be found). Yet
doing so avoids the problem-defining and problem-solving work of both doctor and patient. In
II & III situations, treating the illness is too narrow to define the task. For example to define the
primarily problem as a cancer may be a denial of reality if it is at an advanced stage. Cancer is
then a condition.
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The patient’s real work consists of facing and making adjustments to harsh realities that go
beyond his health condition: making the most out of his life; considering what his children may
need after he is gone; preparing his wife, parents, loved ones, and friends; and completing
valued professional tasks.
Unfortunately, neither doctors nor patients are inclined to differentiate between technical and
adaptive work. The harsher the reality, the harder we look to authority for a remedy.
The story of Steve & Connie Buchanan & Doctor Parsons suggests what an authority can do
when the authority does not know the answer: the authority can induce learning by asking hard
questions and by recasting people’s expectations to develop their response ability.
In contrast, Plato argues in The Republic that people need a philosopher-king to counteract their
ignorance (medical analogy). The expertise required of leadership is for Plato a substantive
vision of the good: he failed to appreciate the medical difference between technical and
adaptive work. Parsons used her authority relationship like a containing vessel for the family’s
learning process: she not only set the agenda, she also regulated stress.
Implications:
In a medical setting, a problem will lack clarity because the patient has not yet reasoned and
separated the problem into Type I and II components.
In a complex social system, a problem will lack clarity because a multitude of factions will
have divergent opinions about both the nature of the problem and its possible solutions. Does
global warning present a problem needing attention? Which scientist should we trust?
The critical strategic question becomes: whose problem is it? And the answer is not so obvious.
Still, medicine and politics present similar dilemmas.
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3 general implications:
1. an authority figure exercising leadership has to tell the difference between technical and
adaptive situations because they require different responses. She must ask the key
differentiating question: does making progress on this problem require changes in people’s
values, attitudes, or habits of behavior? With adaptive problems, authority must look
beyond authoritative solutions. Authoritative action may usefully provoke debate: it
becomes a tool in a strategy to mobilize adaptive work toward a solution, rather than a
direct means to institute one. This requires a shift in mindset:
o One must be prepared for an eruption of distress in response to the provocation.
o In contrast, the mindset which views authoritative action as a solution would logically
view an aggravated community as an extraneous complication to making headway,
rather than an inherent part of making progress.
2. Having an authority relationship with people is both a resource for leadership and a
constraint:
o Resource because it can provide the instruments and power to hold together and harness
the distressing process of doing adaptive work.
o Constraint because it is contingent on meeting the expectations of constituents.
3. As learning takes place, Type III situations may be broken down partially if not completely
into Type I and II components.
The case of William Ruckelshaus of the Environment Protection Agency: This case
illustrates the implications discussed out of the Parson’s case, in a large and public system.
Implications:
EPA had no real experience in orchestrating public deliberation, public thinking on problems:
what could pollution experts say about the value of jobs versus the value of health, or ways to
cope with a risk-filled life, or paths to economic diversification?
The regional EPA office exhausted itself in the undertaking. Was it worth it? 3 significant
benefits:
1. Within the EPA itself, the staff at HQ began to appreciate what it meant to be on the
frontlines.
o Routine procedures to involve the community began to change.
o In following years, the EPA began to act as a frequent sponsor and forum for
negotiation among stakeholders to resolve environmental disputes.
o The focus on risk management broadened the mission of the EPA, giving a larger
context to its previously narrow scientific orientation.
2. The Tacoma experiment in public deliberation restored the credibility of the EPA. The
former head of EPA had crusaded against the “excesses” of the environmentalists and
polarized public debate by framing the issue starkly as a trade-off between jobs and the
environment.
3. The communities of Tacoma and Ruston began seeing the need to adapt (public
engagement).
o Ruckelshaus cut against the grain when he insisted that the public realize that the job of
regulating pollutants was not simply a technical matter of setting safe thresholds of
emission. Trade-offs (which means losses) would have to be made that involved value
conflicts not amenable to scientific analysis. Otherwise, agencies like EPA would
continue to be called upon to do the impossible, to provide fixes for what could not be
fixed by fiat from above.
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The stories of Parsons & Ruckelshaus suggest a strategy of leadership consisting of several
principles:
1. They identified the adaptive challenge, the gap between aspirations and reality, and
focused attention on the specific issues created by that gap.
2. They regulated the level of distress caused by confronting the issues. Not just a matter of
planning and then implementing the plan by force of their authority (against Kotter)
3. They kept attention focused on relevant issues.
4. They devised a strategy that shifted responsibility for the problem to the primary
stakeholders.
Not only constrained them but also provided them with several kinds of power: must know the
tools at her disposal.
Two forms of authority
- Formal authority is granted because the officeholder promises to meet a set of explicit
expectations (job descriptions, legislated mandates,…)
- Informal authority comes from promising to meet expectations that are often left implicit
(trustworthiness, ability, civility,…): brings with it the power to extend one’s reach way
beyond the limits of the job description.
Authority as a resource for leadership – framework for assessing strategic assets for
mobilizing adaptive work.
The relationship with group provides a holding environment for containing the stresses of its
adaptive efforts.
It gives the capacity to command and direct attention.
It gives access to information (the group reveals itself to the authority)
It gives control over the flow of information.
Attention and access to information brings the power to frame issues
It gives means to orchestrate conflict and contain disorder.
It gives the power to choose the decisionmaking process (consultative, autocratic, consensual,
or some variation)
1. Managing the holding environment
o “holds” the patient in a process of developmental learning, to transform Type III
problems into Type II.
o Consists of any relationship in which one party has the power to hold the attention of
another party and facilitate adaptive work, regulating the stresses that work generates.
o Consists of bonds of trust, or of fear, mutual need, and brute force or its threat: holding
environments formed initially by purely coercive means can provide a potent way to
transform stresses into adaptive change. But not always. The opportunity for adaptive
work is often squandered within both noncoercive and coercive authority relationships.
o The strategic task is to maintain a level of tension that mobilizes people (pressurecooker metaphor): Parsons constructed a pressure cooker made from relationships of
informal authority derived primarily from trust.
o Trust in authority relationships is a matter of predictability along two dimensions:
values and skill.
o Without this predictability, civilization itself would not be possible: unpredictable
painful events are more distressing than predictable ones.
o Example of the Mafia and the 17th century Spanish throne: Distrust percolates through
the social ladder, and the unpredictability of sanctions generates uncertainty in
agreements,…
o How fast Parsons could change the expectations of her patients would have 3 broad
determinants:

The severity of the adaptive challenge and the stress it generated.
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The resilience of the patient and their support system
The strength of the holding environment provided by her authority, for containing
and channeling the stress of the challenge.
Parsons regulated the level of stress by pacing and sequencing and by organizing
support services that would meet specific needs.
Pacing consisted of gauging the correlation between how much pressure the family
could stand and how much pressure the next piece of adaptive work would generate.
Her actions served 2 functions:

they directed the attention to the adaptive work issues and

they “tested the waters”, the current resilience of the system.
It required an inner discipline, poise.
Ruckelshaus also took steps to increase trust and contain the distress outside and within
the agency.


o
o
o
o
o
2. Directing attention
o Attention is the currency of leadership
o Can also be dangerous: turning itself into a lightning rod of attention; you then have to
take the heat.
o Yet without it, Ruckelshaus could not have made his point to the nation.
3. Gathering and testing information – reality testing
o Because authorities are expected to know, they are given access to information.
o This gives a special vantage point.
o But it does not translate directly into latitude for taking action (might not have a clear
authorization to communicate it).
o One has to communicate subtly, taking into account the particularities of the
constituents, their network of support, and the harshness of the news.
4. Managing information & framing issues
o More than a conduit of information. The task is to frame issues so that people
comprehend the opportunity and challenge to them.
o The central question is: Has the issue fastened in people’s minds?
o The basic strategic logic is as follows: People are more likely to pay attention to
arguments and perspectives about which they feel some urgency. Urgency, well
framed, promotes adaptive work.
o This may happen at the cost of attention to other issues.
5. Orchestrating conflicting perspectives
o 2 key resources: the right to mediate and the power to arbitrate
o The essence of the problem consists of orchestrating the conflicting voices into some
sort of harmony.
o Pieces of the puzzle – information about the problem – lie scattered in the hands of the
stakeholders across divisions, interest groups, organizations, and communities.
o To lead a group of factions, one has to sense the separate languages.
o Leading across boundaries requires permeating and reforming the boundaries.
o Ruckelshaus announced that a ruling was imminent and that the public would bear the
weight of deliberating on it: this cast 2 coals into the fire at once: the issue itself – a
ruling on arsenic emissions, and the process of decision – public participation rather
than authoritative decision-making.
o The workshops themselves were highly structured, actively facilitated by staff to
ensure that no individual dominated the conversation.
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6. Choosing the decisionmaking process
o Requires judgment based on several factors

The type of problem

The resilience of the social system

The severity of the problem

The time frame for taking action
o Adaptive situations tend to demand a more participative mode of operating to shift
responsibility to the primary stakeholders.
o Takes time because the problem lies largely in their attitudes, values,…
o Nevertheless, autocratic process ok

If the social system has little resilience.

If problem so severe that it could overwhelm the society.

Crisis situation
o One becomes more autocratic – exclusive – when the issue is likely to overwhelm the
current resilience of the group or society given the time available for decision.
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The case of Johnson, King & Co.
Main implications: Johnson leads with authority – he can pace the work, modulate the stress,…
King & co lead without formal authority.
Leading without authority:
- Benefits:
o latitude for creative deviance
o issue focus
o frontline information (need a base, take counsel, also from antagonists)
- Drawbacks:
o Little control over the holding environment: need to regulate distress by modulating the
provocation

Take the authority figure as a barometer

Reduce vulnerability of becoming a lightning rod by providing a context for action
in order to avoid being killed as a messenger

Become a living embodiment of your cause/issue but avoid becoming the issue
yourself
- Risks:
o Temptation to identify the authority figure as the audience for action: the audience is
the group
-
Key questions to ask to mobilize the real stakeholders:
o Who are the primary stakeholders and how might they change their ways?
o What expectations do they have of their authority?
o How could the authority figure begin to reshape those expectations to provide yourself
with latitude to take action?
o What could one do, leading without authority, to reshape those expectations to pave his
way?
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Johnson & Vietnam: took the stance that leaders lead and followers follow
- Inapt analogies
- Accepted as truth the domino theory
- Poor and untested assumptions about the psycho and history of the Vietnamese
- Fail to ask and answer critical policy questions:
o Would the north Vietnamese be inclined to bargain?
o Will to prosecute a long war in Asia?
o Was it ethical to fight this war?
- Miscalculated the costs of going to war
- Ignored the lessons of his domestic policy successes (voting rights)
- Failed
o to face the nation with the adaptive challenge of Vietnam (did not dare to face the risk
of letting South Vietnam fall by engaging a public debate)
o to keep the level of distress within a productive range (what might have seemed in his
mind an effort to pace the work became instead an act of misleading the nation)
o to discipline attention
o to distribute responsibility
o to use dissent as a source of insight and options
- Not just a personal error or failure of character: historical trends favoring presidential
autonomy in making war – to do differently would have required a sea change in the
prevailing conception of the President’s responsibilities in Foreign Affairs.
- Personalized language of his reasoning (p. 159)
Technical reasons for autocratic action
- Various requirements of making foreign policy
o Need of unity behind the President
o Military crisis requires dispatch (clear chain of command)
o Intricacies of foreign policy require the substantive expertise of experienced
professionals
o Negotiations require decisiveness
o President sits at the hub of military and diplomatic channels of secret information
- Thus, democracy demanded good results for the people, not big debates?
- Ok in a routine problem situation but in the case of Vietnam these requirements were either
unachievable or did not apply?
o Sustained unity could not be achieved through autocratic action – needed to ripen the
issue
 Long war
 Age of television
o Did not require split-second decision making – time for deliberation
o Basic questions of values and priorities were political and not technical
o Necessity in international negotiations for a single point of responsible authority does
not reduce the negotiator’s need for support
o Questions posed by the Vietnam war were not the kind that required secrecy: just war?
Worth the costs?
- Treated Vietnam as a technical problem
o Failed to create a holding environment for getting others to share responsibility for
tough issues and for protecting voices of dissent (Mansfield, Fullbright) and hereby
sacrificed the political tools at his disposal to reality-test his policy.
o Squandered his unique position as orchestrator of the policymaking process: Vietnam
became Johnson’s war, not Congress’s and not the Nation’s.
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When Pacing the work becomes work avoidance
- Good reasons to avoid or delay the distress
o May permit giving priority to more important issues
o Provide time to strengthen the society’s problem-solving abilities.
- Pacing might resemble work avoidance because both can involve deception.
o But the deception associated with pacing is a temporary tactic
Having to know the answers
- Johnson viewed foreign policy as a job for technical experts, not as a proper realm for the
politics of inclusion
- His strong personal need to dominate most situations (disciplined by legislative politics into
exceptional mastery of the participative process) stood untethered in an unfamiliar context
with traditions and norms that reinforced dominance.
- These two factors limited his freedom to raise hard questions and prevented him from
engaging in a mode of learning to have decisive answers.
Placing oneself
- Authority figure must decide where to place himself in relation to an issue:
o Circumvention, with the risk of backing into a potential crisis (Johnson on Vietnam)
o Frontal challenge – getting out in front and becoming the “bearer of bad tidings” by
introducing the crisis
o Riding the wave – staying just in front of the crisis, anticipating the wave and trying to
direct its power as it breaks (Johnson on civil rights)
- Had Johnson exercised leadership in Vietnam, he may still have suffered defeat. Leadership
is no guarantee of survival. Quite the opposite. But it may increase the odds of survival.
- He might have used variations of the other two strategies.
- Of course, the policy may not have conformed to the expert opinion of his advisers, but
adaptive work often requires giving up a measure of “expert” control over the outcome.
Should have wrestled some of his questions more fully to the mat.
- However, it would very likely have cost Johnson in just the currency he hated most to pay:
legislative attention to the Great Society. All options would have required Johnson to face
loss and to prepare others for it. Something had to give. To varying degrees, each strategy
would likely have its costs in terms of both the Great Society and American conceptions of
role and foreign interest.
- By making the President the decision-maker instead of the leader of the nation’s problemsolving, Johnson lost his vantage point and his leverage over the holding environment.
Nixon’s downfall and Carter’s malaise
- 2 powerful forces reinforced Nixon’s predilection toward autocratic behavior:
o The polarizing trends of the Vietnam years
o The historical trends toward presidential autonomy in foreign affairs heightened during
the cold war
- Hence, ascribing Nixon’s downfall solely to character is too easy.
- The tragedy of Nixon’s downfall is not only the tragedy of one man. The tragedy is the
work neglected. Political ousters sometimes function in part as avoidance mechanisms,
providing society with a false or incomplete diagnosis (it was all the “leader’s” fault) and a
diversion from its own adaptive work still to be faced.
- Carter tried without great skill but courageously to challenge the nation to face problems of
both values and habits.
- But he neglected to lead the public through a similar learning process. Instead, he merely
delivered the answers.
- He may have believed in facing people with hard problems, but seemed not to know how.
15
-
Authority constrains leadership because in times of distress people expect too much. They
form inappropriate dependencies that isolate their authorities:
o Raise hard questions and one risks getting cut down, even if the questions are important
for moving forward on the problem.
o Thus, the need for leadership from people in authority becomes ever more critical
during periods of disequilibrium, when people’s urgency for answers increases.
o Yet that role is played badly if authorities reinforce dependency and delude themselves
into thinking that they have to have the answers when they do not.
Designing effective interventions – Key steps (for more info, see “The practice of Adaptive
Leadership” by Heifetz, Grashow & Linsky)
- Step 1: Get on the balcony
- Step 2: Determine the ripeness of the issue in the system
- Step 3: Ask, Who am I in this picture?
- Step 4: Think hard about your framing
- Step 5: Hold steady
- Step 6: Analyze the factions that begin to emerge
- Step 7: Keep the work at the center of people’s attention
Surviving leadership – Key principles (for more info, see “Leadership without easy
answers” by Heifetz)
- Pace the work
- Avoid the temptation of martyrdom
- Distinguish self from role
- Externalize the conflict
- Use partners
- Listen, using oneself as data
- Find a sanctuary
- Preserve a sense of purpose
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17
18
Bibliography for these notes
- “Leadership without easy answers” by Ronald Heifetz – The Belknap press of Harvard
University Press, 1994 (includes all the cases discussed during the lectures)
- “Leadership on the line” by Ronald Heifetz & Marty Linsky – Harvard Business Press,
2002
- “The practice of Adaptive Leadership” by Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow & Marty
Linsky – Harvard Business Press, 2009
- “Leadership can be taught” by Sharon Daloz Parks – Harvard Business Press, 2005
19
Notes synthesized from “The powers to lead”
by Joseph Nye, Harvard Business Press
I. Defining leadership
A leader is best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey
and acclaim him; worst when they despise him
Lao Tzu, 630 B.C.
One ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go
together, it is much safer to be feared than loved… Still a prince should make
himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids
hatred
Machiavelli, 1513
1. What can we deduce from these two quotes?
-
-
-
Effective leadership requires a mixture of skills: a mixture of soft and hard power
skills that Nye calls smart power.
Nye defines leaders as those who help a group create and achieve shared goals.
Some try to impose their goals, others derive them more from the group, but leaders
mobilize people to reach those objectives.
Leadership is a social relationship with three key components: leaders, followers,
and the contexts in which they interact.
Polls show that people today are less deferential to authority in organizations and
in politics.
o Soft power is becoming more important.
o Leadership theorists speak of “shared leadership” and “distributed leadership”.
They suggest images of leaders in the center of a circle rather than atop a
hierarchy.
Not everyone agrees though. Kramer warns that “in all our recent enchantment
with social intelligence and soft power, we’ve overlooked the kinds of skills leaders
need to bring about transformation in cases of tremendous resistance or inertia.
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2. Do leaders matter? Yes but…
-
-
-
-
Leadership is ubiquitous, and leaders are all around us. People persist in looking
for heroic leaders although leadership is actually much more broadly distributed in
societies.
HBS study of the effects of CEOs on corporate performance: accounted for about
14% of the difference in performance, ranging from 2% to 21% in
telecommunications:
o Any variable that accounts for 10% of the variation of complex social
phenomena is a factor to be reckoned with.
o On the other hand, these findings hardly support the magical view of
causation popularity attributed to leaders.
Eventful vs. event-making leaders (philosopher Sidney Hook)
o Eventful leader influences the course of subsequent developments by his
actions. The mythical little Dutch boy who stuck his finger in a leaking dike
and saved his country was an eventful leader.
 Although Reagan’s actions had some effect and he was eventful, he did not
create the fork in the historical road. Causation was more complex. The most
important underlying cause was the failure of the centrally planned Soviet
economy, the death of Andropox, the rise of Gorbatchev,…
o Event-making leader doesn’t just find a fork in the historical road: he helps
to create it. Such leaders are called transformational in the sense of changing
what would otherwise be the course of history. They raise new issues and new
questions.
 After Sept. 11, 2001, any American president might have responded to the
Taliban government’s provision of sanctuary to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, but
in choosing to also invade Iraq, Bush created a fork in the road and became a
transformational rather than merely eventful leader.
 Leaders are like surfers waiting for a big wave: individuals do not control the
waves, but can ride them. Individuals do not control events or structures, but
can anticipate them and bend them to their purpose to some degree.
Leaders have different degrees of effect on history, which are not captured by
Hook’s oversimplified distinction, and transformational change is often a matter
of degree.
According to Robert Tucker, leaders matter “a little more, a little less, depending
on:
o how they diagnose those problem situations for their political communities,
o what responses they prescribe for meeting them,
o and how well they mobilize the political community’s support for their
decisions.”
Yet generating influential ideas is not the same as mobilizing people for actions.
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3. Defining leaders and leadership
 Leadership means mobilizing people for a purpose. It is a relationship that orients
and mobilizes followers.
o Einstein was a leader in the simple sense of making breakthrough scientific
discoveries that others followed, but like the front-runner in a race, he was not
much interested in those who followed.
o Lincoln “had to understand the mix of motives in his fellow citizens, the
counterbalancing intensities with which the different positions were held, and in
what directions they were changing, moment by moment”.
o A leader needs to understand followers: “This is the time-consuming aspect of
leadership. It explains why great thinkers and artists are rarely the leaders of
others (as opposed to influences on them)”.
 Nye defines a leader as someone who helps a group create and achieve shared
goals.
o Leadership is the power to orient and mobilize others for a purpose. Holding a
formal leadership position is like having a fishing license; it does not guarantee
you will catch any fish.
o Leadership is not just who you are but what you do.
o The test of a leader is whether a group is more effective in both defining and
achieving its goals because of that person’s participation.
 Not only are leaders and followers often interchangeable in small groups, but in
large groups and organizations, most people wind up leading from the middle,
serving as leaders and followers – principals and agents – at the same time.
o Some chamber orchestras work without conductors, and some jazz groups shift
the lead constantly.
o Some radical groups (such as the environmental group Earth First!) pride
themselves on being “leaderless”, but that is because they make the mistake of
equating leadership with formal authority.
 We can think of leadership as a process with three key components: leaders,
followers, and contexts. The context consists of both the external environment and
the changing objectives that a group seeks in a particular situation.
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4. Heroic and alpha male approaches to leadership
-
-
Human seek heroes, but not all heroes are leaders, and not all leaders are heroic.
o Alpha male theory of leadership (psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig):
 “The reason that would-be leaders are always ready to try their hand at ruling seems
to be because they have little other choice:
 Any vacuum in leadership seems to unleash powerful social and biological
forces within potential candidates to ensure that any power void will not exist for
too long.
 The tendency for this response seems coded in their genes and represents a
latent archetypal response in much the same way as male chimps and baboons
must challenge the existing leader whenever they sense they have the slightest
chance to win, and often even when they do not.
 People are constantly playing games, literally and metaphorically, to establish
dominance in status.
o Yet if humans are hardwired by nature to be led by alpha males, how do we explain the
possibility that for most of our genetic history we had no alpha males?
 “Situational leadership” of most hunter-gatherer groups in which the leader varies
with the group’s circumstances, in which seniority exists, but there is nothing that
even approaches the idea of a chief or Big Man);
 Some human cultures today still have no such leaders.
o Another effect of the traditional heroic approach has been to support the belief that
leaders are born rather than made, and that nature is more important than nurture.
 This belief focuses our attention on the selection rather than training of leaders
(favorable prejudices towards tall men, IQ,…).
o But context is often more important than traits: Churchill’s traits did not change in
1940; the situation did.
o Traits-centered approach has not vanished, it has been broadened: traits have come
to be seen as consistent patterns of personality rather than inherited characteristics,
mixing nature and nurture.
 For example: a group of employers was asked to hire workers who had been ranked
by their looks. If the employers saw only the individuals’ resumes, beauty had no
impact on hiring. Surprisingly, however, when telephone interviews were included
in the process, beautiful people did better even though unseen by the employers. A
lifetime of social reinforcement base on their genetic looks may have encoded into
their voice patterns a tone of confidence that could be projected over the phone.
Nature and nurture became thoroughly intertwined.
In the view of most analysts today, institutional constraints such as constitutions and
impartial legal systems must circumscribe such heroic figures.
o Otherwise, such societies that rest on heroic leaders will not be able to develop the
civil society and broad social capital that are necessary for leading in today’s
networked world.
o Nature and nurture intertwine, but nurture is much more important in the modern
world than the heroic paradigm gives it credit for.
 As Grint observes, “It would be strange if leadership was the only human skill that
could not be enhanced through understanding and practice”.
 The U.S. Army categorizes leadership learning under 3 words: “Be, know, do”:
 “Be” refers to the shaping of character and values, which comes partly from
training and partly from experience.
 “Know” refers to analysis and skill, which can be trained.
 “Do” refers to action and requires both training and fieldwork. Most important,
however, is experience, the emphasis on learning from mistakes & a continuous
process that results from what the military calls “after-action reviews.”
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II. Leadership & Power
1. Defining Power
 Power is the ability to affect the behaviour of others to get the outcomes you
want. You can do that in three main ways:
o you can coerce them with threats (Hard - sticks),
o you can induce them with payments (Hard - carrots), or
o you can attract or co-opt them (Soft).
 Getting the outcomes one wants by attracting others rather than manipulating
their material incentives.
 “Managers can’t control everything. They must instead work through
influence, persuasion and an awful lot of training. And corporate culture – the
common organizational values that people learn – is often what guides
people, not the rules or the instructions of any one manager.”
 In behavioural terms, soft power is attractive power. In terms of resources,
soft power resources are the assets – tangible and intangible – that produce
such attraction.
 Soft power can provide what fund-raisers call “the power of the ask.” An
index of leaders’ power is the frequency, size, and range of requests they can
successfully make of you. In institutions with flat hierarchies like universities
and other non-profit organizations, soft power is often the major asset
available to a leader. Once that soft power has eroded, little else is left.
People just say no.
 In many real-world situations, people’s motives are mixed.
o Command power – the ability to change what others do – can rest on
coercion or inducement.
o Co-optive power – the ability to shape what others want – can rest on the
attractiveness of one’s values or the ability to set the agenda of political choices.
 Power always depends on the context of the relationship: the domain of your
boss’s power in this case is limited to work.
 Sometimes people define power as the possession of resources that can influence
outcomes. A person or group is powerful if it is large, stable, and wealthy. Analysts
call this the “vehicle fallacy”. Richest politicians do not always win the elections.
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2. The power of followers: Why do people follow at all?
 One can think of Hitler’s followers in terms of concentric circles:
o with true believers like Goebbels, Göring, and Speer as inner core;
o they are followed by a circle of “good soldiers” like the Hamburg Reserve
Police Battalion 101, who, in a show of “crushing conformity,” willingly
executed Jews and Poles;
o an outer circle of complicit bystanders who knowingly acquiesced;
o and a further circle of passive bystanders who made no effort to know what
was behind the myths and propaganda;
o beyond them were those who refused to follow and resisted, many of whom
were killed or coerced into silence.
 Leadership, like power, is a relationship, and followers also have power both to
resist and to lead. Followers can be defined by their position as subordinates or
by their behaviour of going along with leaders’ wishes. Followers empower
leaders as well as vice versa.
o This has led some leadership analysts like Ronald Heifetz to avoid using the
word “followers” and refer to the others in a power relationship as citizens or
constituents.
 In modern life, most people wind up being both leaders and followers, and the
categories can become quite fluid.
 Followers’ behaviour can be ranked by its intensity and sorted into categories
(Kellerman) such as:
o alienated,
o exemplary,
o conformist,
o passive, and
o pragmatic.
 A successful middle-level leader persuades and attracts his boss as well as his
subordinates. Richard Haass, who served in several American administrations, uses
the metaphor of a compass:
o “North represents those for whom you work.
o To the South are those who work for you.
o East stands for colleagues, those in your organization with whom you work.
o West represents those outside your organization who have the potential to affect
matters that affect you.”
 Effective leadership from the middle often requires leading in all directions of that
compass.
o Lee Iacocca was a successful executive at Ford Motor Company, but not in all
directions. Leaders in the middle who forget to attract and persuade in all
directions often cease to be leaders.
 Even when they do not take initiative, followers have the power to set constraints
on leaders.
o In the hunter-gatherer societies discussed earlier, followers use ridicule,
secession, ostracism, and even assassination to limit leaders who try to claim
more power than their followers are willing to grant.
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3. The mixture of hard & soft power
 Weber identified three ideal types of authority of legitimated power. Two depend
on position and one on person.
o Under traditional authority, a person follows another because the latter is chief
or king or emperor by right of some traditional process such as heredity.
o Under rational or legal authority, a person follows because the other is
president or director or chair and has been properly elected or appointed based
on rational criteria.
o Under charismatic authority, a person follows another because the latter
embodies a gift of grace or exceptional magnetism.
 The distinction between informal personal power and power that grows out of a
formal position is not exactly the same as the distinction between hard and soft
power (link with Heifetz).
o Some leaders without formal authority, such as gang leaders, may effectively
use coercion as well as charisma, and
o some military officers have the soft power of charisma as well as the hard power
conveyed by their position.
o But generally, those without formal authority tend to rely more on soft
power, whereas those in formal positions are better placed to mix hard and soft
power resources.
 People are drawn to others both by their inherent qualities and by the effect of
their communications.
o Some communications are designed to limit reasoning and frame issues as
impractical or illegitimate in such a way that they never get on the agenda for
real discussion.
o During periods of insecurity, leaders may appeal to patriotic rhetoric to exclude
criticism from the public discussion. At this point, persuasion blurs into
propaganda and indoctrination.
 Hard and soft powers are related because they are both approaches to achieving
one’s purpose by affecting the behaviour of others.
o Sometimes intimidators have a vision, belief in their cause, and a reputation for
success that attracts others despite their bullying behaviour.
o Although some studies suggest that bullying is detrimental to organizational
performance, the Stanford psychologist Roderick Kramer argues that bullies
who have a vision and disdain social constraints are “great intimidators” who
often succeed.
o While some studies report that Machiavellianism (defined as manipulative,
exploitive, and deceitful behaviour) is negatively correlated with leadership
performance, other studies have found a positive relationship.
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 So where does leadership theory now stand on the roles of hard and soft power?
o As David Hume pointed out more that two centuries ago, no individual alone is
strong enough to coerce everyone else.
o Except for some religious leaders, such as the Dalai Lama, who combines
personal and positional power, soft power is rarely sufficient. Psychologists
have found that too much assertiveness by a leader worsens relationships, just as
too little limits achievement: “Like salt in a sauce.”
o CEO Jeff Immelt: “When you run General Electric, there are 7 to 12 times a
year when you have to say, ‘you’re doing it my way.’ If you do it 18 times, the
good people will leave. If you do it 3 times, the company falls apart.”
 The ability to combine hard and soft power into an effective strategy is smart
power.
o Machiavelli may be correct that it is better for a prince to be feared than to be
loved, but we sometimes forget that the opposite of lover is not fear, but hatred.
And Machiavelli made it clear that hatred is something a prince should
carefully avoid.
o Soft power is not good per se, and it is not always better than hard power.
Nobody likes to feel manipulated, even by soft power.
 In a competition with soft power, it matters very much what you and others
think.
 If I shoot you to achieve my objective, it does not matter much what you
think.
o Like any form of power, soft power can be wielded for good of bad purposes,
and these often vary according to the eye of the beholder.
 Bin Laden possesses a great deal of soft power in the eyes of his followers,
but that does not make his actions good from an outside point of view.
 It is not necessarily better to twist minds than to twist arms.
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4. Powers and networks
 In today’s information age, the control of information flows in networks is an
important source of power for leaders. So also is the ability to process vast, diverse
flows so that the information becomes knowledge and not mere noise.
 Think of the difference between friendships and acquaintances.
o Valuable information if more likely to be shared by friends than among
acquaintances.
o But weak ties that reach our further may provide more novel information.
o Strong ties may provide the power of loyalty but be resistant to change;
weak ties may provide “the necessary information and ability to link diverse
groups together in a cooperative, successful manner.”
 A great democratic politician has to be a person with a great capacity for
shallow friendships.
 Leaders will increasingly need to understand the relationship of networks to
power and how to adapt strategies and create teams that benefit from both
strong and weak ties.
 Equally interesting for the question of leadership is what globalization is doing to
the group question “Who is us?”
o Humans have always been capable of multiple identities, but traditionally they
took the form of concentric circles that tended to weaken with distance.
o In today’s global world, a better metaphor might be networks of Venn
diagrams.
o Leaders are identity entrepreneurs who increase their power by activating and
mobilizing some of their followers’ multiple identities at the cost of others.
Intergroup leadership becomes more complex and more important.
 The other major change in the macro-context of leadership is the information
revolution.
o Technology democratizes social and political processes and, for better and
worse, institutions play less of a mediating role.
o The information revolution is affecting the structure of organizations. Polls
show that people today are less deferential to authority in organizations and
politics.
 In 1930, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase tried to explain
the rise of the modern corporation. Why not just rely on markets? His answer
was transactions costs.
 The classic economic theory of the firm as a hierarchical organization that
internalizes functions in order to reduce transactions costs (think GM) is
being supplemented by the notion of firms as networks of outsourcing (think
Toyota or Nike).
 But today, “more companies now consist essentially of intangible assets such
as patents plus the values embedded in their brands. The proportion of
intangible assets to shareholder value at Fortune 500 companies has steadily
risen from about 50 per cent in 1980 to 70 per cent today.”
 So that “Hierarchical, command-and-control approached simply do not work
anymore. The reduction of transactions costs does not need to go through
formal hierarchical organization anymore.
28
 “In dynamic, complex, and ambiguous contexts like the dotcom environment,
the traditional view of a leader’s being decisively in control is difficult to
reconcile…
 Effective leadership depends on the use of multiple ‘leaders’ for capable
decision-making and action-taking.”
 The way that governments work is also changing. They are constructing and using
market mechanisms for public purposes.
 Postheroic leadership “depends less on the heroic actions of a few individuals at
the tope and more on collaborative leadership practices distributed throughout an
organization.
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5. Types and Skills of leaders (charismatic & transformational)
 Leaders come in a great variety of sizes, shapes, and types.
 Because Nye is primarily interested in the types and skills of leaders that are
relevant to modern democratic societies and organizations, he focuses on the
currently dominant theoretical approach, called the “neocharismatic and
transformational leaders paradigm.”
 Charismatic leadership
o One of the most common ways to differentiate types of leaders is to call them
charismatic or non-charismatic. Charisma produces soft power, for better and
for worse.
 In common usage, charisma is the special power of a person to inspire
fascination and loyalty. Charisma is the Greek word for “divine gift” or
“gift of grace”.
o Weber said that personal charisma lasts only “as long as it receives recognition
and is able to satisfy the followers or disciples.” In other words, there is a
sociological as well as a psychological dimension to charisma.
o Does charisma originate in the individual, in the followers, or in the
situation? Some theorists say all three.
o The power that charismatic leaders unleash among their followers can do great
good or great harm.
 Some theorists categorize “negative charismatics” as those who are prone to
grandiose projects, inattention to details, unwillingness to delegate, failure to
create institutions that empower followers, and lack of planning for their
succession.
 On the other hand, there have bee historical moments when “positive” or
“reparative” charismatic leaders like Gandhi, King and Nelson Mandela
have released energies among their followers that have transformed social
and political situations for the better.
o Some theorists distinguish between:
 “close” charismatics, who work best in small groups or inner circles where
the effects of their personality are felt directly, and
 “distant” charismatics, who rely on more remote theatrical performance to
reach and move the broader imagined communities that they aspire to lead.
 In the first case, the personal charm is felt directly; in the latter case, it is
projected and mediated.
30
o Other theorists distinguish:
 “socialized” charismatics, who use their power to benefit others, and
 “personalized” charismatics, whose narcissistic personalities lead to selfserving behaviour.
o Resources help reinforce charisma:
 “In ancient times leaders often wore special clothing, masks and ornaments
that conferred on them a larger-than-life appearance”;
 For modern executives, “the same function is played by private planes,
limousines, palatial homes, exclusive seats at sporting events, and other
trappings of corporate power.”
o Edwards concluded that charisma is more easily identified after the fact than
before it – ex post rather than ex ante. It is hard to use charisma to predict
who will be a successful leader.
o Followers are more likely to attribute charisma to leaders when they feel a
strong need to change, often in the context of a personal, organizational, or
social crisis.
 The British public did not see Churchill as a charismatic leader in 1939
 but a year later, his vision, confidence, and communications skills made him
charismatic in the eyes of the British people given the anxieties they felt after
the fall of France and the Dunkirk evacuation.
 Yet by 1945, when the public focus turned from winning the war to the
construction of a welfare state, Churchill was voted out of office. His
charisma did not predict his electoral defeat. The change in followers’ needs
was a better predictor.
 Transformational and transactional leadership
o Transformational leaders empower and elevate their followers.
Transformational leaders mobilize power for change by appealing to their
followers’ higher ideals and moral values rather than their baser emotions of
fear, greed, and hatred.
 Charisma in the sense of personal magnetism is only one part of
transformational leadership.
 For leadership theorist Bernard Bass, transformational leadership also
includes:
 an element of “intellectual stimulation” (broadening followers’
awareness of situations and new perspectives) and
 “individualized consideration” (providing support, coaching, and
developmental experiences to followers rather than treating them as mere
means to an end).
o Transformational leaders are contrasted with transactional leaders, who
motivate followers by appealing to their self-interest.
 Transactional leaders use various approaches, but all the rest on reward,
punishment, and self-interest.
o Just as hard and soft power can be complementary, the two types of leadership
style are not mutually exclusive.
 Leaders can pick from a menu of hard and soft power resources.
 Many leaders use both styles at different times in different contexts.
31
o
o
o
o
 Achieving transformational objectives may require a combination of
both hard and soft power, and the mix may change over time. Some hard
power leaders have a vision that provides soft power.
Although the term transactional is clear, the concept of transformation is
confusing because theorists use it to refer to
 the objectives of the leaders,
 the styles they use, and
 the outcomes they produce.
Those three dimensions are not the same thing.
 Sometimes leaders transform the world but not their followers, or vice versa;
 Sometimes they use a transactional style to accomplish transformational
objectives.
 Consider the example of Lyndon Johnson.
o In the 1950s, Senator Johnson deeply wanted to transform racial
injustice in the South, but he did not use soft power to preach to or
inspire a new vision in other senators.
o Instead, he misled his fellow southerners about his intentions and used
a transactional style of hard power bullying and bargaining to achieve
progress toward his transformational objectives in passing a civil rights
bill in 1957 that was anathema to many of the supporters who had made
him majority leader. He did not change his followers, but he did begin
to change the world of African Americans in the South.
 Franklin Roosevelt is often cited as an example of a transformational
leader;
o In the 1930s, he used the soft power of inspirational communications to
help achieve his transformational goals of social reform, transforming
the views of his followers in the process.
o But after he failed to transform American isolationist attitudes, FDR
used very indirect transactional bargaining to pursue his goal of moving
U.S. foreign policy toward support of Great Britain before World War
II.
Given this confusion in the theory, it is better to use different terms to
describe leaders’ objectives and their styles.
 With regard to leaders’ objectives of changing the views of their followers,
we can use Burn’s term “transforming”.
 In relation to changing the world, we can refer to leaders’ objectives as
ranging from status quo to transformational.
 We can distinguish leaders’ styles by how they use hard and soft power
resources.
 A leader may use both hard and soft power styles to achieve
transformational objectives or incremental objectives or to preserve the
status quo.
Nye uses the terms
 “transactional style” to characterize what leaders do with their hard power
resources and
 “inspirational style” to characterize leadership that rests more on soft power
resources.
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o It would be more accurate to display leaders in various positions in a twodimensional space rather than restrict them only to one of the four quadrants,
since leaders adopt different styles in different contexts.
 Sometimes leaders (and their followers) seek to preserve the status quo or
adapt only slightly.
 As we will see, some business theorists define leadership in terms of change
and contrast it with mere management. But this biases the concept against
conservative leadership.
 Imagine an isolated monastery where monks want an abbot who does not
introduce cable television or the Internet. Preserving a group’s valued way
of life can be an important form of leadership.
 Abraham Zaleznik of Harvard Business School criticized management
education and described managers as merely embracing process and
seeking stability, while leaders tolerate risk and create change.
o The secret to success lies in the ability of leaders to combine hard and soft
power resources in appropriate contexts.
 Michael Mumford and Judy Van Doorn describe such hybrid types as
“pragmatic leaders.”
 They use the example of Benjamin Franklin, who often wanted to
change the status quo;
 Franklin did so not by inspirational appeal, but by careful analysis of
social and power relations and then working (often behind the scenes)
through elite networks to develop coalitions to implement his vision.
o Theorists argue that transactional leadership styles are more frequent and
effective in stable and predictable environments, and an inspirational or soft
power style is more likely in periods of rapid and discontinuous social and
political change.
 Some leaders tend to be relationship-oriented. Other leaders are more taskoriented.
o The former tend to rely more on inspirational skills and soft power,
o The latter more on transactional skills and hard power.
o The nature of the group, the clarity of the task, and the resources of their
position all determine situational control.
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III. Critical power skills
1. Soft power
 Emotional Intelligence
o Emotional intelligence is the self-mastery (discipline) and empathic capacity
(outreach to others) that allow leaders to channel their personal passions and
attract others.
 The idea is not new. In the 1920s, the psychologist E. L. Thorndike defined
“social intelligence” as the ability to act wisely in human relations.
o There is uncertainty about how the two aspects of emotional intelligence self-control and empathy toward others – relate to each other.
 Clinton, for example, scores low on the first and very high on the second
dimension.
 It is a learnable skill that increases with age and experience.
o If emotional experience is not authentic, others will likely find out in the long
run, but successful management of personal impressions requires some of the
same emotional discipline and skill possessed by good actors. Acting and
leadership have a great deal in common.
o Moods that start at the top, tend to move the fastest because everyone watches
the boss. Closely watched CEOs and presidents are always conveying signals,
whether or not they realize it.
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 Communications
o Effective public rhetoric can partly compensate for poor organizational skills
(the ability to attract and manage an effective inner circle of followers)
o Both masses and the inner circles of followers can be attracted and inspired
but the inner circles are a must.
 Hitler was skilful at communicating with both distant and inner-circle
audiences.
 Stalin relied primarily on the latter.
 Truman was a modest orator but compensated for his lack of public rhetoric
by attracting and ably managing a stellar set of advisors.
o Setting the right example is another crucial form of communication for leaders.
 Vision
o Part of what leaders communicate is vision, or skill in articulating a picture
that gives meaning to an idea and inspires others.
o Usually such visions provide a picture of the future and encourage change, but
some visions can portray the past or the status quo as attractive and
encourage people to resist change.
o Some management experts think it is more important to know your company
well and pick the right people than to worry about vision.
o Some leaders think that vision can solve most of their problems, but the wrong
vision can do damage, and an overly ambitious vision can also hurt.
 The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once quipped, “People with
vision should go see a doctor.”
o In practice however, a successful vision often arises from the needs of the
group, which are then formulated and articulated by the leader (link with
Heifetz):
 “Everyone asks, ‘What’s your vision?’ But you offend many people and get
into trouble by answering too quickly.
 The smart response at the beginning is ‘What do you think?’ and then listen
before you articulate your vision.”
o To be sustainable, a successful vision must also be an effective diagnosis of the
situation a group faces (link with Heifetz).
o A movement leader can promote a vision that is miles ahead of his followers,
but a president with multiple objectives and responsibilities must maintain a
continuous dialogue with the public that keeps him from moving too far
ahead of his followers (link with Heifetz).
o Analysts can judge the vision of a leader in authority in terms of whether it
creates a sensible balance between realism and risk, and whether it balances
objectives with capabilities.
 One of Tony Blair’s great strengths as a leader was his “ability to articulate a
vision. A serious weakness has been his patchy attention to detail.
 As Teddy Roosevelt once put it, “I hold the man worthless who is not a
dreamer, who does not see visions; but I also hold him worthless unless in
practical fashion he endeavours to shape his actions so that these dreams and
visions can be partially realized.”
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2. Hard power skills
 Organizational skills
o Organizational skill is the ability to manage the structures, information flows,
and reward systems of an institution or group.
o This includes the encouragement of leadership at lower levels in their
organizations.
o Especially important is the effective management of flows of information
relating to both the inputs and outputs of decisions.
o Good leaders construct teams that combine these functions, making sure to hire
subordinates who can compensate for the leader’s deficiencies in managerial
skills. More recently, there has been a renewed interest in leaders as managers.
o The organizational skills required for leaders as managers should not be
confused with the efficiency or tidiness of a well-run organization.
 Organization and management refer to leaders’ ability to ensure an accurate
inflow and outflow of information for making and implementing decisions.
 Effectiveness is more important than efficiency.
 Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, ran an inefficient organization with
overlapping jurisdictions and responsibilities.
 Tom Peters argued that top managers cannot hope to solve all problems in
a tidy fashion, but “what they can do is: generally shape business values,
and educate by example”. A crucial component is assuring that unfiltered
bad news can reach the leaders and be acted on promptly.
 Machiavellian political skills
o When Roderick Kramer calls “political intelligence” the ability to size up the
weaknesses, insecurities, likes, and dislikes of others so that you can turn
them into your instruments, he is referring narrowly to the Machiavellian
political skills that are crucial for the hard power of threats and inducements.
o Kramer contrasts such hard “political intelligence” with the “social
intelligence”. The starkest point of contrast between these two kinds of leaders
is how willing they are to use hard power skills.
 The psychologist David McClelland has shown that people with a strong
need for power are more effective leaders, but only if they also develop an
internal capacity to restrain their use of power.
o Kramer points out that his great intimidators are “bullies with a vision”, aiming
at an objective rather than just manipulating others to prove who is the stronger.
 Pure bullying – defined as repeated actions designed to humiliate and
dominate others – tends to be counterproductive, though it is a common
human behaviour.
o The politics of fear can be effective, but they are not the only political skills,
nor the best skills in all circumstances.
 Too much hard Machiavellian power can interfere with and deprive leaders
of their soft power.
 Moreover, a style that works in one context may not work in another.
o The moral of the story, of course, is not that hard or soft power is better, or that
an inspirational or a transactional style is the answer, but that it is important to
understand how to combine these power resources and leadership styles in
different contexts.
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3. Contextual intelligence
 Neustadt wrote “From one situation to the next, the leader’s influence swells or
diminishes depending on how personal operating style fits organizational needs
and outside conditions.”
o “Horses for courses”: some horses run better on a dry track and some on a
muddy course.
o Leadership is “an interactive art” in which the leader is “dancing” with the
context, the problem, the factions, and the objective (link with Heifetz).
 What counts as an appropriate response to a situation is interpretive and
contestable.
o There is no one way to lead a team.
o Success depends on the accuracy and completeness of the leader’s mental
model of the situation, skill in executing the behaviours required by that
model, and the ability to harvest the lessons of experience.
 Contextual intelligence as the ability
 Contextua1 intelligence implies both:
o a capability to discern trends in the face of complexity, to understand an
evolving environment and to capitalize on trends.
 Intuitive diagnostic skill that helps a leader to align tactics with objectives to
create smart strategies in varying situations.
o adaptability while trying to shape events.
 Leaders and policy entrepreneurs “do more than push. They also lie in wait for a window to open.” Like surfers. Leaders with contextual intelligence are
skilled at providing meaning or a road map by defining the problem that a
group confronts.
 Others have called it judgment or wisdom, an “acquaintance with relevant facts of
such a kind that it enables those who have it to tell:
o what fits with what;
o what can be done in given circumstances and what cannot,
o what means will work in what situations and how far,
o without necessarily being able to explain how they know this or even what they
know.”
 Many psychologists define intelligence as the ability to solve problems or create
products that are valued in one or more cultural settings. This involves a collection
of intelligences.
o Some argue, for example, that for a skill to be an intelligence, it should have
some overlapping correlation with general intelligence. The idea of contextual
intelligence meets that requirement. It consists partly of cognitive analytic
capabilities and partly of tacit knowledge built up from experience.
 Contextual intelligence is also correlated with the skill of emotional intelligence.
 George w. Bush has famously described his leadership role as being “the decider.”
But deciding how and when to decide is as important as making the final decision.
o What should be the composition of the group the leader turns to?
o What is the context of the decision?
o How will information be communicated, and how much control does the leader
maintain over the decision?
o Without contextual intelligence, being a “decider” is not enough.
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 Ronald Heifetz argues that the first thing a leader needs to diagnose is whether the
situation calls for technical and routine solutions or requires adaptive change.
o In Heifetz’s useful metaphors, a leader needs to gain perspective by “going to
the balcony” to observe the swirling activity on the dance floor, regulate the
“level of distress”, “give the work back to the people,” and protect “voices from
below.”
 The following five dimensions are particularly important for the intuitive skill of
contextual intelligence:
a) Understanding culture context
b) Distribution of power resources
c) Followers’ needs and demands
d) Crisis and time urgency
e) Information flows
See details below for each dimension
a) Understanding cultural context
o Culture is the recurrent pattern by which groups transmit knowledge and
values. Some aspects of human culture are universal; other dimensions are
particular to a group.
o The culture of the group sets the framework for leaders. They determine the
criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be a leader.
o Managing culture is one of the most important things that leaders do. If
leaders do not “become conscious of the cultures in which they are embedded,
those cultures will manage them.” (Schein)
o Effective leaders inspire followers through the careful management of emotion,
but appropriate levels of emotional expression vary with cultures.
o Leaders with contextual intelligence understand that policy change sometimes
requires a change of group culture, and they develop a sense of how malleable
a given culture can be under different circumstances.
 Many a corporate merger that looked lucrative to investment bankers
because of economic synergies and opportunities comes a cropper because of
cultural differences. “One of the dangers in any acquisition is the acquiring
company assuming their culture is the right one.”
o When encountering different environments, whether national or organizational,
some people are better than others at learning the appropriate cues to figure out
quickly what is happening in a culture. Such skills can also be learned. Cultural
intelligence is a subset of contextual intelligence.
b) Distribution of power resources
o Culture and power are closely related, since which resources produce power in
a given domain depends heavily on the objectives that are expressed in a
culture. An army general faces a different set of options from those that confront
a church pastor.
o A group’s political culture as well as its formal structures and unwritten rules
determine what power resources are available to leaders in any particular
situation, which in turn shapes their choice of transactional and inspirational
styles.
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o
o
o
o
o
o
 Leading others who consider themselves the leaders’ equals is different from
commanding troops where hierarchy is the norm. Running a law firm or
consulting partnership is different from running a manufacturing
corporation. Many of these people do not consider themselves followers but
independent elites. They respond poorly to a command-and-control style and
have the power to resist their formal leaders.
Even when the political culture is not overly egalitarian, leaders need to
understand whether they are in an executive or a legislative situation. In the
latter case, the only hope of success is to assemble majority coalitions. It is often
impossible or too costly for a leader to win everyone to a common position, but
some followers bring more companions into the fold than others.
Leaders also need to understand the sources of their authority (link with
Heifetz).
Leaders also have to be able to assess the strength of loyalties that exist in small
groups and in wider imagined communities.
 Where identities are strong and noble purposes predominant, an inspirational
call to serve the group can generate considerable soft power.
 In other circumstances, such efforts may merely produce cynicism and a
backlash of negative reactions; an appeal to tangible interests and rewards
would be more effective.
There is also a need to understand the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of
the interdependence leaders share with other members of the group.
 To paraphrase the economist Albert Hirschman: What options to others have
for exit, voice, or loyalty, and how does that affect their power?
 They must also know the structure of incentives in the game that is being
played. Is it positive or zero sum? If it resembles a zero-sum prisoners’
dilemma in which one’s loss is the other’s gain, will it go on long enough that
the other can be taught an optimal cooperative strategy of tit for tat, or will
the game end too soon for such a strategy to succeed?
Finally, in modern democratic societies, leaders need to understand the
difference between the politics of public and the politics of private contexts
and how that affects the distribution of power.
 Measures of merit, such a profit, are more precise and less contested in
private organizations.
 Efficiency often takes second place to considerations of due process in
making public decisions, and secrecy and confidentiality are more restricted.
Some of these skills in political assessment can be taught; some come naturally
(or not at all).
c) Followers’ needs and demands
o How much do people feel a need for change, and what types of change do they
want? How stable is the status quo? How can coalition be created to overcome
resistance? How can hard power be used to overcome resistance without
undercutting the power of attraction and co-optation?
o Leaders also need to assess contexts in terms of their follower’s demand to
participate in decisions.
 “Leaders must have the capabilities of being both participative and
autocratic and of knowing when to employ each”.
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 Vroom distinguishes degrees of autocracy on a five-point scale:
1. making decisions alone
2. deciding after individual consultation
3. deciding in the context of group consultation
4. facilitating decisions by others, and
5. delegating fully to others.
o A leader may opt for broader participation in order to educate followers and to
develop a sense of commitment and ownership of the decision (link with
Heifetz).
o The novelty of a situation also affects leaders’ choices of style.
 In familiar situations, the problem may be primarily one of co-ordination and
action.
 But in a novel situation, effective leadership may require greater diversity in
the group that shapes decisions. Although broader participation could slow
things down, it also assures a broader set of views and the avoidance of
groupthink. The increased transactions costs may be more than rewarded by
the greater creativity of a more diverse group (link with Heifetz).
d) Crisis and time urgency
o People use the term “crisis” as a metaphor for long-drawn-out processes that
challenge important values. When crises emerge slowly, leaders have more
options and time to develop strategies.
 Leaders often welcome a sense of crisis because it relaxes the normal
constraints that limit their power and actions.
 Crises provide teaching moments and open windows of opportunity for
change.
o We can make a distinction between routine and novel crises (link with Heifetz).
 In routine crises, the most appropriate leadership is a command-and-control
approach.
 In novel crises, an appropriate leadership style involves a muted command
presence and a flatter horizontal structure that produces collaboration in
developing understanding and design for a new approach.
o Leonard and Howitt divide leadership in urgent crises into three phases:
 understanding
 design
 execution
Authority and hierarchy are appropriate for all three phases of routine crises, but
only for the third phase of novel crises.
o Three quite different types of work that need to be performed in a major crisis.
 Cognitive work by analysts can help to diagnose the situation
 Operational work by analysts can help to diagnose the situation; operational
work requires tacit knowledge and experience more than analysis
 Political work by top leaders requires strategic choices as well as managing
relations with the outside environment, such as the press and the public.
A successful leader in a crisis has to have the contextual intelligence to know
which decisions to make and which to leave to others.
o Effective crisis leadership is not merely a matter of understanding when to
delegate decisions and how to reassure the public. It also involves pre-crisis
leadership in building a system, training and preparing in advance.
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e) Information flows
o Order flow down the formal chain of command and reports flow back up. But in
practice, some of the most important information flows circumvent and
supplement the formal flow or are lateral communications among followers.
Gossip is rarely idle; it makes groups work.
 Franklin Roosevelt described his own style as “political juggling.”
 He kept himself in the center of information flows by playing off one
advisor against another.
 This was effective for a one-way flow of inputs to the president that
ensured his control, but his failure to inform subordinates made for an
inefficient process in which there was inadequate outward flow of
information needed to allow his subordinates to do their work effectively.
 For example, his secretary of state was not included or informed of his
meetings with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta.
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IV. Good and bad leaders
 As Lord Acton famously warned, power corrupts. Yet without power leaders
cannot lead.
 In studying managers, David C. McClelland and David H. Burnham distinguished
three motivational groups of people:
o those who care most about doing something better have a “need for
achievement”;
o those who think most about friendly relations with others have a “need for
affiliation”; and
o those who care most about having an impact on others show a “need for
power.”
They found that the third group turned out to be the most effective leaders, but
they cautioned that “power motivation refers not to dictatorial behaviour but to a
desire to have an impact, to be strong and influential.” In their view, ethics and
power can be mutually reinforcing rather than in conflict.
 Machiavelli also addressed the importance of ethics for leaders, but primarily in
terms of the impression that apparent virtue makes on followers. The appearance
of virtue is an important source of a leader’s soft power.
o As we saw earlier, “bullies with a vision” can succeed in modern organizations.
o In addition to the courage of the lion, Machiavelli also extolled the strategic
deceptiveness of the fox.
o As Joseph Badaracco, who teaches ethics at Harvard Business School, says,
“Idealism untempered by realism often does little to improve the world.”
1. Defining good and bad
 One of the problems in identifying good and bad leaders is the ambiguous ways in
which people use the word “good”. It is sometimes used to mean “ethical” and
sometimes to mean “effective.”
 As we saw earlier, some leadership theorists build both meanings into their
concept by defining leaders as those who produce positive change for a group. Thus
leadership is ethical by definition, and someone like Hitler is a mere power wielder,
not a leader.
 It helps to keep the two meanings of “good” separate. A good leader is one who
effectively helps a group to create and achieve objectives for better or worse.
o Thus Hitler was an effective leader with morally bad purposes for his first
decade in power.
o In the end, because he led his followers to disaster, he turned out to be a bad
leader in both the moral and the effective sense.
 In practice, we can judge both effectiveness and ethics in three dimensions:
o Goals
 Effective goals combine realism and risk in a vision that can be implemented
 Ethical goals are judged by the morality of the intentions and vision.
 Good goals have to meet our moral standards, as well as a feasibility test.
o Means
 Effective means are those that are efficient for achieving the goals
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 Ethical means depend on the quality, not the efficiency, of the approaches
employed.
o Consequences
 Consequential effectiveness involves achieving the group’s goals
 Ethical consequences mean good results not just for the in-group, but for
outsiders as well.
 Of course in practice, the two dimensions are often closely related.
o A leader who pursues unrealistic (ineffective) goals or uses ineffective means
can produce terrible moral consequences for followers.
 Thus reckless reality testing that leads to immoral consequences can become
an ethical failure.
o Conversely, a leader’s good intentions are not proof of what is sometimes
misleadingly called “moral clarity”.
 For example, those who justify the invasion of Iraq because it was intended
to remove a brutal dictator are practicing one-dimensional moral judgment.
2. Public and private morality
 Followers want leaders to protect and advance their interests even if doing so
involves deception.
o Up to a point, they want leaders to sacrifice their personal scruples and depart
from everyday moral rules in order to advance the group interest.
o As for justice, experimenters have found that people preferred ingroupfavouring leaders over fair ones.
 The resulting dilemma for leaders is called the problem of “dirty hands.”
o To advance the interests of the group for whom they have a fiduciary
responsibility, leaders may have to do things they would not be willing to do in
their private lives. As trustees, they have an additional set of moral
obligations.
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o The political philosopher Michael Walzer argues that if it is right for a leader to
try to succeed, “then it must also be right to get one’s hand dirty. But one’s
hands get dirty from doing what it is wrong to do.”
 Walzer uses the example of a leader who orders a man tortured to discover
the location of a terrorist bomb in a city and prevent the loss of innocent life
even though he personally believes torture is wrong.
o Sometimes, leaders can maintain their conscience and sense of integrity by
distinguishing between the public and private spheres.
 Thus Mario Cuomo, the Catholic governor of New York, personally opposed
abortion but argued eloquently that in his role as governor, he was obligated
to think of the requirements of a public official in a pluralistic democracy. By
keeping the public and private spheres separate, he avoided a sense of dirty
hands.
o Sometimes, however, there are two equally compelling standards in the same
public sphere, and the problem of dirty hands is unavoidable.
 Max Weber famously distinguished an ethic of ultimate ends from an ethic of
responsibility.
o In the former, absolute moral imperatives must not be violated for the sake of
good consequences, but an ethic of responsibility must focus on the results.
o Weber warns that “he who seeks the salvation of the soul, his own soul and
others, should not seek it along the avenue of politics.”
 In the philosophical traditions of the Western Enlightenment, ethicists distinguish a
deontological or rule-based approach associated with Immanuel Kant from a
consequentialist approach associated with utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham
and John Stuart Mill. The two traditions each provide an important strand of
contemporary moral rules in the West today.
o The difference can be illustrated by a simple story.
Imagine you are an observer for an NGO in Darfur and you come across a
village where a military commander has lined up fifty people against a wall and
is about to execute them because someone from the village fired a shot that
killed a soldier last night. You say, “Stop! Only one shot was fired, and thus
most of these people are innocent.” The commander looks at you with disdain
and hands you a rifle, saying that if you kill one person, he will let the rest go.
He warns you not to try anything foolish because his soldiers now have their
guns trained on you. Do you fire and save forty-nine lives, thus dirtying your
hands, or do you drop the rifle and maintain the integrity of your principles
while watching the commander kill fifty people? As the example changes to
killing one innocent person to save millions, or to Walzer’s ticking terrorist
bomb, the trade-off between a leader’s scruples and the consequences for
followers makes the choice more difficult for many people. At what price does
personal integrity translate into selfishness and a violation of followers’ trust?
There are no easy answers to such problems, and recent scientific discoveries
suggest that evolution may have hardwired different solutions to the dilemma
into the human brain.
o Another classic philosophers’ case contrasts how people respond to a runaway
trolley car.
In one case, you can push someone into the path of the car so that it slows
sufficiently to allow five people to escape it.
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




In another case, you can throw a switch that sends the car down a track that kills
one person rather than another track where it would kill five. The outcome in
lives is the same in either case – one person dies or five die - but most people
recoil from the first action more than the second. A recent study has shown that
people with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex region of the brain
are about twice as likely to push someone in front of the tram or suffocate a
baby whose crying would reveal to enemy soldiers where a family is hiding.
Harvard philosopher Joshua Greene concludes “I think it’s very convincing now
that there are at least two systems working when we make moral judgments.
o There’s an emotional system that depends on this specific part of the brain and
o Another system that performs more utilitarian cost-benefit analyses which in
these people is clearly intact.”
o The experiment suggests that “the decision on how to act is not a single, rational
calculation of the sort that moral philosophers have generally assumed is going
on, but a conflict between two processes, with one (the emotional) sometimes
able to override the other (the utilitarian, the location of which this study does
not address).”
Whatever the neuroscience, in daily practice, people’s sense of moral obligation
tends to come from three sources.
o One is a sense of conscience, which is personally or religiously informed and
leads individuals to try to achieve a sense of moral integrity.
o A second involves rules of common morality that society treats as obligations
for all individuals, and
o A third is codes of professional ethics and conventional expectations that might
be considered the duties of one’s role.
Leaders are subject to all three, and these sources of moral obligation are frequently
in tension with each other. Often there is no single solution.
 As Isaiah Berlin once noted, because “the ends of men are many, and not all
of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of
conflict – and tragedy – can never wholly be eliminated from human life,
either personal or social.”
We tend to make moral judgments in terms of the three dimensions of goals, means,
and consequences, often with a delicate weighing of the trade-offs among them.
Because of their special roles, we often put more weight on consequences when
judging leaders.
At the same time, if followers allow leaders to argue that the duties of their role
require them to think only of consequences, they may slip into a self-justificatory
style that too fully detaches them from other rules of moral behaviour.
Conscience and the search for a sense of personal integrity can be an important limit
on the slippery slope of such overly permissive morality.
o For example, Nixon once told an interviewer that his role justified his actions:
“When the president does it that means it is not illegal.” That attitude led
members of his inner circle to believe “that the president and those acting on his
behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the
nation’s security demanded it”.
o But as one of those followers later said, “I finally realized that what had gone
wrong in the Nixon White House was a meltdown in personal integrity.
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




Without it, we failed to understand the constitutional limits on presidential
power and comply with statutory law.”
o Similar questions have arisen about the interpretation of executive power by
President Bush and Vice President Cheney in the struggle against terrorism.
Mindless adherence to society’s rules is not the same as integrity.
o As Hannah Arendt described Adolf Eichmann, “In one respect, Eichmann did
indeed follow Kant’s precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions.
this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘inclinations,’ whether
they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his
‘duty.’”
o To take another example, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark
Twain has his hero help his slave friend Jim run away even though Huck feels
guilty about breaking the law. Conscience and integrity may sometimes require
violating rules and laws when the alternative is highly immoral consequences.
Some leaders solve such conflicts with “sleep test ethics” as their sign of integrity:
an act is right if you can sleep with the results. But the danger of such tests is “meism”, or the absence of any larger standards to control the ego.
If leaders develop ingrained moral habits that are something like Aristotle’s
classical virtues of character – courage, justice, prudence and temperance – the
dangers of ego-centered intuitionism become less acute.
But different cultures and groups shape character in different ways, and so moral
intuitions are not all the same; a virtuous character in some cultures would not seem
so in another.
o Osama bin Laden developed a character and a religious sense of justice that
allowed him to commit what we see as mass murder, but it probably also
allowed him to sleep soundly after September 11, 2001.
Many societies have ethical systems that stress impartiality and have an analogue to
the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. “Your
interests and my interests should be treated the same way. However, appealing to an
intuitive sense of fairness - treating others as you would want to be treated, not
playing favourites, and being sensible to individual needs - does not always
provide a solution.
o Imagine a parent with one flute and three children, each of whom wants it.
The first child says, “I made it”; the second says, “I am the only one who can
play it’’; and the third says: “I have no other toys”. Even with a thought
experiment about deciding behind a veil of ignorance, the principle of justice as
fairness remains unclear in some cases.
o In such circumstances, the parent (or leader) may find it more appropriate to
turn to a procedural or institutional solution in which the children bargain
with each other or agree on a lottery - or on a neutral figure to decide how time
with the flute will be allocated or shared.
o The parent can also teach or coach the children about sharing, which is a
different image of leadership as persuasion rather than exercise of authority (link
with Heifetz). Developing intuitions about process and institutions – helping a
group decide how to decide – is often one of the most important moral roles that
leaders (and parents) play. As we saw earlier, suppressing conflict may lead to
worse consequences in a group than if a leader helps to orchestrate and
moderate multiparty conflict so that followers learn new behaviour.
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3. Self-serving versus Group-serving deception
 Sometimes leaders have different objectives from those of a large part of their
group, and rather than reveal the differences, they deceive their followers.
 In other instances, however, leaders find it impossible to educate their followers
adequately in time, or followers are too deeply divided to reach a consensus that
will sustain group action (link with Heifetz).
o Churchill once said that the truth may be “so precious that she should always be
attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
 Even if one admits that deception may sometimes be necessary, one can still ask
about the importance of the goal, the availability of alternative means to
achieve that goal, whether the deception can be contained or is likely to spread
through precedent or example, the damage done to various victims of the deception,
and the accountability of the deceivers (whether it can be discovered and explained
later).
o One study concludes that presidential lies “inevitably turn into monsters that
strangle their creators.”
 Our best guarantees that rulers will act morally come less from imposing rigid
rules and more from establishing powerful ways to call them into account so
that others can judge if their claims are self-serving. The answer to some of the hard
questions about judging good and bad leaders turns on institutions. (see point 6
below)
4. Costs, risks, and luck
 Even when we judge leaders by their consequences, we can still make moral
judgments about how leaders distribute the risks and costs of their actions.
o In deciding how to decide, a leader may choose an efficient autocratic approach
or a more participatory approach.
o The decision can be judged not only on effectiveness, but it also has an ethical
component if it leads to learning by the group (link with Heifetz).
o There are also questions of how risk is allocated. Rash assessments of reality
that impose high risks on others can be condemned on moral as well as
effectiveness terms.
 It is one thing to pose a grand vision that leads people up a mountain; it is
another to lead them too close to the edge of a cliff.
 Finally, there is the question of the costs imposed on others.
o Many a leader, including secular saints like Gandhi, have imposed enormous
costs on their spouse and children that would be condemned if carried out by
your next-door neighbor but are exonerated because of their subsequent
accomplishments.
o Williams argues that it matters how intrinsic the cause of the failure is to the
project itself.
o Because we weigh consequences more heavily in our moral judgment of
leaders, history tends to be kind to the lucky and unkind to the unlucky, but
we can still judge them in terms of the means they used and the causes of
their luck.
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 That still leaves open the question of what is the appropriate point at which to
judge leaders.
o A British politician once wrote that “all political lives, unless they are cut off in
midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.”
o Truman’s biographer David McCullough suggests that “about 50 years has to
go before you can appraise a presidency – the dust has to settle.” At this point,
however, the odds for Bush do not look favorable.
5. The ethics of transformational and transactional leadership
 Transforming leaders “engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers
raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Because of this classic
definition, many people assume that leaders with transformational objectives
and an inspirational style are better or more ethical than leaders with more
modest objectives and a transactional style. But the answer is more complex.
Sometimes hey are better, but sometimes they are worse.
 Common causes are not always more moral than individual interests.
o Transformational leaders appeal to people’s higher needs, but it is often not
clear which needs are higher.
o Individual interests are not automatically less legitimate than collective end.
 If a government official chooses to go to his daughter’s softball game on a
Saturday afternoon rather than serve the public interest by working in the
office, which is the higher need?
 If transformational leaders are not able to persuade everyone to voluntarily
accept a common vision, what is the likely status of people who prefer
their own goals and visions?
 Madison’s famous solution to the problem of cleavage and faction in objectives
was not to overcome division and conflict by trying to convert everyone to a
common cause, but to overcome divisions by creating, an institutional
framework in which ambition countered ambition and faction countered faction.
o Separation of powers, checks and balances, and a decentralized federal system
placed the emphasis on laws more than leaders.
o “Madisonian government works not because participants agree on goals, but
because they can agree on specific activities (as in acts of legislation) that
address their different goals.
o So too in ‘private’ organizations, like corporations, the glue that holds them
together need not be consensus on ends but can be simply consent to means
– agreement on rules, rights, and responsibilities that serve the separate interests
of their participants.”
o Even when a group cannot agree on its ultimate goals, its members may be able
to agree on means that create diversity and pluralism without destroying the
group. In such circumstances, transactional leadership may be better than
inspirational efforts at transformational leadership.
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6. Leaders and institutions
 The Madisonian example suggests that judging ethical leadership must include
consideration of institutions. For better and worse, both transactional and
transformational leaders can undercut or destroy institutions.
o Machiavellian transactional leaders “know how to circumvent organizational
systems in order to achieve their personal objectives and make political gains.”
o As Max Weber pointed out a century ago, the charisma of inspirational leaders,
which focuses authority in the individual, is a powerful solvent of institutions.
 Madisonian government was not designed for efficiency. Law is often called “the
wise restraints that make men free,” but sometimes laws must be changed or
broken, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s demonstrated. An inspirational
leader who ignores institutions or breaks them must carefully consider the longterm ethical consequences as well as the immediate gains for the group.
 As we saw earlier, one of the most important skills of good leaders is to design
and maintain systems and institutions. This has both an effectiveness and an
ethical component.
o Poorly designed institutions are those that fail to achieve a group’s purpose, not
in each particular instance but over the long term.
o Well-designed institutions include means for self-correction as well as ways of
constraining the failures of leaders. Ultimately, it is a company’s culture that
sustains high performance with high integrity.
o A leader needs to create an institutional framework in which “the company’s
norms and values are so widely shared and its reputation for integrity is so
strong that most leaders and employees want to win the right way.”
o Poorly designed or led institutions can also lead people astray. Obedience to
institutional authority can be bad at times. Good leadership is not merely
inspiring people with a noble vision, but involves creating and maintaining the
systems and institutions that allow effective and moral implementation.
7. Meaning and identities
 This focus on institutions is not a denial of the importance of inspirational
leadership. Leaders who are strong in “sense-making” are those who “know how to
quickly capture the complexities of their environment and explain them to others in
simple terms. They create a narrative that gives meaning to the situation in
which their followers find themselves.
o King was brilliant at using soft power to “invert the resources of his
opponents”. He certainly had no riches or material rewards to offer his
supporters – but he did have an honorable goal.
 One of the most important ways leaders produce meaning is by establishing or
changing a group’s identity: “Leaders must he entrepreneurs of identity. The
success of their leadership hinges on an ability to turn ‘me’ and ‘you’ into ‘us’.”
 But some leaders see moral obligations beyond their immediate group and take
actions to educate their followers about them (link with Heifetz).
o Mandela worked tirelessly to expand the identity of his followers both by
words and deeds.
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o As the psychologist Howard Gardner concludes, “The heroes of my study turn
out to be Mahatma Gandhi and Jean Monnet, two men who attempted to
enlarge the sense of ‘we’.
 We can see that most human identities are “imagined communities.”
o For the past century or two, the nation has been the imagined community that
people were willing to die for, and most leaders have seen their primary
obligations as national.
o In a world of globalization, many people belong to a number of imagined
communities. Some – local, regional, national, cosmopolitan – seem to be
arranged as concentric circles, where the strength of identity diminishes with
distance, but in a global information age, this ordering has become
confused.
 Good leaders today are often caught between their cosmopolitan inclinations
and their more traditional obligations to the followers who elected them.
 Insularity is not an all-or-nothing moral dimension.
o In a world in which people are organized in national communities, a purely
cosmopolitan ideal is unrealistic. A leader who claims there is an obligation to
equalize incomes globally is not credible, but a leader who says that more
should be done to reduce poverty and disease can rally followers.
o As the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah puts it, “Thou shalt not kill is a
test you take pass-fail. Honor thy father and mother admits of gradations.”
o The same is true of cosmopolitanism versus insularity. We may admire leaders
who make efforts to increase their followers’ concern for the consequences
of their actions on the out-group, but it does little good to hold them to an
impossible standard whose pursuit could undercut their capacity to remain
leaders.
8. The morality of followers
 Inspirational leaders can try to educate their followers, but like Gandhi they may not
fully succeed. The moral choices that followers make can constrain even the
most saintly of leaders.
 The old adage that people get the leaders they deserve is an oversimplification, but
certainly bad followers help produce bad leaders and constrain good ones.
 The combination of two dimensions of loyalty and independent thinking
provides a normative grid for judging followers.
o Theorists argue that the best followers are those who are empowered to think for
themselves and who, though loyal, are willing to criticize and correct their
leaders. In this view, independent thinkers with high loyalty are the best
followers: leaders empower them, and they in turn empower their leaders in a
social contract of trust that helps protect leaders from mistakes.
 Many leaders speak of empowerment of their followers but fail in its practice.
 The reason people follow a leader can be simplified into
o needs related to solving problems (which tend to be transactional) and
o needs related to identity and meaning that leaders provide (which tend to be
inspirational but can also come from success in solving major problems).
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 The penalty for combining voice with exit is greater in America than in
British political culture, where Parliament provides an institutional base for
resignation in protest.
 Few American politicians who resign in protest return to high office, but in
Britain, nearly half do.
 Very often leaders in the middle find themselves in a policy vacuum with few clear
directives from the top.
 Bureaucratic entrepreneurs, on the other hand, take advantage of such
opportunities to adjust and promote policies. Always take 20 percent more authority
than is granted. It’s much better to have someone dial you back than have to dial
you forward. The key moral question is: When does such entrepreneurial activity
exceed the bounds of general high-level policies set from the top?
 As a popular saying goes, the key to success in leadership is to surround yourself
with good people, enable them by delegation, and then claim credit for their
accomplishments. To make this formula work, however, requires a good deal of soft
power. Without the soft power that produces attraction and loyalty to the leader’s
goals, entrepreneurs run off in all directions and dissipate a group’s energies. With
soft power, however, the energy of empowered followers strengthens leaders.
9. Choice of means and the role of soft power
 Remember the contrasting leadership views of Lao Tzu and Machiavelli and noted
that the new conventional wisdom in leadership studies argues that soft power is
increasingly more effective in modern democratic societies and organizations. One
of the important characteristics of liberal democratic societies is that they
distribute platforms for leadership broadly, whereas authoritarian regimes tend
to concentrate them.
 If having hard power traditionally meant enjoying the privilege of not having to
adjust or learn, wielding soft power often requires learning and adapting to
followers’ needs (link with Heifetz).
 At the same time, however, hard power remains an essential tool for effective
leaders even in modern democratic societies.
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 Contextual intelligence is necessary if leaders wish to understand the appropriate
mix of hard and soft power skills in particular situations.
 Turning from the effective to the ethical dimension, are there moral grounds to
prefer soft power? Not always. But on the dimension of means, as opposed to
goals and consequences, a moral case can be made preferring soft power.
o By its very nature, it depends on what goes on in the mind of the followers and
usually leaves more space for others to exercise choice. If we value autonomy
of individuals and respect their choices, then, although coercion may
sometimes be necessary, it should be generally disfavored, and it is usually
more moral for a leader who has options to prefer soft power.
o Coercion is a matter of degree. Skeptics argue that soft power is coercive as
well. At the same time, there is still some wisdom in the old adage that sticks
and stones can break your bones, but words don’t really hurt you. Of course
words can hurt, but you have more options in response to words than to force.
o Soft power instruments are not all equal in this regard. They differ in the
degree of rational appeal and respect for followers’ autonomy.
 Educating the public is not the same as indoctrinating the public with
propaganda.
 In such cases, soft power instruments can create a psychological
manipulation that provides as little choice as hard power, but these
circumstances often depend on a coercive order that limits access to
alternative views.
o Some soft power means are better than others.
 As we saw earlier, charisma itself raises interesting moral issues as a soft
power instrument. When combined with narcissism, it can be highly
dangerous.
 When wielded by balanced leaders, personal attraction can mobilize people
for new goals and objectives, but a danger arises when leaders use the soft
power of their charisma to weaken institutional constraints that maintain the
potential for alternative Madisonian solutions to group problems.
 Power is the ability to affect others to obtain the outcomes one wants, but we can
also distinguish between simply wanting power over others and wanting power
with others (link with Heifetz). Getting what you want and enabling others to do
what they want can be reconciled or linked by soft power skills of listening, mutual
persuasion, communicating, and education.
o This may be the central message of Lao Tzu’s ancient insight that “a leader is
best when people barely know he exists, not so good when people obey and
acclaim him; worst when they despise him.”
o In today’s world, the leader will need to combine various soft power skills with
Machiavellian hard power skills, but a moral case can be made that leaders
should have a general preference for soft power options when possible. Leaders
may find that what is ethical and what is effective may coincide more often than
in the past.
 We judge our leaders every day.
o Sometimes the categories and judgments are easy.
o At other times, there are subtle trade-offs among ends, means, and
consequences.
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o In balancing moral obligations suggested by their conscience, common moral
rules, and their fiduciary roles, leaders sometimes have to accept the burden of
dirty hands because of their roles.
o But difficult dilemmas should invite rather than discourage moral
discourse. Societies, groups, and leaders are all better off for engaging in open
practices of criticism that use the distinctions suggested earlier.
 The good news is that leaders can change. They suggest that the best leaders
possess two characteristics that act as regulators
o a greater emotional maturity, where there is little egotism, and
o a democratic, coaching managerial style.
 Both individuals and organizations can learn. Art history does not produce great
painters, but it can help develop and educate intuitions.
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