Study Notes by Scott Cormode
"The Work of Leadership"
Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie
Harvard Business Review (January-February 1997)
Available in PDF at www.hbsp.harvard.edu
"Leaders do not need to know all the answers. They do need to ask the right questions." (124)
Jack Pritchard: triple by-pass surgery
Technical solution: surgery and medication
Adaptive change: creating new habits (e.g. quit smoking; improve diet; get exercise)
------An expert (like a surgeon) can provide a technical solution, but only the individual can do the work of adapting.
The “work of leadership” is “mobilizing people to do adaptive work.”
Adaptive work is "true leadership.” And when is this “true leadership” required?
"Adaptive work is required when our deeply held beliefs are challenged, when the values that made us successful
become less relevant, and when legitimate yet competing perspectives emerge." These are called "adaptive
challenges" (124)
Adaptive problems are often systemic problems with no ready answers (not technical issues)
Adaptive work is leadership because leadership is more than “just authoritative expertise.”
A “technical problem” is one that can be solved by an expert who uses some technique (e.g. setting a broken arm,
replacing a broken air conditioner, or hiring a new choir director)
 A technical problem will go away when it is “solved”
 With a technical problem, things will one day return to “normal” in that they will go back to
being the way they once were.
o e.g. If a doctor sets a broken arm, she believes it will likely heal and the patient will be
able to act as if the arm were never broken.
o e.g. If a technician replaces the air conditioner, the congregation will be able to function
as if the air conditioner were never broken.
An adaptive problem will not go away; an expert cannot solve it; things will never be the same again.
 e.g. hiring a new choir director will not address the generational division in a church that creates a
constant tension over the style of the congregation’s worship music.
/* Note that technical problems often require only single-loop learning. But when an organization
does double-loop learning, they often encounter adaptive challenges. */
“Getting people to do adaptive work is the mark of leadership in a competitive world." But leaders often resist doing it
because it creates two uncomfortable circumstances. (124)
1. Adaptive change requires leaders to put aside their own need to provide solutions.
 Leaders are often reluctant to refrain from problem-solving “because many [leaders] reach their
positions of authority by virtue of their competence in taking responsibility and solving
problems.”
 Leaders cannot solve the problems for their people any more than the doctor can quit smoking for
the patient. "The locus of responsibility for problem solving when [an organization] faces an
adaptive challenge resides not [with the organization's formal leaders] but in the collective
intelligence of the [organization's members] at all levels, who need to use one another as
resources, often across boundaries, and learn their way to solutions." (124)
 For this reason, adaptive change cannot be imposed; it must be evoked.
2. Adaptive change requires leaders to make their people uncomfortable.
 “Adaptive change is distressing for the people going through it. They need to take on new roles,
new relationships, new values, new behaviors, and new approaches to work.”
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Study Notes by Scott Cormode
They will blame their leaders for forcing them to experience the pain that comes with adaptive
change (just as patients blame their doctors for making them lose weight).
People “often look to the senior [leaders] to take problems off their shoulders.” 124
What should leaders do when their people ask them to take away the pain that comes with adaptive change?
 Ask tough questions rather than provide easy answers.
o "Rather than fulfilling the expectation that they will provide answers, leaders have to ask
tough questions. Rather than protecting people from outside threats, leaders should allow
them to feel the pinch of reality in order to stimulate them to adapt." (125)

“Instead of orienting people to their current roles, leaders must disorient them so that new
relationship can develop. Instead of quelling conflict, leaders have to draw the issues out.
Instead of maintaining norms, leaders have to challenge ‘the way we do business’ and help others
distinguish immutable values from historical practices that must go.” (125)
Principles for Leading Adaptive Work
1. Get on the balcony: see the whole organization and the entire process.
 Leaders need to get above the dance floor (the plane of action) in order to see the big picture.
 Leaders must develop “the capacity to move back and forth between the field of action and the
balcony, to reflect day to day [and] moment to moment.” (125, 126)
 The goal is to enable the leader to become reflective.
 “The dynamics of adaptive change are far too complex to keep track of, let alone influence, if
leaders stay only on the field of play.” 126
/* The balcony has a particularly helpful connotation for pastors. It is often the place where the
atypical members sit (e.g. the youth, the late-comers, those who want to sneak out early). What
would the story of the worship service look like written from the balcony. What would communion
look like? Or the Christmas Eve candle light service? <Think of the passage, “Get thee up to a high
place…> */
2. Identify the Adaptive Challenge
e.g. The head of one organization “identified the essential adaptive challenge: creating trust throughout the
organization.” 126
How?
a. Listen to people inside and outside the organization, especially concerns and disagreements.
i. Ask, “Whose values, beliefs, attributes, or behaviors would have to change in order for
progress to take place?”
ii. “What sacrifices would have to be made and by whom?”
b. Conflicts are often clues to embedded tensions – symptoms of adaptive challenges. (126)
/* This is where double-loop learning is important. Don’t look just at disputes. Ask yourself,
“What about our system created the dispute in the first place?” and “What allowed the dispute to
continue until now?” */
c. Look in the mirror. The leaders are often the ones who need to undergo the most painful and
thorough changing.
o “No [leader] can hide from the fact that his or her team reflects the best and the worst of
the company’s values and norms, and therefore provides a case in point for insight into
the nature of the adaptive work ahead.” (126, italics added)
Note: “Strategy development itself requires adaptive work.” The very act of investigating and naming the
adaptive challenge is often so disconcerting that it is the beginning of the adaptive process. 127
3. Regulate Distress
 “Adaptive work generates distress” because a leader is asking people “to work on challenges for
which there are no ready solutions” and that will require them to experience pain. 127
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Study Notes by Scott Cormode
People “cannot learn new ways when they are overwhelmed.”
“But eliminating stress altogether removes the impetus for doing adaptive work.”
Thus, “a leader must strike a delicate balance between having people feel the need to change and
having them feel overwhelmed by change.”
Productive levels of stress require three things.
a. Holding Environment: create a psychological space that is both supportive and prods them forward.
 A holding environment is both safe and uncomfortable.
o It is safe so that people can attempt new ways of being without large penalties for
fumbling or failing in their initial attempts.
o It is uncomfortable so that people feel an incentive to change.
o Think, for example, of the person who needs to begin exercising. Their first attempts are
going to be embarrassing because the person is out of shape. No one wants to be the
center of attention when trying something new, especially if there is a high probability
that their first attempts will flounder. But exercising is painful, especially after that first
attempt – which means the person is likely not to want to do it again. So there needs to
be an environment that encourages the person’s efforts and discourages their desire to
stop trying.
b. Leaders need to use their authority to manage the adaptive process – and specifically to avoid the
temptation to use their authority to “solve” the problem.
c. Regulate distress.
4. Pacing: Maintain Disciplined Attention
 The key to maintaining disciplined attention is pacing.
 People facing adaptive challenges are tempted away from adaptive work in two ways:
1. Avoidance:
People will avoid a difficult problem if we let them. They will pretend it does not exist, that
it is not important or that it is someone else’s problem (especially the leaders’). This is what
psychologists like to call denial. Avoidance happens when people do not feel the depth of the
problem or its full ramifications. Forms of avoidance include “scapegoating, denial, focusing
only on technical issues, [and] attacking individuals rather than the perspectives they
represent.” (128)
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The appropriate remedy to avoidance is to make “people feel the pinch of reality.”
Point out the internal inconsistencies in their behavior. Show them the pain that the
problem causes for themselves or others around them. Help them to see that the
problem will not go away all on its own.
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Conflict is the natural by-product of adaptive work. Leaders are often tempted to
resolve the conflicts that develop too quickly. While it is true that the leader should
not let the conflicts get out of hand, the leader may actually want to draw the
conflicts out so that they continue to remind people of the particular places that work
still needs to be done.
2. Flight:
People can become so frightened by an adaptive challenge that they run away from it. It is
the opposite of avoidance. They feel the depth of the problem too acutely and it overwhelms
them. This usually happens when a leader pushes people to change too quickly.
 The appropriate remedy to flight is to take away some of the heat.
Instead of pointing out internal inconsistencies and naming points of conflict, the leader
allows those situations to remain for a little while so that those who wished to run away
can avoid the problem for a little while.
NOTE: avoidance is far more common than flight. Leaders need to give people enough
time to work through the difficult implications of an adaptive situation.
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Study Notes by Scott Cormode
Flight to authority is a particular temptation.
It is the tendency of people to look to the leader to “solve the problem.” People facing
adaptive challenges often act like passive followers. They claim that they will do
whatever the leader asks of them and then they blame the leader when she does not make
everything right. Flight to authority inevitably fails, however, for two reasons:
(1) The situation is not a technical problem that a leader can solve.
(2) It keeps people from doing the hard work of adapting (that is why the leader must
“put the work back on the people)
Note: authorities are, however, often the “repositories for our worries and aspirations, holding them,
if they can, in exchange for the powers we give them.” The role of the leader is to hold the fears and
then parcel them out at a rate people can stand. (Leadership without Easy Answers: pg. 69)
Proper pacing, therefore, ensures that people feel safe and supported at all times, but it does not all them
to stop moving forward toward the ultimate goal of adapting to the new situation. That is what it means
to “maintain disciplined attention” in a “holding environment.”
5. Give the work back to the people
A leader must constantly construct situations where the people themselves have to devise strategies for
adapting.
 Note: When an organization has to do adaptive work, then the whole organization (or a majority of it)
must be in on the labor that adaptive work requires.
 "Getting people to assume greater responsibility is not easy. Not only are many [followers]
comfortable being told what to do, but many [leaders such as pastors] are accustomed to treating
[people] like machinery requiring control.”
 Leaders need to “learn to support rather than control,” even as followers “need to learn to take
responsibility.”
 "The key is to let them discover the problem." (129)
 “A leader also must develop [the group’s] collective self-confidence.” 129
o That means that the leader needs to get people to build on their successes so that they have
the courage to face the more difficult parts of the adaptive challenge.
 “He knew that he could not maintain behavioral change. What he could do was create the conditions
for people to discover for themselves how they needed to change.” And eventually, “the people who
needed to do the changing finally framed the adaptive challenge for themselves.” (131, 132)
6. Protect Voices of Leadership from Below
 "Giving a voice to all people is the foundation of an organization that is willing to experiment and to
learn."
 "When authority figures feel the reflexive urge to glare or otherwise silence someone, they should resist."
 Key example: man who challenges the leaders’ pet project and is scolded. He will never think speak up
again.
 “Leaders must rely on others within the [organization] to raise questions.” The leader cannot be the only
one asking the questions. So the leader must “provide cover to people who point to the internal
contradictions of the enterprise.” (130)
Good Summary: “He knew that he could not mandate behavioral change. What he could do was create the conditions for
people to discover for themselves how they needed to change.” 131
“Engineering is the wrong metaphor” for strategy. “The prevailing notion that leadership consists of having a vision and
aligning people with that vision is bankrupt because [I would say “if”] it continues to treat adaptive situations as if they
were technical” problems. (134)
“When a leader is asked to square conflicting aspirations, he and his people face an adaptive challenge.” (134)
(From Heifetz's book, "Shifting their expectations is a polite way of saying that she had to fail their expectations at a rate
they could stand." (p. 83)