Ronald Heifetz - On Leadership

[Music]

[Music]

my name is Ron Heifetz and I've been

teaching at the Kennedy School at

Harvard for 35 years I founded the

Center for public leadership here and

I've been experimenting with teaching

leadership for all of this time I call

it an experiment because even though my

courses have been quite successful and

I've had students now go practice

leadership all around the world some

have become presidents and prime

ministers of countries many are working

at grassroots a lot of working in

schools or religious organizations

nonprofits governments of any of all

kind and in business I continue continue

to call it an experiment because

leadership itself is a frontier area of

thought it's not a well work discipline

where people agree on basic terms of

reference as you'd find in economics or

or health or medicine or law or or

statistics or engineering people even

disagree when you read books on

leadership about how they define the

terms leadership Authority management

power influence followers citizen so a

lot of my work has been at the frontier

to clarify useful ways to understand

these different words and what they mean

and then to build a theory a practical

theory of leadership to guide people in

their daily practice so one of the big

discoveries in my work is that is that

we tend to over identify leadership with

a set of personal characteristics there

is no one set of personal

characteristics that is leadership all

the ones that we would say are important

in leadership like the ability to listen

to stomach ambiguity to stomach conflict

to keep purposes and values ever-present

in your mind those are important to be a

good parent to be a good parent of a

teenager you've got to have a stomach

for conflict you've got to be willing to

improvise and try different things out

you've got to keep your eye on the ball

of what you're trying to accomplish even

when you're exhausted and tired and and

sometimes quite annoyed so there is no

one set of characteristics or personal

abilities that define leadership

leadership stew find by the work to be

done the challenges that people are

facing

like in any craft a good carpenter may

have good tools and good abilities but

what makes a carpenter a carpenter is

that they build houses and so forth so

we don't really need leadership in a

society or in an organization when the

problems are routine and we know what to

do what we need people to do is provide

the kind of managerial and authoritative

expertise and then know how to define

the problem to be solved and mobilize

people and organize people and direct

people towards a solution we need

leadership in societies and

organizations when people are facing new

kinds of challenges that require people

to learn new ways and that challenge

then of learning new ways is a discovery

process which sometimes is quite painful

because sometimes to learn new ways

you've got to unlearn old ways and that

sometimes means departing from tradition

and departing from history so leadership

in its practice can sometimes be quite

dangerous and risky work because you're

trying to engage people and facing up to

realities that require departures from

historical traditions and and other ways

of operating and sometimes requires

people to move to the frontier of their

competence to experiment in an area

where they can't feel entirely competent

yet because those new competence

competencies are yet to be developed and

developing that kind of stomach to

orchestrate and mobilize and listen to

people and hold people through an

ongoing process of developing new

capacity I would say that that begins to

describe the heart of the practice of

leadership and in that sense the heart

of the practice of leadership is an

educated process you're trying to help

people come to new judgments to clarify

their value orientations to clarify how

to relate to one another properly and

how to distribute power differently and

how to experiment and move from version

1.1 to 1.2 and have a stomach for

ongoing failure as they move towards

increasingly productive successes that

kind of leadership is

think begins to anchor leadership in the

work to be done rather than simply the

personal skills or the powers of

authority so leadership then becomes

accessible to anybody

one might exercise leadership from a

high position of authority but one might

also exercise leadership from the middle

of an organization or at the front lines

because if we begin to distinguish

leadership from authority then it's it's

a practice that anybody can participate

in simply by seeing a problem in your

midst and beginning to mobilize people

in your surrounding to work on that

problem and build that new capacity and

that becomes very important because then

we can begin to counteract the tendency

of people to wait until they gain a high

position of authority to practice

leadership indeed if you're working in a

school you can practice leadership as a

as a as a as a novice teacher because

you may be bringing fresh ideas to it in

a school where many other teachers may

be a little bit calloused and a little

bit exhausted but you have new

experiments to run now if you know how

to listen carefully and respect your

elders and then engage them quite

gradually in a process of reawakening

some of their own adventuresome Nissen

plasticity you may actually help build

the capacity of that school even from

the position of a new person like

somebody from Teach for America and

similarly you might practice leadership

as the chairman of the English

department in mobilizing and mentoring

teachers both lateral to you and and new

and even some senior teachers in trying

out new things and rediscovering how to

have fun in the classroom or in

softening the calluses that emerge

because teachers of course fail with a

percentage of their students every day

and it becomes hard to face into those

failures and stay in the game so that

one could be practicing leadership as a

chair of a department not just a novice

teacher in helping people continue the

ongoing adventure of discovering how to

work that frontier of competence in

finding ways to connect to that student

whose eyes tend to glaze OH

over maybe they glaze over because they

saw a fight at home the night before

maybe because you know an uncle touched

them in a way that was abusive and then

the teacher has to somehow learn skills

of social work new kinds of competencies

visiting homes bringing in an uncle into

the classroom into a parent-teacher

meeting in order to figure out what are

the needs of that student to hold that

student properly to help that student

fulfill his or her potential and

similarly the principal of a school can

practice leadership in all sorts of ways

including these so distinguishing

leadership from authority helps us begin

to see that if we understand leadership

as a practice as an activity then it

becomes available to anybody high or low

any place their position simply because

they passionately care about some

problem situation about the people in

that problem situation and then mobilize

people with faith in their capacity to

step up to the plate and meet that

challenge

[Music]