Leadership
Manuel E. Contreras
Social Development Institute
Inter-American Development Bank
June, 2005

“Leadership is one of the
most observed and least
understood phenomena on
earth”
James MacGregor Burns (1978)

Heroic vs. post heroic leadership
(Bradford & Cohen, 1998)
Post-Heroic Leadership
Heroic Leadership
New framework:
Traditional framework:
Everyone is responsible
Leader is responsible
Tangible
Direction vision
Shared Leader an d
Management
Leader
responsibility members
Group
creates
create
team
Mutual
Downward
influence
influence

Authority
(Heifetz, 1994)
Conferred power to perform
a service
1. Authority is given and can be taken away
2. Authority is conferred as part of an
exchange

Formal and Informal
Authority
Formal Authority: comes with various powers of
the office and it is granted because the office
holder promises to meet a set of explicit
expectations (job descriptions, legislated
mandates, etc.).
Informal Authority: rests on trust and comes
with “the power to influence attitude or
behavior beyond compliance.”
Trust: Predictability on values and skills.
(Heifetz, 1994)

SOURCES OF POSITIONAL
POWER Importance and
Formal
Formal authority
relevance of
Relevance Authority
the position
Centrality
Autonomy
Visibility
SOURCES OF PERSONAL
Credibility
POWER
Informal
Trust
Expertise
Authority
Respect
Track record
Attractiveness Admiration
Effort
Adapted from Hill (1994)

Authority
Social functions of authority:
Direction and sense of purpose
Protection
Order:
Roles and responsibilities
Conflict resolution mechanism and
cohesion
Norms
(Heifetz, 1994)

Adaptive Leadership
Mobilize people to face their problems
and their painful decisions so that they
learn new ways of being.
Mobilization implies to motivate,
organize, orient and focus attention.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Adaptive Leadership
The final objective of leadership is to confront
difficult problems that require the clarification
of values and the generation of progress.
The measurement of leadership is the
progress in the solution of problems.
Communities achieve this progress because
people who exercise leadership challenge
them and help them in the process.
There is a joint responsibility.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Technical Problems
“The necessarry knowledge about them
already has been digested and put in the
form of a legitimized set of known
organizational procedures guiding what
to do and role authorizations guiding
who should do it.”
(Heifetz, 1994)

Adaptative Problem
No adequate response has yet been
developed. They require learning to
overcome the conflicts in values, or
reduce the gap between the espoused
values and reality.
They require changes in values, attitudes
or habits of behavior.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Distinguishing Technical from
Adaptive Challenges
What’s the Who does
Work? the work?
Technical Apply current Authorities
know-how
Adaptive Learn new The people
ways with the
problem
(Heifetz and Linsky, 2002)

Technical and Adaptive
Problems
When we face an adaptive problem and
we treat it as technical one and we turn
to authority figures to produce technical
solutions we develop inadequate
dependencies (maladaptive behavior).
(Heifetz, 1994)

Disequilibrium and work
evasion
To exercise leadership one must overcome
the work evasion mechanisms and help
people learn despite their resistance.
Leadership requires that one regulate the
level of stress and the pace of learning at a
rhythm within a range that people can
tolerate.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Common mechanisms of work
avoidance
Hold on to the past.
Blame the authority figures.
Find a scapegoat.
Deny the problem.
Draw conclusions too quickly.
Use a distraction.
(Heifetz, 1994)

How to control the heat
Lower the temperature
Raise the temperature
Address the technical
Draw attention to tough aspects of the problem
questions Establish a structure for the
Give people more problem-solving process
Temporarily reclaim
responsibility than they
responsibility for tough
are comfortable with issues
Bring conflict to the Employ work avoidance
mechanisms
surface
Slow down the process of
Protect dissenting challenging norms and
voices expectations
(Heifetz and Linsky, 2002)

Leadership with authority

Authority as a resource
Managing the holding environment
1.
Directing attention
2.
Testing reality
3.
Managing information and framing
4.
issues
Orchestrating conflicting perspectives
5.
Choosing the decision making process
6.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Strategic principles
1. Get on the balcony.
2. Identify the adaptive challenge.
3. Regulate distress.
4. Maintain disciplined attention and prevent
work avoidance.
5. Give the work back to the people.
6. Protect leadership from below.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Get on the balcony
Leadership is both active and reflective.
One must alternate between
participating and observing.
Take perspective
Develop capacity to distinguish the
patterns
Don’t be swept away by the music!
(Heifetz, 1994)

Identify the adaptive
challenge
Is it a technical or adaptive problem?
Readjustments on basic routines or new
ways to proceed?
What are the values, beliefs or attitudes
that need to change?
What sacrifices must be made and by
whom?
(Heifetz, 1994)

Regulate distress
Balance between tension necessary for
change and being overwhelmed by
change
Holding environment
Orchestrate the sequence and rate of
change
Modified social function of authority
(Heifetz, 1994)

Adaptive Work Calls for Leadership
(Or walking on the razor’s edge)
razor’s (Heifetz and Laurie, 1998)
(Heifetz and Laurie, 1998)
Responsibilities Situation
Technical or Routine Adaptive
Direction Authority defines problems Authority identifies the
and solutions adaptive challenges,
frames key questions,
issues and solutions.
Protection Authority shields the Authority lets the
organization from external organization feel external
threats pressure within a range it
can stand
Orientation Authority clarifies roles Authority disorients
and responsibilities current roles or resists
pressure to orient people
in new roles prematurely
Controlling Conflict Authority restores order Authority exposes conflict
or lets it emerge
Shaping Norms Authority maintains norms Authority challenges
unproductive norms or
allows them to be
challenged

Regulate distress
Poise and tolerance: Control change
Emotional capacity to tolerate
uncertainty, frustration and pain
(Heifetz, 1994)

Maintain disciplined attention
Allow people to face difficult
alternatives in terms of values,
procedures, operating styles and power
Uncover conflicts to use them as
sources of creativity
Limit work avoidance
(Heifetz, 1994)

Giving the work back to the
people
Achieve that people assume greater
responsibilities
Develop the collective trust in oneself
(Heifetz, 1994)

Protecting leadership from
below
For organizations to learn, everybody
must be able to express their opinion
These opinions can create
disequilibrium--one must resist the
temptation to quiet them to restore
equilibrium.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Protecting leadership from
below
Protect those who put the internal
contradictions of the organization on
the table
What are they really talking about?
Is there something we are missing?
(Heifetz, 1994)

Losing balance
Authority limits the exercise of leadership because in
times of disequilibrium and distress people expect too
much and develop inadequate dependencies.
Whoever puts forward delicate issues runs the risk of
being sacrificed. It is in periods of disequilibrium that
there is a greater urgency to find answers, and the
need for leadership from those in authority is even
greater.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Losing balance
If authority figures reinforce that dependency
and fool themselves thinking they have
answers that they do not have, they are not
complying well with their role. They will give
technical solutions to adaptive problems that
will generate work avoidance and hamper
progress.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Management vs. Leadership

Management and Leadership
according to Kotter (1998)
Management Leadership
• Coping with complexity • Coping with change:
Promotion and mangmt.
• Planning and budgeting • Setting a direction: vision
and strategies for
achieving it
• Organizing and staffing • Aligning people:
communicating vision
• Controlling and problem • Motivating and inspiring
solving

Ronald Heifetz’s reply:
Heifetz’s
“In short, the prevailing notion that leadership
consists of having a vision and aligning people
with that vision is bankrupt because it
continues to treat adaptive situations as if they
were technical: the authority figure is
supposed to divine where the company is
going, and people are supposed to follow.
Leadership is reduced to a combination of
grand knowing and salesmanship.”
(Heifetz and Laurie, 1998)

Staying alive
Self-knowledge and self-discipline
form the foundations for staying
alive.
Heifetz and Linsky, 2002

Assassination
Leadership is dangerous because the stresses
of adaptive work can be severe.
People exercising authority are always failing
somebody.
Persons exercising leadership and authority
figures get attacked, dismissed, silenced and
sometimes assassinated because they come
to represent loss, real or imagined, of the
members of the community as a result of
adaptive work.
(Heifetz, 1994)

The temptation for martyrdom
“Exercising leadership, people often are
drawn to taking courageous stands. Indeed,
leadership may require willingness to die.
Sometimes, however, people confuse courage
with the temptation of martyrdom.”
“Martyrdom does not arise from the nature of
the martyr’s person or acts alone. It derives
from the meaning people give to him/her and
his/her acts. Martyrdom is a role created by
the community.”
(Heifetz, 1994)

The temptation for martyrdom
“ … Martyrdom is a role reserved for
charismatic authorities who are assassinated
in the service of their cause.”
(Heifetz, 1994)

Charisma
We attribute charisma to those that express
our pain and give us hope, and we don't
understand that the source of their charisma
is our own longing.
Charisma derives not only from the attitudes
of those people and their devotion to the
cause, but also from the fact that the
community has invested power and hope in
them.
(Heifetz, 1994)

Personal challenge
Internal discipline to contain the personal
tensions that leadership causes.
The role/self distinction.
Partners: confidants and allies.
Listening: Using oneself as data.
Finding a Sanctuary.
Preserving a sense of purpose
“the capacity to find the values that make risk-
taking meaningful.”
(Heifetz, 1994)

Final reflections
The exercise of leadership is a voluntary
activity.
Thus, it’s a time bound intervention: its
episodic.
It is oriented by the task of carrying out
adaptive work.
It implies asking questions more than
providing answers.

Final reflections (cont.)
(cont.)
It requires good questions and the
willingness to sustain uncertainty.
The heart of the strategy is to center
people’s attention in complex and difficult
issues instead of in distractions.
In light of the above, one can exercise
leadership form any position.
Its development requires a learning
strategy.

\"The true journey of discovery
does not consist in searching
for new territories
but in having new eyes.”
Marcel Proust

Bibliography
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Organizations Through Shared Leadership. New York: John Wiley &Sons.
Heifetz, Ronald A. (1994) Leadership without easy answers. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Heifetz, R.A. and D.L. Laurie (1998). “The work of leadership.” Harvard
Business Review on Leadership. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
Heifetz, R. A. and M. Linsky (2002) Leadership on the line. Staying alive
through the dangers of leading. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Hill, L. (1994). “Power Dynamics in Organizations.” Note HBB No. 494-083.
Harvard Business School.
Kotter, J.P. (1998) “What leaders really do.” Harvard Business Review on
Leadership. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
MacGregor Burns, J. (1978) Leadership. New York: Harper & Row.