On today’s season finale of On the Balcony, Michael Kohler welcomes Professor Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the book that has formed the focus of this season. Professor Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. His work addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation. Heifetz opens the episode by discussing how his own thinking in last thirty years has been shaped by his role as a parent. He points out that parenting is fundamentally a series of adaptive challenges requiring the ability to deal with the unpredictable—a good model for thinking about the ongoing stream of challenges that organizations, companies, governments, and our societies as a whole are facing. Michael then asks Ron to reflect on the development of Leadership Without Easy Answers and how the Leadership Studies field has evolved since its publication. Heifetz shares some of the family history and personal experiences that influenced his thinking and led him to consider how charismatic authority emerges and how to teach leadership practice that would avoid the temptations of grandiosity and power. He also discusses his process of realizing that authority is not fundamentally bad or unnecessary but is an integral part of social relationships with its own virtues and significance and must be wielded with responsibility and trustworthiness.

On the subject of trust, Heifetz next points out how common it is to experience violations or abuses of trust by authority and how many of us learn to distrust it as a result. He uses the example of politicians to illustrate this, pointing out that the fear of negativity often leads to a lack of trust on both sides of the relationship with their constituents, resulting in pandering rather than transformative leadership. He also points out that the COVID pandemic provided a useful set of cases to illustrate the impact of trust, with countries with lower trust in authority having higher death rates, the US being a prime example. Heifetz goes on to discuss the work of repairing and restoring trust, including encouraging those in roles of authority to develop a mindset of ongoing repair instead of an entitlement to trust. He also focuses on the challenge of mobilizing people to do adaptive work and the importance of developing new, more empathetic strategies for creating sustainable change in the hearts and minds of those who resist it. In order to make progress, he states that it’s essential that those in positions of authority and privilege are involved in the adaptive work, so we must resist the urge to resort to a cheap binary-ism of rejection and understand the difficulty of jettisoning one’s culture and traditions wholesale. And, to close the episode and the season, Heifetz shares his thoughts on what the future holds for him and his framework, including a refocusing of Leadership Studies onto cultural innovation and evolution.

The Finer Details of This Episode:

The adaptive challenges of parenthood
The evolution of the Leadership Studies field
The virtues and significance of authority
How politicians can lead and stay alive
Quotients of trust and the COVID pandemic
The practice of repairing and restoring trust
Activism and mobilizing people to do adaptive work
The need for leadership at the micro level
The future for Leadership Studies

Quotes:

“We can’t afford to have an allergic reaction to authority systems just because they’ve been abusive to many of us historically.”

“We all are designed to seek validation, affirmation, and even affection.”

“We see politicians change their tune—not because they’ve learned about the world and fortunately keep evolving their points of view, but simply because the constituency has changed its point of view.”

“The politician changes their point of view in order to gain the affirmation and ultimately then the authorization of that constituency.”

Links:

On the Balcony on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast

Leadership Without Easy Answers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Without-Answers

https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/ronald-heifetz

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