The Secret of Good Leadership

With book shelves overloaded with volumes on leadership, it's not often I come across an article that seems worth adding to the existing body of knowledge. This is the exception, a report from the FT on Ronald Heifetz' course on leadership (registration needed at FT site) at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Heifetz separates leadership from authoritarian instruction, and leads a course that challenges students to tackle the chaos and confusion that may result from high-stress problem solving situations. He creates an environment in the classroom which mimics this, and pushes the students to deliver in an unstructured setting. The drop-out rate is high, but the successes rise to greater achievements.

Similar to action learning definitions (of puzzles and problems), he differentiates between two types of management problem - technical challenges (for which there is a known solution that must be recognised) and adaptive challenges (in which both the problem and the solution may not be clear). During adacptive challenges, organisations experience long periods of disequilibrium, and it is the leader's challenge to control the pace of this while ensuring that momentum continues in face of the psychological needs for stability.

Heifetz offers this teaching as a counter-balance to the notion of charismatic leadership, particularly when this connection with a single vision prevents people and organisations from tackling the real problem they face.