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Leadership Expert Ronald Heifetz

Interview with Harvard University professor on the qualities and mechanics of leadership.

There's a big difference between exercising authority and leadership, says one of the most refreshing new voices on the subject. The trick is to know what the situation calls for

Don't be fooled by Ronald Heifetz's youth. At 37, he has already had more careers than most people pack into a lifetime -- surgeon, psychiatrist, cellist, and public policy professor. More to the point, this insightful man, who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is worth listening to, particularly for what he has to say about an insidious problem that entrepreneurs have been tripping over ever since the first start-up began to grow: defining the leader's role.

That is a subject about which a great deal has been written lately -- much of it trite, little of it original. Rarely does someone come along with anything new or instructive to say about corporate leadership. At first glance, Heifetz seems an unlikely exception. He is the first to admit that he has limited knowledge of how businesses actually work. But don't let that stop you. Though his expertise is in political leadership, his insights are directly relevant to businesspeople, particularly those who run growing companies.

And Heifetz won't give you the usual blather about the personality traits of great leaders. He puts much more emphasis on the definition of leadership, in part because he understands the power of words. Label someone a leader -- give him or her the leader's role -- and a conscientious person tries to be or do what the label implies. That same label will likewise determine the expectations of the people in the group or organization being led. Problems most often arise, Heifetz suggests, when leaders and followers have the wrong notion of what leadership is. To correct the problems, therefore, you must begin by offering a better definition -- which is precisely what he has done.

Inc. senior writer Tom Richman visited Heifetz's cubbyhole office in Cambridge, Mass., to get the word.

* * *

INC.: Can you give us a succinct definition of leadership?
HEIFETZ: I define leadership as an activity, not as a set of personality characteristics. So what I'm interested in is developing people's capacity to perform a particular activity, and I call this activity "leadership." And the activity of leadership I define as the mobilization of the resources of a people or of an organization to make progress on the difficult problems it faces.

Notice that I am not talking about routine problems; I don't think they require leadership. I'm talking about difficult problems. In those situations, someone exercising leadership is orchestrating the process of getting factions with competing definitions of the problem to start learning from one another.

* * *

INC.: Let's try to simplify that. Are you saying that exercising leadership does not mean imposing a solution on the group?
HEIFETZ: Well, it might if the situation involves a simple problem. For example, if I take my car to my mechanic and he says, "This is what needs to be done to fix the car," the mechanic is imposing his solution on my car, and that's fine. With a routine problem, one can look to authority -- to experts -- to come up with the solution and to implement it.

* * *

INC.: So you're drawing a distinction between exercising authority and exercising leadership.
HEIFETZ: Yes, but let me go on. I would not say that my car mechanic is exercising leadership. He's an expert, so I granted him authority. He's exercising his authority by telling me what's wrong with my car and what he's going to do to fix it. It's not a complex situation, and the mechanic is exercising authority, not leadership. But -- and this is important -- even in a very complicated situation demanding the exercise of leadership, an authority figure still has a role.

* * *

INC.: Which is?
HEIFETZ: To maintain equilibrium in the organizational system. The function of an authority figure is to right the ship, maintain equilibrium, keep things on an even keel. People expect an authority figure to be comforting.

* * *

INC.: And a leader, in contrast . . .
HEIFETZ: I wouldn't use the word leader. I'd say someone who exercises leadership. Someone exercising leadership is probably generating disequilibrium. Either he is raising issues or asking questions that disturb people and force people to come to terms with points of view or problems that they would rather not consider; or he's protecting other people in the organization who are creating disequilibrium.

* * *

INC.: Let me see if I've got this straight. People exercising authority create equilibrium in an organization, and people exercising leadership create disequilibrium. I guess I don't get it.
HEIFETZ: OK, say we're in a senior staff meeting, and the financial guy announces that we're losing market share. One possible reason, he suggests, is poor packaging.

The first thing that happens is the packaging guy becomes furious and rebuts the charge. The two of them start going at each other, and maybe others join in. Does this solve the problem? No. These are work-avoidance mechanisms. People will do all kinds of things that don't have anything to do with solving the problem. So someone has to exercise authority to reduce disequilibrium to a range within which people can pay attention to the information that the financial guy is presenting. Exercising authority can restore the equilibrium, but it can't solve the problem, which is that we're still losing market share. For that, someone -- the CEO, the financial guy, someone -- must exercise leadership, which is the mobilization of people to face, define, and solve problematic realities.

* * *

INC.: I take it that, by your definition, the person who exercises leadership is not the individual who provides answers but the individual who manages the group's efforts to define its own problems and reach its own answers.
HEIFETZ: Sort of. But it's a little more than that because it's not simply the neutral guy orchestrating a process. First, it would be fine to provide answers if you really had the answers. But if you have the answers, like my car mechanic, then it is probably not a situation demanding leadership. There are a lot of situations, however, in which no clear answers exist, but where the authority figure is expected to provide them anyway. The exercise of leadership then requires the orchestration of competing factions. That doesn't simply mean sitting back passively and saying, "You work it out," because organizations have ways of avoiding that work. Defining problems is creative work and very difficult. Orchestrating competing points of view is also hard work. Both generate stress in an organization, so organizations tend to find ways to avoid those tasks. Most often, they'll blame it on the authority figure himself, saying, "We shouldn't have to do this work. If only we had the right authority figure, the right leader, our problems would be solved.'

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