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INC.: OK. Say I'm the CEO. I founded the company. I've hired half a dozen people to work for me. When I started out, I was the only one here. I defined the problems; I made all the decisions; I took all of the action. That's the way it was when those people came. Now, you're telling me, I have to change their expectations about my behavior.
HEIFETZ: Sure. Presumably, as you move forward, the environment in which you operate is going to become more complicated. That's why you need more people. If people continue to expect you to be the know-it-all in assessing a complicated environment, you're lost. You may be able to wing it long enough to stay aloft for a while, but there's no way, to my mind, you can exercise leadership alone. The exercise of leadership requires, in complex problem situations, more information than one person can have.
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INC.: So you've got to bring others into the process. What's so hard about that?
HEIFETZ: What's hard is getting people to do what's necessary to solve the problem. Understand that the solution to a complex problem is going to require adjustments in the habits of people involved with the problem. In your company of six people, all of whom may hold conflicting views, all six people will have to change some of their attitudes, their ways of seeing things, and their habits of action.
Those changes involve a learning process. Your people have to examine some of their previous conceptions, and they have to import into their frames of reference the frames of reference of other people -- information that other people have. The CEO who is used to providing all the answers may be able to tell people what to do. But issuing a command is not going to change people's understanding. The solution is going to require that these people develop a capacity to continue to adapt to a changing and complicated environment.
INC.: Which takes time.
HEIFETZ: Right. In the short run, the people in the company may be delighted to get clear commands from the CEO, because it protects them from having to think things through themselves. In the longer term, though, it's going to increase their dependency on the CEO as the authority figure, and it will weaken their own capacities to come to terms with a complex environment.
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INC.: So, contrary to expectations, the strong authority figure doesn't necessarily make the best CEO?
HEIFETZ: He may in certain situations. There is one situation in which it makes a lot of sense to exercise very firm authority. That is when the disequilibrium generated by the complexity of the environment is so severe that people cannot think straight, cannot organize themselves to work. In this case, the CEO's authority is a tool for leadership. He has to exercise authority to bring the level of disequilibrium into a tolerable range that allows people to go to work defining and solving problems.
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INC.: You mean what Lee Iacocca did at Chrysler?
HEIFETZ: Exactly. Iacocca had to make people feel sufficiently secure and safe. He had to play to their need to have a big daddy. . . .
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INC.: To a point?
HEIFETZ: To a point.
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INC.: What's that point?
HEIFETZ: It's the point at which people fall into comfortable habits. After that, you know you've gone too far. People still have to be sufficiently ruffled and disturbed that they're thinking and anxious and working, but not so discomforted and stressed out that they're dysfunctional.
Franklin Roosevelt is another good example, by the way.
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INC.: In what sense?
HEIFETZ: Well, in 1933, the country was in enormous crisis. A lot of the banks were going under. In his first 100 days in office, Roosevelt exercised a very firm and powerful authority that soothed and comforted the people and gave them a sense of hope and security. It was necessary because the level of crisis in the United States was so severe that the country was on the brink of falling into catastrophic work-avoidance patterns similar to those occurring in Nazi Germany that same year. There, the social disequilibrium was so severe that people looked to anyone who could provide them with some firm belief -- regardless of what the belief was.
The difference is that Roosevelt, in providing people with a sense of security, knew that he couldn't do the solving. He knew the only way for the nation to make progress on this set of very messy, complicated problems was to engage the creative energies of the various constituencies. He had bankers arguing with industrialists arguing with labor arguing with Treasury. His own role was managing levels of disequilibrium and orchestrating the process by which these opposing factions sorted out the next steps.
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INC.: That sounds straightforward, if not easy.
HEIFETZ: Yes, but there's a trap for a Roosevelt or an Iacocca. Because his exercise of firm command made so much sense in a crisis, a CEO may begin to think that he should operate in that same mode all the time.
