Great Throughts Treasury

"Leading major organizational change often involves radically reconfiguring a complex network of people, tasks and institutions that have achieved a kind of modus vivendi, no matter how dysfunctional it appears to you. When the status quo is upset, people feel a sense of profound loss and dashed expectations. They may go through a period of feeling incompetent or disloyal. It is no wonder they resist the change or try to eliminate its visible agent."

"Learning to take the heat and receive people's anger in a way that does not undermine your initiative is one of the toughest tasks of leadership. In this sense, exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb."

"Partners come in two general types: the confidant and the ally. The confidant is the person to whom one can cry and complain. A confidant can provide a holding environment for someone who is busy holding everybody else."

"Steering an organization through times of change can be hazardous, and it has been the ruin of many a leader."

"Let us face it; to lead is to live dangerously. While leadership is often depicted as an exciting and glamorous endeavor, one in which you inspire others to follow you through good times and bad, such a portrayal ignores the dark side of leadership: the inevitable attempts to take you out of the game. Those attempts are sometimes justified. People in top positions must often pay the price for a flawed strategy or a series of bad decisions."

"Never get involved in the dark side of office politics, such as maligning associates, practicing deceit, manipulating others or withholding information to enhance your position. Although you may be successful in doing these things for a while, it will not take long for your colleagues to identify your true nature and turn against you. However, it is natural and normal to be an active participant in the political process that occurs in ever organization, which involves trying to influence others, networking, and exercising power."

"Of course, organizations, like all human systems, are highly complex. And the structures, culture, and defaults that define and maintain them prove tenacious. But they are tenacious for a reason. It took a long time for them to develop into self-reinforcing systems. They would have perished already if they were not fit to thrive in at least yesterday’s world."

"Often, the deal to confer power in exchange for a service is made so automatically that the phrase ‘social habit’ may fit better than ‘social contract.’"

"Once settled on the hierarchy, the rest of the members seem to find their places and roles, and the level of tension within the group diminishes dramatically. As the same time, cohesion increases."

"The absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision-making."

"Some of us may hate or distrust authority, but I doubt that we can do without some form of it."

"Successful leaders manage conflict; they don’t shy away from it or suppress it but see it as an engine of creativity and innovation. Some of the most creative ideas come out of people in conflict remaining in conversation with one another rather than flying into their own corners or staking out entrenched positions. The challenge for leaders is to develop structures and processes in which such conflicts can be orchestrated productively."

"The accumulation of evil never resides in one person at the top because no one gets to the top without representing the interests of the dominant factions in the system. The evil, if it is evil at all, lives in the routine ways in which people throughout the system collude in maintaining a dysfunctional status quo."

"The advantage of formal positions of authority is breadth. The disadvantage is distance from raw and relevant detail."

"The concept of social contract may be one cornerstone of democracy, yet democracy is not so easily achieved in light of our inclination to look to authority with overly expectant eyes. In part, democracy requires that average citizens become aware that they are indeed the principals and that those upon whom they confer power are their agents. They also have to bear the risks, the costs, and the fruits of shared responsibility and civic participation."

"The common personalistic orientation to the term leadership, with its assumption that ‘leaders are born and not made’ is quite dangerous. It fosters both self-delusion and irresponsibility."

"The loyalty and support of team members must be obtained before the leader attempts to implement his or her vision of the future….people can learn to become successful at inspiring and energizing others. The most important responsibility of a leader is to develop people. The ultimate leader is the one who is willing to develop individuals to the point that they eventually surpass him or her."

"The flight to authority is particularly dangerous for at least two reasons: first, because the work avoidance often occurs in response to our biggest problems and, second, because it disables some of our most important personal and collective resources for accomplishing adaptive work."

"The scarcity of leadership from people in authority, however, makes it all the more critical to the adaptive successes of a polity that leadership be exercised by people without authority."

"The myth of leadership is the myth of the lone warrior; the solitary individual whose heroism and brilliance enable him to lead the way."

"The point here is to provide a guide to goal formation and strategy. In selecting adaptive work as a guide, one considers not only the values that the goal represents, but also the goal’s ability to mobilize people to face, rather than avoid, tough realities and conflicts. The hardest and most valuable task of leadership may be advancing goals and designing strategy that promote adaptive work."

"The politics of inclusion are not faint-hearted efforts at making everybody happy enough. Inclusion means more than taking people’s views into account in defining the problem. Inclusion may mean challenging people, hard and steadily, to face new perspectives on familiar problems, to let go of old ideas and ways of life long held sacred."

"The second image of leadership – mobilizing people to tackle problems – is the image at the heart of this book. This conception builds upon, yet differs from, the culturally dominant views."

"The strategic challenge is to give the work back to people without abandoning them. Overload them and they will avoid learning. Underload them and they will grow too dependent, or complacent. Thus, an authority has to bear the weight of the problems, for a time."

"The threat of coercion is part of the authorization we give to the traffic police, for example, to prevent accidents at dangerous intersections. Not only do we want that threat to inhibit the impulses of other drivers, we also look to it at times to bridle out own."

"The term ‘holding environment’ originated in psychoanalysis to describe the relationship between the therapist and the patient. The therapist ‘holds’ the patient in a process of developmental learning in a way that has some similarities to the way a mother and father hold their newborn and maturing children. For a child, the holding environment serves as a containing vessel for the developmental steps, problems, crises, and stresses of growing up."

"There are lots of things in life that are worth the pain… Being a leader is one of them."

"This study examines the usefulness of viewing leadership in terms of adaptive work. Adaptive work consists of the learning required to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. Adaptive work requires a change in values, beliefs, or behavior. The exposure and orchestration of conflict – internal contradictions – within individuals and constituencies provide the leverage for mobilizing people to learn new ways."

"Thus, authoritative action will tend to reduce stress, while inaction will increase it. This may be true regardless of the content of the action."

"To King and his colleagues, the country had to face its own internal contradiction: the gap between what it said and what it did."

"What follows, then, are seven practical suggestions for bearing the responsibility that comes with leadership without losing one’s effectiveness or collapsing under the strain. They are: (1) get on the balcony, (2) distinguish self from role, (3) externalize the conflict, (4) use partners, (5) listen, using oneself as data, (6) find a sanctuary, and (7) preserve a sense of purpose."

"When [Gandhi] fasted for justice, people began to pay attention, not because another person was about to die of starvation but because Gandhi practiced what he preached."

"While the stress is severe, we seem especially willing to grant extraordinary power and give away our freedom. In a historical study of thirty-five dictatorships, all of them emerged during times of social distress."

"When Socrates described himself, he drew a crucial distinction between wisdom and a passion for wisdom. Having a passion for wisdom surpassed the attainment of wisdom. Curiosity was a virtue. Indeed, he considered only a life of ongoing examination worth living."

"When we do elect activists, we want them to change the thinking and behavior of other people, rarely our own."

"To sustain the stresses of leadership, he needs to know enough about his own biases to compensate for them. If he reacts automatically to reject advice when it is given in a way that appears condescending, for example, he needs to become sufficiently acquainted with that reflex that he can listen and respond flexibly, according to the needs of the situation."

"Wrenching organizational transformation” is adaptive change, which require individuals throughout the organization to find the solutions to challenges within themselves and change accordingly. This requires the organization to “accept a solution that may require turning part or all of the organization upside down."

"Yet those who do lead usually feel that they are taking action beyond whatever authority they have."

"Yet however much King embodied civil rights, he never became the issue. The distinction is important. King only represented the issue, and most people, I think, could tell the difference. The context of his activity was clear. Few people thought King was the source of the civil rights perspective, even if they knew him as chief spokesman and strategist… President Johnson’s behavior illustrates the other side of the distinction. Johnson went way beyond representing the cause of the Vietnam War. By virtue of taking on the role of solitary decision-maker, he became the issue – his judgment, his dishonesty, and style."

"Yet when faced with an adaptive challenge, an authority might still choose a more autocratic mode as a result of other factors. First, the organization or community may have too little resilience to bear the stresses of adaptive work. Giving the work back to people may overwhelm them and run counter to prevailing norms."