Summary Of Leadership Without Easy Answers By Ronald Heifetz

Ronald Heifetz in his book, Leadership without Easy Answers, organizes leadership by differentiating between “technical” and “adaptive” problems, and between leadership and authority. Further, he redefines leadership an activity. An activity of mobilizing people towards collective action, rather than simply being defined as sets of personality traits. To be an effective leader, you must engage in adaptive work. Adaptive work consists of learning how to “address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face” (22). Therefore, leadership is not value-free. Different competing values is important in adaptive success. It provides a guide to formulating and creating a strategy
A leader must guide the people though adaptive challenges. This model of leadership can be compared to a doctor helping his patients. Challenging medical conditions require that the patient engage in adaptive thinking that is facilitated by doctor. The patient must think hard on what realistic options they are presented with and what values they hold. To do adaptive work, the leader must accept a change in values, beliefs, and behavior. Heifetz states, “The exposure and orchestration of conflict- internal contradictions- within individuals and constituencies provide the leverage for mobilizing people to learn new ways” (22). In this view, the central task of leaders then becomes to clarify what matters most. The advantages of adaptive work are: 1. It values reality testing as it “points to the pivotal importance of reality testing in producing social useful outcomes- the process of weighing one interpretation of a problem and its courses of evidence against others.” 2 “allows us to evaluate leadership in process rather than wait until the outcome is clear” (24). Therefore, adaptive work requires assessing reality and clarifying values to eliminate the gap between “the values people stand for and the reality they face”
As adaptive challenges arise, these authoritative systems learn how to respond to them. Therefore, the “stresses generated by the problems become temporary” (72). However, for some problems there hasn’t been a response developed. For example, poverty, drug abuse, racial issues, national debt, environmental pollution. Heifetz states, “No organizational response can be called into play that will clearly resolve these kinds of problems. No clear expertise can be found, no single sage has general credibility, no established procedure will suffice” (72). In these situations where the authority system has no response, the people tend to look to authority and generate inappropriate dependencies. Hence, these authoritative systems under a sense of urgency tend to create fake remedies or “take action that avoids the use by skirting it” (73). Therefore, looking to people with authority for solution is maladaptive. Heifetz states, “Indeed, it is perhaps the essence of maladaptive behavior: the use of a response appropriate to one situation in another where it does not apply” (73). Authority is important in countering routine situations and conflicts, and can be used “invaluably in more challenging times” (73). Yet, it can also be used to avoid work. Work avoidance occurs in response to the most crucial problems. To distinguish between adaptive and maladaptive authority relationships, “we need