Heifetz on public leadership: the popular author applies the notion of adaptive challenges to the superintendency.

Talk to Ron Heifetz for more than a few minutes about school leadership, and it's clear he doesn't think those at the helm have an easy time of it. There are those fractious school boards. Parents who want their children transferred to another teacher now. Students' scores on high-stakes exams.

"Being a superintendent is just about the hardest political job in America," says Heifetz, a nationally known authority on leadership in the public arena. "You're a puppet with so many strings attached that it's not hard to get your arm pulled off."

But that doesn't mean conflict--or inertia--is the inevitable result. Develop stronger adaptive skills, Heifetz says, and your organization can adjust and even thrive amid wrenching change. Learn to communicate your aspirations, he advises, and you will better help your colleagues to embrace them. Rethink traditional notions of command and control. Stop expecting a leader to have all the answers. Then you may see genuine reform take root and energize those around you.

Drawing on his wide range of perspectives--lecturer on public leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, co-founder of the Center for Public Leadership, author, psychiatrist and cellist--Heifetz has redefined leadership, loosening it from the traditional moorings of solo initiative and moving it toward a process of engaging colleagues in addressing new demands. It's an approach that ultimately makes success the responsibility of all a community's members.

Advice on how to lead is easy to come by--a quick trip through any bookstore will confirm that. But for many school leaders, what separates Heifetz's work from the pack is its recognition of the demands they confront and the tools it offers for moving forward. "I think the way he breaks down the change process has a lot of resonance," says Paul Houston, AASA executive director. "most superintendents see themselves as having to bring about change. As a breed, superintendents feel pretty put upon. Heifetz says, 'Yes, you are-and you still have to lead.'"

Sitting in his airy office at the Kennedy School in Cambridge, Mass., Heifetz recently shared some of his views with The School Administrator.

Q: The No Child Left Behind legislation has imposed a lot of mandates to be met in a relatively short time. When a superintendent has to take someone else's vision and put his mark on it, how does he or she start?

Heifetz: I think NCLB represents, at the level of orienting values for the educational system, a major challenge by articulating an aspiration that has rarely if ever been taken seriously in the history of American education. But at the level of this high aspiration, at that abstract and high level of a dream, it probably identifies an underlying truth in the American vision that, even though rarely articulated if ever, has always been there. It's the same overarching value that Martin Luther King Jr. grabbed ahold of in August 1963 when he said, I have a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

A great company and a great country and a great school system will claim values that generate a gap between current operating reality and those values, rather than claiming minimal values, with which they then can say, we have no gap, we're successful. 1 think the federal government has been, by stating such a vision, surfacing the huge gap between the fundamental nature of the American proposition that all human beings are created equal and the reality of how our school systems have been operating, which is that we tolerate perfectly well leaving many children behind. There isn't any nation on the planet that has figured out how to not leave any child behind. Clearly, that's a job for a great many institutions in a society, not only the school system.

One of the injustices I've observed in working with school systems is that they're being asked to do the primary job here, letting the other institutions in a community off the hook. In a sense then, they're being asked to treat this adaptive challenge as if it were a technical problem that can be solved solely through their own instruments. We know that that's just not true. We have to gear up as a society to help (school systems) do their part of that job. In the end, they still can't do that job all by themselves--it's going to require other institutions in the community to collaborate in providing a healthier holding environment for those children.

Q: So where does a school superintendent begin to address this and spell out the challenge?

Heifetz: The tactics of adaptive change always have to be tailored to a particular situation. Different situations call for different qualities of touch: some soft touch, some a harder touch. The essential point, however, is to claim a higher set of aspirations and then to mobilize the people in your building or district to be more creative and collaborative in teaching each other and in working together to discover how to get closer to realizing those aspirations.

In the process, you're going to end up identifying people who are unwilling to undergo that kind of adaptive change because it involves too much loss, too much disloyalty for them, and they will sabotage the effort. And many of those people will have to leave.

Frequently adaptive processes will require accepting casualties. One ought to try to minimize the number of casualties. The people who can't change have reasons why they're deeply invested in their way of doing things, and one can work with them in more innovative ways to release their stranglehold on their creativity. But sometimes you can't figure out how to do that in a timely enough fashion, and they've got to go.

Q: Is part of that process empowering teachers, principals and others, working your way through the system to get a broader variety of people to take on leadership roles?

Heifetz: Different classrooms even within the same building are going to require different adaptations because different teachers bring to their work different talents and weaknesses. The job of the principal is to say, "Here are my aspirations." In that regard, I think the federal government has provided a huge assistance to principals and school superintendents all over the country in saying we've got to meet this aspiration; we can no longer leave children behind. That's fabulous fuel for the fire--and they've got to use that fuel.

Now they've also got to find ways to reshape the policy so they can reshape it to the adaptive requirements of their community. Ultimately, you want teachers to discover how to increase the yield of success within any classroom. And teachers in individual classrooms will have to go against the grain of certain inculcated habits in the system to learn how to do that.

What we need is a culture in which teachers invite colleagues into each other's classroom. The superintendent has to set that as a process goal and create structures that will encourage that to happen.... Teachers are going to need help to figure out how do 1 respond to a given situation? The teacher might say, "I took off 10 minutes to talk to the student, but I didn't get anywhere." One has to help that teacher learn how to optimize that 10 minutes. Or if you can't get anywhere, what are some other resources you could bring to bear from outside the community?

In the long term, it is more debilitating to the teacher to neglect that student than it would be to discover a way to help that student. In the short term, there's an added amount of investment the teacher needs to make so you get resistance.

What we need to develop are processes and procedures to change the culture within buildings in order to make it not only permissible but strongly encouraged for that kind of collaborative learning to take place.

Q: What are some effective ways to bridge gaps and create a community where people can take a risk?

Heifetz: There's the rewarding of experiments, and the response to failure that's an inquisitive response, saying, "OK, what can we learn from what just happened?" which begins to change the norm in the culture, rather than saying, "How the hell could this have happened?" Because the "how the hell could this have happened," people know that already. What they don't know is that anyone's willing to learn anything from what's happened.

The superintendent needs to be a public leader on education. The superintendent has to ask: "Who needs to learn what in this community for us to make progress for kids?" Then the superintendent has to develop a strategy that addresses those various constituencies: the retired people, some of whom don't see a stake in paying taxes; employers who could be doing more; parents who need to be doing a better job; clergy; social service agencies; the police.

The public leadership job for the superintendent is to be the champion for the children within each of those so that each of those communities begins to bear the weight of the responsibility. The natural inclination within many of those communities is to throw the monkey back on the back of the school system. And the job of the superintendent is to say, "We're going to carry that monkey as best we can, but we can't carry it by ourselves."

Q: What are the benefits to school leaders of being able to join a community of their peers to discuss leadership issues? You have talked about the Wallace Foundation project, which brought such a group together. Did the school leaders involved find a new sense of community, and did having this outlet make their job more manageable?

Heifetz: It wasn't until about the third workshop that they began to let down their guards--that was six or eight months into it. The first retreat was five days, and all the subsequent ones over two years, every quarter, were three days, and we structured a fair amount of time each gathering to have them present cases of a leadership dilemma to each other in small groups for consultation. It took several workshops before they began to see what an opportunity it was for them to have this kind of conversation.

Q: Were there any leadership dilemmas that you saw that you didn't necessarily anticipate?

Heifetz: Nearly all were ones I wouldn't have entirely anticipated. I think the most dramatic findings were twofold: They seemed to find it enormously helpful to have a leadership framework that took into account the political complexities of their jobs and that distinguished the technical expertise that all of them had from the adaptive challenges. It was quite liberating to them, I think, to have those adaptive challenges as the focal point of our attention.

This is different from the authoritative expertise that they were predisposed to exercise: "Here's the problem, I'll give you the solution." Even when you're supervising a teacher in the classroom, and you may see all sorts of potential solutions, none of them are solutions in truth until they are realized in her behavior or his behavior. So what you think are your solutions are really just your proposals until they are internalized and lived.

This was a new way of thinking, and it liberated quite a lot of creativity on their part. It named something they had all experienced, but they had not had an analytical framework for beginning to get their heads around their task in mobilizing adaptive work.

The second big thing is the excitement that was unleashed when they discovered each other. They knew each other, but they hadn't had these kinds of collaborative conversations where they were helping each other figure out "What's the next leadership move I should make? How should I have this conversation with this person?" They got very nitty-gritty, very tactical. They delighted in teaching each other. They wanted more of it.

You know, the isolation and aloneness at the top is really unnecessary. These people will by default move into a lonely position in relation to their job by virtue of the politics of their job, the organizational dynamic of their job. You fight it by calling colleagues on the phone in other districts who have no competing stakes and with whom you can start getting real. The more real you get, the less lonely you feel.

The key here is distinguishing self from role. There are some rich opportunities to create within various regions forums in which superintendents might come together to talk periodically and begin to share cases.

Q: How do you address it when something goes wrong and people shoot arrows your way? You're the flashpoint within the system for discontent.

Heifetz: There are at least three aspects to this. One is the strategic aspect: How should I respond to the complaint? In my books, we discuss a strategic framework for responding to leadership challenges of that. Another dimension is the interpretive dimension: How do I make sense of what's coming at me? There's an important diagnostic part of the work. The third piece: How do I not take it personally? That is hard to do when the stakes are high because you generally care with your gut.

I've found that because the stakes are high, school administrators are more inclined to be brittle in their response to opposition. By brittle, I mean not only that they are reacting, but they are too ready to discount the quality of the opposition. I don't mean they're too ready to discount the political strength of the opposition or the import of the opposition from an organizational point of view. But they're quite ready to discount that there are any legitimate values in the opposition.

You can't negotiate very well with an opposition nor mobilize an opposition if you discount the values they stand for. You have to have some reverence for the pain of change that you're asking your opposition to sustain if it were to take any steps toward your agenda. Allies come cheap; it doesn't cost them anything. The opposition has the most to lose. So when you distinguish yourself from your role, you can begin to depersonalize the attacks, and that also helps you depersonalize the people who are attacking you. You can begin to understand what's really at stake for them, for their jobs, their competency.

You need to get inside the head of the opposition, and then work with it, figure out how to negotiate with it. This is usually necessary because rarely do you have the political capital to just blow them out of the water, and even if you did, it might not be the right thing to do.

Q: How recent is the shift in the conception of leadership that moves people away from a more "silo" mentality?

Heifetz: I think it's recent, over the past 20 years. Certainly to conceptualize leadership in this way, in which leadership is distinguished from authority and in which technical is distinguished from adaptive work. So you can begin to understand what kind of leadership is going to be required to mobilize new adaptation within a system. How do you do that with authority and beyond your authority?

Superintendents or principals have a realm of authority, but they also have critical constituencies who lie outside their authority. Parents, for example, or for the superintendent, school board members or taxpayers or the mayor or the chamber of commerce or the teachers' union. Key aspects of his or her reality that they have to contend or negotiate with--they've got to find ways to exercise leadership into those constituencies beyond their authority.

So this is a relatively new way of thinking. It's also consonant with a trend in the business community in which people are thinking more about boundary-less organizations.

Q: In your discussions with superintendents, do you find a defensiveness about their work?

Heifetz: I think they are defensive, appropriately and inappropriately. I think there's an appropriate level to this defense because underlying the attack on public schools is a set of assumptions about children and about how a society should work that are the antithesis of leaving no child behind. Assumptions in which it's perfectly all right to leave children behind, they're a lot who are incapable. I think people in the public schools who are trying to defend the disenfranchised children are reacting defensively in a totally appropriate way.

At the same time, improving the public school system is going to require experimentation because it's the nature of adaptive progress that experimentation is required. Genetic diversity is what drives adaptability in a species. And genetic diversity is another word for multiple experiments being run in a gene population in the hope that in a changing environment, one segment of that population will have the keys to the future. So we need multiple experiments to be run in a community, and it may be that, for example, some of the charter schools will generate lessons that can then be applied in the regular public school system much more broadly.

Some of the defensiveness is inappropriate in the sense that we do need multiple experiments to be run. The challenge is to run these experiments without investing even less in our public schools, which to my mind are underinvested in even now.

RELATED ARTICLE: Heifetz asks: what is true leadership?

People often look to leaders in a crisis to be the ones with quick, decisive answers. Parents know this. So do teachers and CEOs. No surprise there. Rapid response can be very attractive amid uncertainty.

But the traditional approach is not always the answer. To Ron Heifetz, cofounder of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a lasting solution that gets at the heart of a problem may lie in leaders' ability to wrestle with new Strategies and draw their team into developing together a vision for progress.

That's the less glamorous but ultimately more enduring kind of problem solving that can help an organization, be it a corporation or a school system, rise to a new challenge, according to Heifetz. It's not a simple or always immediately satisfying approach. Witness the title of his 1994 book, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Harvard University Press).

What's helpful about Heifetz's approach to leadership is his sense of humanity. Tinkering with established wisdom is not always warmly embraced, after all, and opponents' responses may make you feel like you're trying to turn a battleship in a swimming pool. That's the kind of day-today reality that Heifetz and co-author Marty Linksy take on in Leadership on the Line (Harvard Business School, 2002).

Indeed, it's not hard to find yourself somewhere in Heifetz's analysis, whether you're at the top or on the ground floor of an organization. In Leadership Without Easy Answers, Heifetz walks you through the challenges of well-known figures--Lyndon Johnson in his dealings with civil rights leaders, for example--but also introduces you to everyday people who emerged to make a difference. He provides a framework for understanding the individuals' actions by plumbing the difference between technical and adaptive challenges, those that require familiar, even prescriptive solutions and those that point to the need for a new template.

Heifetz makes you see how leadership can emanate from all corners, even those without official authority.

--Amelia Newcomb

RELATED ARTICLE: Heifetz and the notion of 'I, Superintendent'

BY JAMES H. LYTLE

For two years, through last spring, I had the extraordinary opportunity to be one of 12 superintendents participating in a seminar at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where we convened every three months with Ron Heifetz and his colleagues at the Center for Public Leadership for three intensive days of dialogue, discussion, reflection, introspection and self-critique.

Each of our districts had received a Leadership for Educational Achievement in Districts grant from Wallace/Reader's Digest Funds. Our group included several superintendents who were well known in professional circles nationally, including a former AASA president and others whose careers were regularly chronicled in Education Week. Others of us were relatively new in our positions and had spent most of our career in a single district. Although our districts were considered urban, they ranged in size from 14,000 to 160,000 students.

Our knowledge of Heifetz, a lecturer in public leadership at the Kennedy School, was restricted to what we had read on his two book jackets: Leadership Without Easy Answers and Leadership on the Line. What we learned in our first session with him was that he had trained to be a neurosurgeon but became interested in psychiatry while moonlighting as a prison doctor. As his practice in psychiatry developed he became increasingly aware of the challenges faced by those who lead organizations. Over time he turned his attention to the study of leadership.

Our sessions with Heifetz began in fishbowl settings. Heifetz taught the basic concepts in his books, relating them to the work of the superintendents. As the program progressed, the center consultants began making site visits to their superintendent case loads, learning the settings and challenges of each superintendent and providing counsel on problems the superintendent identified. In a sense the consultants served as intermediaries, bridging the boundaries between the Kennedy School and the districts. Their connectedness helped reduce the resistance of the superintendents and inform the Heifetz team of the real-world problems we faced.

Personal Scenarios

We moved to case studies, but the cases were our own. Our colleagues and the Harvard faculty helped us deconstruct the cases and work on solutions. As in using a therapist, the cases often opened a doorway to other problems and revealed how directly our own personas and predilections were factors in the case.

One superintendent told of dealing with a retrograde and majority-white school board in a district where a substantial majority of the students were Hispanic. The challenge was to learn how to deal with the board in sympathetic ways while also advocating for the students, their parents and their community--and while simultaneously managing budget crises, teacher contract negotiations, No Child Left Behind and other pressing matters.

A second colleague had recently applied for a superintendency in another district, was publicly announced as a finalist and then was not selected for the position. But this "repudiation" of his home district during his first term in office cost him the support of his mayor and school board members, who made it clear he was no longer welcome. He was coping with the imminent loss of his position and status.

A third was making dramatic progress in shifting her school district from an employment culture to a performance culture, with strong support from the corporate and political sectors, when a change in the governorship caused a major shift in her support base. She had to quickly adjust from the euphoria of a string of very real and public successes to being on the defensive.

Another of us was dealing with a seemingly innocuous matter--the naming of an elementary school. But the city's Hispanic community insisted the school be named after an Hispanic political activist, while the white community wanted a neutral, happy valley name. The issue rapidly polarized the community, generating contentious board meetings and newspaper editorials. The superintendent had to help board members understand they needed to lead the community through this problem, not act from personal preference.

In my case, I described how our district had long fostered a culture of dependency of teachers and principals on the central office and that the state's highly prescriptive reform agenda had served only to shift the dependency from central office to the state department of education. We needed to develop the capacity to solve problems ourselves, not implement the solutions of others. But how was I, a relative newcomer, going to help district leadership accept the risks inherent in setting one's own direction ?

Gaining Perspective

As our group worked its way through these cases, the emergent themes were ones central to Heifetz's writing and research: the differences between adaptive and technical work; the ability to hold steady while a complex issue ripened; the necessity of giving the work back, of not assuming that as superintendent I needed to have the solutions; the need to "get on the balcony," in Heifetz's words, in order to gain perspective; and perhaps most important, the dangers of leading.

We came to see what we knew intuitively--that the price of leadership, particularly when change and disruption are part of the agenda, can be both emotional and physical and can take a heavy personal toll. We also acknowledged the isolation intrinsic to the position. And we were learning to be resources to each other, increasing the power and value of our trips to Harvard. For their part, Heifetz and his colleagues were beginning to understand the complexity of the superintendency.

We also worked through the predictable stages of group development--resistance, fight, flight--and on to an acknowledgement that this experience was very much worth our time. As one of the most experienced and traveled superintendents in the group commented, "This is the first time I've developed enough trust in the faculty, the group and the process to really admit to the challenges I face and my own uncertainties, and because I'm able to do that, I'm gaining more from this experience than any I've ever been involved in."

The faculty of the Center for Public Leadership acknowledged it was moving into the land of invention. Although they were experienced in doing executive training programs and situational consultations, they never had worked with a single group over an extended period. As their understanding of the superintendency deepened, they called on colleagues from other parts of the university to introduce concepts that were outside their own province but relevant for us.

The first was Barry Jentz, a consultant who specializes in communication for leading and learning. Through a set of brief videotaped role plays in which we all took part, he provided each of us powerful feedback on how quickly we stop listening when we are in conversations and start planning our responses. As a result we miss clues and vital information, and we limit our opportunities to influence those with whom we interact.

The second was Robert Kegan, who took us through an introspection exercise that helped each of us see how we work against our own commitments and espoused priorities and how we have unarticulated assumptions that block our ability to act even when we intend to do so. (The November 2001 issue of Harvard Business Review carries a more complete representation of Kegan's insights.)

Working with us and participating in the exercises was Jerry Murphy, former dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, whose research and practice have persuaded him that the real barriers to effective leadership are intrapersonal. In his view, superintendents get to be superintendents because they have been able to lead effectively in other situations and organizations. But their success or failure in the superintendency is dependent on the degree to which they can access their own competencies and fears, be honest with themselves and ask for help when they need it.

New Self-Awareness

This leads me to my notion of "I, Superintendent." Certainly none of the participating superintendents anticipated that much of the adaptive work of our experience with Heifetz and colleagues would be personal. We expected to be challenged--this was Harvard, after all--and we expected we might get help with the hot and thorny dilemmas of our school districts. But the emergent truth was unanticipated: The answer was within us. We had to act on what we were learning.

For me, this has meant dealing with people and situations I'd rather avoid; acknowledging my discomfort with conflict; recognizing my tendency to intellectualize and analyze rather than just do it; admitting that for all my espoused comfort with chaos and complexity, I still have a need to be in control (better to lead than follow); and sensing when I am reverting to my comfort zone.

It's also publicly acknowledging my own mistakes and shortcomings and accepting that many of the things I've done during my six years in Trenton have made a real difference for the kids and the city.

For me the experience with Heifetz and his colleagues has helped me become more self-aware and hopefully more effective in providing the leadership our community deserves.

James Lytle is superintendent of the Trenton Public Schools, 108 N. Clinton Ave., Trenton, NJ 08609. E-mail: [e-mail]

Amelia Newcomb is a staff writer with The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. E-mail: [e-mail]