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The Work of Leadership

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Followers want comfort, stability, and solutions from their leaders. But that’s babysitting. Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones. Then they manage the resulting distress.

The Work of
Leadership
by Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article:
2 Article Summary
The Idea in Brief—the core idea
The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work
3 The Work of Leadership
14 Further Reading
A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

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The Work of Leadership

The Idea in Brief

The Idea in Practice

What presents your company with its toughest challenges? Shifting markets?
Stiffening competition? Emerging technologies? When such challenges intensify, you may need to reclarify corporate values, redesign strategies, merge or dissolve businesses, or manage cross-functional strife.

1. Get on the balcony. Don’t get swept up in the field of play. Instead, move back and forth between the “action” and the “balcony.” You’ll spot emerging patterns, such as power struggles or work avoidance. This high-level perspective helps you mobilize people to do adaptive work.

These adaptive challenges are murky, systemic problems with no easy answers.
Perhaps even more vexing, the solutions to adaptive challenges don’t reside in the executive suite. Solving them requires the involvement of people throughout your organization. 2. Identify your adaptive challenge.

COPYRIGHT © 2002 HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Adaptive work is tough on everyone. For leaders, it’s counterintuitive. Rather than providing solutions, you must ask tough questions and leverage employees’ collective

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