March 30, 2009 Vol. 2, Issue 3
Marty Linsky, co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, has decades of experience as a consultant, facilitator, teacher and trainer in leadership with a wide range of public and private sector clients in the U.S. and abroad. He is also a full-time faculty member at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he teaches about leadership, press, politics, legislatures, and public management.
Linsky has written several books, including Leadership on the Line, co-authored with Dr. Ronald Heifetz. Harvard Business Press will publish The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, co-authored by Linsky, Heifetz and Alexander Grashow, later this spring.
ATA: NASA projects often inVolve partnerships with industry, academia, nonprofit research institutes, and government space agencies in other countries. In many cases, the lines of authority are less than perfectly clear. Can you talk about the distinction between authority and leadership?
Linsky: Authority is about role. People in authority, whether Presidents, parents, or CEOs, are expected to provide direction, protection and order. As long as they provide those services well, they will keep their authority, or even earn a bigger role. Leadership is a behavior, not a person, and the opportunities to exercise leadership come to each of us every day, in our jobs, at the family dinner table, and in our community life, independent of our roles or formal authority.
ATA: What does the term “leading from the middle” mean, and how might it be relevant to managers in a project-based organization like NASA?
Linsky: In a healthy organization, with a culture of leadership, people throughout the organization are expected to exercise leadership by, for example, asking uncomfortable questions, using their judgment to make progress in unanticipated circumstances, taking reasonable risks in service of the mission, and going beyond their own comfort zones, doing whatever it takes, to make sure that relevant data and insights from their piece of the whole come to the attention of senior authorities.
ATA: What are some effective techniques for bridging differences in organizational cultures that emerge during partnerships?
Linsky: Each of the partners has to make tough choices about what is so of their essence that it must be preserved going forward and what, of all that they value, needs to be left behind in order to make progress and to enable the partnership to thrive. These choices have to be explicit, but they are difficult to make, and each partner must acknowledge and respect the losses that the other is taking in the interests of moving forward together.
ATA: What should practitioners keep in mind about the difference between partners and allies?
Linsky: It is silly to try to exercise leadership alone, even though people often end up there because they are passionate about their mission or because people who agree with them on the issues are happy to have them take all the risks if they are willing to do so. Never exercise leadership alone. If you are going to raise a difficult issue at a meeting, even if it is your meeting, ensure in advance that others will support you, or at least support keeping the issue on the table. We differentiate between allies and confidantes. Allies are people who are with you on the issue, although often for reason that are very different than yours. Confidantes are people who don’t care at all about your issue, but care deeply about you. You need them. They are the only ones who will help heal you when you are bruised, who will listen to you without consequences when you are sharing what is in your heart or stomach, and can be relied upon to help you diagnose from the balcony what is really going on. People often make the mistake of trying to turn allies into confidantes. Bad idea. You end up telling them things that they can use for their purposes when your interests on an issue are not so aligned.
ATA: How do you define an adaptive challenge, and how does it differ from a technical problem?
Linsky: A technical problem is subject to authority, expertise, and more data. Adaptive challenges are about values, perhaps a conflict in values or a gap between espoused values and aspiration and the current reality. Closing that gap is difficult because values, beliefs, loyalties live in peoples’ heart and stomachs, not in their heads. Because you are working on a different part of the anatomy, you have to employ different techniques. But most problems do not come marked with a big “T” for technical or “A” for adaptive. They come mixed, and it is a function of leadership to sort out the technical and adaptive aspects, and to help the organization resist the temptation to make the classic error of trying to treat an adaptive challenge as if it were a technical problem.
Learn more about the Cambridge Leadership Associates model of adaptive leadership.
