Ronald Heifetz, MD
Foremost Authority on Leadership & Organizational Adaptability; Founder, Center for Public Leadership; Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School; Co-Founder, Cambridge Leadership Associates
MEET Ronald Heifetz, MD
“There are many jobs in life worth the challenge and the pain. Providing leadership to people is one of them,” says Ronald Heifetz, M.D. One of the world’s foremost authorities on leadership, he is candid about the real leadership task: to mobilize people to live up to their values, meet great challenges, and achieve adaptive change.
The founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Heifetz is renowned for developing transformative methods of leadership development and education. Co-creator of the groundbreaking Adaptive Leadership model, his research focuses on the challenge of building the adaptive capacity of organizations and societies. Dr. Heifetz advises heads of governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations, and has spent more than three decades teaching and coaching people from aspiring leaders to heads of state. The King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, his courses are legendary, consistently winning the Kennedy School’s alumni award for most influential courses, and drawing students from throughout Harvard and neighboring universities.
Dr. Heifetz’s seminal book, “Leadership Without Easy Answers” (Harvard University Press, 1998), which rocketed him – and his leadership theories – to prominence, has been reprinted and translated many times over. He is also co-author of best-sellers, “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) and “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World” (Harvard Business Press, 2009). He has published several Harvard Business Review articles, and is the subject of several others, including the book “Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World” by Sharon Daloz Parks (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005), which gives readers an inside look at Dr. Heifetz’s bold approaches to leadership theory – and his methods for teaching it.
Dr. Heifetz trained initially in surgery before deciding to devote himself to the study of leadership in politics and business. He completed his medical training in psychiatry. Co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership consulting firm, Dr. Heifetz is a graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, and the Kennedy School.
The founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Heifetz is renowned for developing transformative methods of leadership development and education. Co-creator of the groundbreaking Adaptive Leadership model, his research focuses on the challenge of building the adaptive capacity of organizations and societies. Dr. Heifetz advises heads of governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations, and has spent more than three decades teaching and coaching people from aspiring leaders to heads of state. The King Hussein bin Talal Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at Harvard’s Kennedy School, his courses are legendary, consistently winning the Kennedy School’s alumni award for most influential courses, and drawing students from throughout Harvard and neighboring universities.
Dr. Heifetz’s seminal book, “Leadership Without Easy Answers” (Harvard University Press, 1998), which rocketed him – and his leadership theories – to prominence, has been reprinted and translated many times over. He is also co-author of best-sellers, “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2002) and “The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World” (Harvard Business Press, 2009). He has published several Harvard Business Review articles, and is the subject of several others, including the book “Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World” by Sharon Daloz Parks (Harvard Business Review Press, 2005), which gives readers an inside look at Dr. Heifetz’s bold approaches to leadership theory – and his methods for teaching it.
Dr. Heifetz trained initially in surgery before deciding to devote himself to the study of leadership in politics and business. He completed his medical training in psychiatry. Co-founder of Cambridge Leadership Associates, a leadership consulting firm, Dr. Heifetz is a graduate of Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, and the Kennedy School.
Ronald Heifetz SUGGESTED SPEAKING TOPICS
A Survival Guide for Leading Through the Dangers of Change
Leadership is not all inspiration, decisive action and rich rewards. To lead is to live dangerously; it requires taking risks, putting yourself on the line, disturbing the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. When people resist and push back, there’s a strong temptation to play it safe to avoid getting burned. Dr. Ronald Heifetz shows how to lead and stay alive. Giving equal weight to the dangerous work of leading change, and the critical importance of purposeful and personal survival, Dr. Heifetz presents straightforward strategies designed to understand how to survive the practice of leading people to meet great challenges, tackle tough problems, and achieve important change. These strategies include the ability to: “get on the balcony” (above the fray to observe key patterns); distinguish ripe from unripe issues; analyze factional perspectives; interpret systemic dynamics; identify sources of meaning; manage expectations; read opposition; sequence, pace and orchestrate conflict and convergence; give work back to its rightful owners at a rate they can absorb; distinguish between self and role; identify and manage hungers, and preserve a sense of purpose.
Achieving Adaptive Success: Learning to Lead Beyond Authority and Technical Problem Solving
Around the world, changes in societies, markets, customers, competition and technology are forcing organizations and those who lead them to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating and solving problems. It’s adaptive change – a concept Dr. Ronald Heifetz and his colleague, Riley Sinder, introduced more than three decades ago, and one that has never been more relevant and imperative than it is today. Mobilizing an organization to adapt its strategy and culture in order to succeed in new business environments is critical, Dr. Heifetz says, but it’s hard work for everyone involved. “It’s tough work to a) identify the organizational DNA that’s essential and should be conserved, b) to distinguish this from the DNA that should be discarded, and c) to generate innovation that takes root in the organization so people can bring the best of their history forward and thrive in a changing and challenging world,” he explains. “The most common source of strategic leadership failure is diagnostic: treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.” Dr. Heifetz defines the important difference between diagnosing and solving technical problems (those that can be solved with authoritative expertise and good management) versus adaptive challenges (which require a combination of conservation, innovation, and learning). To mobilize adaptive work, senior executives must differentiate between the two types of challenges, as well as between leadership and authority. He discusses how to unbundle the adaptive from the technical components of the challenge; lead across boundaries in all directions; direct attention and responsibility; manage trust and meaning; regulate disequilibrium; and activate widespread leadership that distributes the adaptive work where it must be done.
How to Lead in (Permanent) Crisis
Today’s mix of urgency, high stakes and uncertainty is our new normal – a permanent crisis. Organizations and those who lead them need to get acclimated to the task of generating new operational and cultural capacity to achieve the ongoing organizational and personal ability to create new adaptations to new situations. Dr. Ronald Heifetz discusses the two phases of crisis leadership: emergency, during which leadership must mitigate damage and stabilize the situation, and adaptive, where the underlying challenges are met – as much a process of conservation as it is of reinvention. “Many top executives buckle under the pressure to limit their objectives to damage control rather than leverage the crisis to introduce, frame, and mobilize energy for the adaptive work.” Dr. Heifetz explores the critical skills those in authority positions need in order to practice leadership in both the emergency and adaptive phases. Those who practice leadership cannot prevent or predict crises, but they must be prepared for them. Dr. Heifetz provides the insight and tools to do so, and to seize these moments of opportunity to hit their organization’s “reset” button.
Solving the Leadership Consulting Dilemma
The current call for leadership is huge. After all, everyone wants better leaders. The multi-billion dollar consulting industry delivers an abundance of brilliant ideas for leadership – and produces just as much waste. Perhaps as much as 70-80 percent of strategy consultants’ rich recommendations are never implemented, or they fail shortly after the initial efforts at execution. But it’s not because the strategy isn’t right, says Dr. Ronald Heifetz. It’s because the consulting industry simply doesn’t have the analytical tools, the fine-grain organizational data gathering know-how, and consulting artistry required to help their clients effectively lead change. In today’s complex times, consultants cannot expect clients to simply take good strategic analysis and turn recommendations into organizational solutions. Solutions are merely proposals if they do not take life in the attitudes, habits, values, and actions of people throughout an organization. Strategy development that brings implementation up front, and then consults to clients on the complex and dangerous politics of change is a vast, interesting, and critically important frontier. Dr. Heifetz is helping teach the consulting industry to do leadership consulting right, and well.
Leadership is not all inspiration, decisive action and rich rewards. To lead is to live dangerously; it requires taking risks, putting yourself on the line, disturbing the status quo, and surfacing hidden conflict. When people resist and push back, there’s a strong temptation to play it safe to avoid getting burned. Dr. Ronald Heifetz shows how to lead and stay alive. Giving equal weight to the dangerous work of leading change, and the critical importance of purposeful and personal survival, Dr. Heifetz presents straightforward strategies designed to understand how to survive the practice of leading people to meet great challenges, tackle tough problems, and achieve important change. These strategies include the ability to: “get on the balcony” (above the fray to observe key patterns); distinguish ripe from unripe issues; analyze factional perspectives; interpret systemic dynamics; identify sources of meaning; manage expectations; read opposition; sequence, pace and orchestrate conflict and convergence; give work back to its rightful owners at a rate they can absorb; distinguish between self and role; identify and manage hungers, and preserve a sense of purpose.
Achieving Adaptive Success: Learning to Lead Beyond Authority and Technical Problem Solving
Around the world, changes in societies, markets, customers, competition and technology are forcing organizations and those who lead them to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating and solving problems. It’s adaptive change – a concept Dr. Ronald Heifetz and his colleague, Riley Sinder, introduced more than three decades ago, and one that has never been more relevant and imperative than it is today. Mobilizing an organization to adapt its strategy and culture in order to succeed in new business environments is critical, Dr. Heifetz says, but it’s hard work for everyone involved. “It’s tough work to a) identify the organizational DNA that’s essential and should be conserved, b) to distinguish this from the DNA that should be discarded, and c) to generate innovation that takes root in the organization so people can bring the best of their history forward and thrive in a changing and challenging world,” he explains. “The most common source of strategic leadership failure is diagnostic: treating adaptive challenges as if they were technical problems.” Dr. Heifetz defines the important difference between diagnosing and solving technical problems (those that can be solved with authoritative expertise and good management) versus adaptive challenges (which require a combination of conservation, innovation, and learning). To mobilize adaptive work, senior executives must differentiate between the two types of challenges, as well as between leadership and authority. He discusses how to unbundle the adaptive from the technical components of the challenge; lead across boundaries in all directions; direct attention and responsibility; manage trust and meaning; regulate disequilibrium; and activate widespread leadership that distributes the adaptive work where it must be done.
How to Lead in (Permanent) Crisis
Today’s mix of urgency, high stakes and uncertainty is our new normal – a permanent crisis. Organizations and those who lead them need to get acclimated to the task of generating new operational and cultural capacity to achieve the ongoing organizational and personal ability to create new adaptations to new situations. Dr. Ronald Heifetz discusses the two phases of crisis leadership: emergency, during which leadership must mitigate damage and stabilize the situation, and adaptive, where the underlying challenges are met – as much a process of conservation as it is of reinvention. “Many top executives buckle under the pressure to limit their objectives to damage control rather than leverage the crisis to introduce, frame, and mobilize energy for the adaptive work.” Dr. Heifetz explores the critical skills those in authority positions need in order to practice leadership in both the emergency and adaptive phases. Those who practice leadership cannot prevent or predict crises, but they must be prepared for them. Dr. Heifetz provides the insight and tools to do so, and to seize these moments of opportunity to hit their organization’s “reset” button.
Solving the Leadership Consulting Dilemma
The current call for leadership is huge. After all, everyone wants better leaders. The multi-billion dollar consulting industry delivers an abundance of brilliant ideas for leadership – and produces just as much waste. Perhaps as much as 70-80 percent of strategy consultants’ rich recommendations are never implemented, or they fail shortly after the initial efforts at execution. But it’s not because the strategy isn’t right, says Dr. Ronald Heifetz. It’s because the consulting industry simply doesn’t have the analytical tools, the fine-grain organizational data gathering know-how, and consulting artistry required to help their clients effectively lead change. In today’s complex times, consultants cannot expect clients to simply take good strategic analysis and turn recommendations into organizational solutions. Solutions are merely proposals if they do not take life in the attitudes, habits, values, and actions of people throughout an organization. Strategy development that brings implementation up front, and then consults to clients on the complex and dangerous politics of change is a vast, interesting, and critically important frontier. Dr. Heifetz is helping teach the consulting industry to do leadership consulting right, and well.
