To Lead is to Live Dangerously

The title of this piece are the words of Harvard leadership professor Ron Heifetz. I took his course titled “Leadership on the Line” over 15 years ago while in graduate school, and I can say – without any hesitation – it has been the single most important leadership course I have taken in my life. Why? Because Heifetz does not romanticize leadership.

Heifetz understands leadership is not a purely inspirational pursuit – an act of getting group of humans to work together towards a higher calling. He also does not contemplate leadership as an exclusively technical activity – one that relies on existing knowledge and a series of strategies, milestones, processes, and tactics. Rather, the central, core assumption underlying Heifetz’ work is that when you’re leading –particularly leading innovation and change– someone is trying to take you out.

Therefore, the key question for Heifetz is: How does one lead and stay alive?

Leadership – true leadership – requires not only disrupting the status quo but also “surfacing hidden conflict,” according to Heifetz. That is an important statement because it is not at all how we tend to understand, contemplate, value, or pursue leadership in society today. Heifetz further explains that organizations often live within a “modus vivendi” paradigm – a state in which conflicting parties in an organization find ways to co-exist peacefully. As the leader surfaces and directly addresses the underlying conflict within this modus vivendi paradigm, such an act creates a “disequilibrium” within the organization, leading to attempts by those surrounding the leader – above, below, and to the right and left – to take the leader out.

These “thwarting tactics,” as Heifetz terms them, can manifest in direct attacks against the leader – the leader’s performance and the performance of the leader’s team and even attacks against those the leader recruited on to the team. A leader can also become marginalized to the point where his/her capabilities and relevance are so narrowed that the leader’s broader authority over the team or organization is undermined. Detractors can also neuter the leader by redistributing the leader’s standing across teams and/or push overwhelming levels of day-to-day tasks and tactical events such that it overtakes the leader’s ability to pursue and lead innovative change.

Through these and other “thwarting tactics,” detractors attempt to maintain the status quo, restore their authority and agency over their environment, and protect themselves from the change. Heifetz points out that when this type of organizational “disequilibrium” occurs, people in-and-around the leader experience “profound loss.” This loss must not be underestimated by the leader because it can have psychological effects. Heifetz describes these psychological effects as “hungers” and buckets these hungers in two categories: (1) “desire for control” and (2) “desire for importance.” These hungers surround the leader and become additional complexities the leader must manage.

There are several ways to manage the risk of surfacing hidden conflict and leading great change. I want to focus on one area that I have found useful – what Heifetz describes as “cooking the conflict.”

Conflict is a necessary part of change. In fact, conflict can be healthy. It can be part of the process of creating something fundamentally new and innovative. But, of course, conflict can put the leader or an organization at existential risk. Moreover, conflict not only can slow the pace of change but also derail the leader’s plans. Therefore, “taming conflict” as Heifetz puts it, is a key role of the leader.

To tame conflict, a leader must first know the boiling point of the organization and understand the nature of and root causes that trigger the boiling point level. The leader must also have an intimate understanding of the triggering elements that can be reversed – and that which are not – in the process of elevating the “disequilibrium” of an organization to its boiling point.

The leader must be able to raise the temperature of an organization to a point at which there is enough stress that change can be achieved but not so high that it boils over and scalds the organization and the leader. As Heifetz asserts: “without some distress, there’s no incentive to change.”

Therefore, it is a critical and even the central role of the leader to raise and lower the temperature of the organization so the organization can stay alive through the great change and prepare itself for the next period of change. In this paradigm, leadership is pragmatic – more exploratory and discovery-based than it is intuitive.

Heifetz also suggests a leader can constructively raise the temperature of an organization by “focusing the organization’s attention on the hard issues, placing the work where it needs to be through getting the team to take responsibility for solving the problems, and bringing into the open conflicts that have been occurring behind closed doors.” To lower the temperature, Heifetz recommends changing the pace of change and/or focusing first on solving more “technical problems” before getting on to the more difficult and often emotional issues. This allows the organization to become more comfortable with the change that is coming.

Like a maestro, the leader is, therefore, engaged in an ongoing process of raising and lowering the temperature of the organization towards a goldilocks level of stress that is productive and able to drive toward change.

I fear we do not have enough would-be leaders willing to risk their professional reputations and even their personal lives to lead great change. This may mean the mangers who make the status quo highly efficient and the bureaucrats who ensure the past is entrenched today, tomorrow, and into the future may well win the day.

Indeed, there are many threats to our country and society today – perhaps the greatest remains our inability to lead great change and innovation at scale.

And, if this remains the case, we will die.



Alex Gallo is the author of “Vetspective,” a RallyPoint series that discusses national security, foreign policy, politics, and society. Alex also serves as the Executive Director of the Common Mission Project, a 501c3, that delivers an innovation and entrepreneurship program, Hacking for Defense®, which brings together the government, universities, and the private sector to solve the strategic challenges. He is also a fellow with George Mason University’s National SecurityInstitute, an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University, and a US Army Veteran. Follow him on Twitter at @AlexGalloCMP.