On the Balcony of One’s Own Life: The Personal Side of Adaptive Leadership

One of my favorite Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cles is “The Work of Lead­er­ship” by Ronald Heifetz and Don­ald L. Lau­rie. Writ­ten over twen­ty years ago, it crys­tal­ized the dif­fer­ence between adap­tive prob­lems fac­ing orga­ni­za­tions and more rou­tine, tech­ni­cal ones, a dis­tinc­tion that remains emi­nent­ly use­ful. Adap­tive chal­lenges are the ones that don’t have easy or even expert answers. They rep­re­sent what we’ve nev­er faced before. The sup­plant­i­ng tech­nol­o­gy. The nasty merg­er gone awry. The par­a­digm shift in an indus­try. The pan­dem­ic and its after­math. By con­trast, tech­ni­cal chal­lenges have eas­i­er, per­haps more log­ic-based (though com­plex) answers. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, the lead­er­ship team can fig­ure it out, or hire capa­ble helpers to do so. The point is, tech­ni­cal chal­lenges are ones where some­body has an answer, despite the com­plex­i­ty of the sit­u­a­tion. Adap­tive ones, by con­trast, require all of us some­bod­ies who make up the orga­ni­za­tion to fig­ure it out togeth­er, often through a process of tri­al and error, good guess­es and, above all, con­flict, syn­er­gy and col­lab­o­ra­tion among peo­ple with dif­fer­ent the­o­ries about how to proceed.

If you are say­ing to your­self, but that’s all we do is work is on adap­tive chal­lenges, I cer­tain­ly would­n’t argue. The throes of rapid change are upon us more than ever.

My con­cern in this post, how­ev­er, is not so much about the accel­er­a­tion of orga­ni­za­tion­al change as what is hap­pen­ing for the indi­vid­ual lead­ers who are immersed in the changes. 

Some Typ­i­cal Challenges

Con­sid­er Mel (short for Melody) who is part of a Finance team caught in those “throes.”

• She and her team have been try­ing to shift to a new cloud-based finan­cial man­age­ment sys­tem but the whole process has become con­fused, slowed to a snail’s pace with inad­e­quate train­ing and poor decision-making. 
• In the­o­ry this whole change is part of a greater effort to add “busi­ness intel­li­gence” func­tions to her work unit, a term that has gone large­ly unde­fined and seems to mean she and her team are respon­si­ble for putting togeth­er reports she’s nev­er been asked for in the past, caus­ing her to won­der if they are real­ly needed. 
• There’s also a class and pay study afoot and her staff are gen­er­al­ly upset because posi­tions have been under­paid for years. 
• She’s been told she will need to reor­ga­nize but she wor­ries this will be lit­tle more than mov­ing deck chairs on the Titanic. 
• The work­load for Mel and her reports feels unre­al­is­tic, over­whelm­ing and depress­ing. She feels she is cop­ing in a sys­tem where she isn’t invit­ed to key meet­ings with those mak­ing deci­sions about her own and her team’s work and she can­not real­is­ti­cal­ly say no to any­thing assigned. She oper­ates with­out any clear sense of pri­or­i­ty — it’s all important. 
• Her boss is sym­pa­thet­ic but can’t seem to pro­vide solu­tions or spe­cif­ic guid­ance. “It is what it is,” he says, “Do your best” –phras­es she’s come to pri­vate­ly detest. 
• HR, unhelp­ful­ly, can only sug­gest that she take class­es in time man­age­ment and resilience and seems gen­er­al­ly impen­e­tra­ble to any oth­er feed­back, such as about leader behav­ior upstream or the actu­al sys­temic and cul­tur­al con­di­tions that define this workplace.

This isn’t just orga­ni­za­tion­al messi­ness. This is a per­son­al sit­u­a­tion for a leader caught in the errat­ic, feels-like-fail­ure mid­dle of things.

Stay or Go?

For her part, Mel does­n’t feel she even has time to stop and take stock. The irony is that although she is gen­er­al­ly regard­ed as one of a few lead­ers like­ly to grow in the orga­ni­za­tion — some­one nobody wants to lose — she is pri­vate­ly won­der­ing what, if any­thing, she should do about her sit­u­a­tion. Should she stay, try to fight through the chaos and pres­sure caus­ing her to reg­u­lar­ly work 60–80 hours a week, poten­tial­ly wreck­ing her home­life, par­ent­ing and mar­riage, or should she give up and try to start over some­where else?

This is the per­son­al side of adap­tive lead­er­ship, one I think orga­ni­za­tions increas­ing­ly expect lead­ers — espe­cial­ly those in the mid­dle — to mas­ter on their own.

Heifetz and Lau­rie sug­gest that lead­ers try to “get on the bal­cony” of their orga­ni­za­tion in order to see the whole pat­tern with­out get­ting swept up in the field of action, and this strikes me as excel­lent advice, but for indi­vid­ual lead­ers who feel they have lit­tle per­son­al agency to change their sit­u­a­tion this advice often rings hol­low unless they adopt a rad­i­cal­ly new stance. To quote the poet Mary Oliv­er and her poem, “The Jour­ney,” their own per­son­al bal­cony is the place to go “to save the only life that you could save” — which is your own.

And, indeed, that effort may begin with carv­ing out some qui­et, reflec­tive space to rest and renew long enough to invite new think­ing and feel­ing. The first act is to cre­ate a per­son­al bal­cony that is qui­et enough to lis­ten to the deep­er mes­sages of self and soul, a place to gen­uine­ly intro­spect and to sort out the pain and begin deter­min­ing how much per­son­al agency, in fact, is need­ed and of what kind. 

Why Is This So Tough?

Com­mit­ted, respon­si­ble peo­ple are often excep­tion­al­ly good at vol­un­teer­ing, doing more, being good team play­ers, along the way vio­lat­ing their own rules for what con­sti­tutes a rea­son­able approach to their work; then won­der­ing why they are burn­ing out while try­ing hard­er and hard­er to do the right and nec­es­sary thing. By the time they do the carv­ing out, they may already be so exhaust­ed the only ques­tion is “How much longer have I got here?” At this point, we may well have missed signs along the way — points at which our agency has been giv­en away and where the only recourse seems to be to blame our­selves or the orga­ni­za­tion for the situation.

In part this blame dynam­ic may well rep­re­sent a symp­tom of a larg­er prob­lem, which is a fail­ure of what I would call “reflec­tive lead­er­ship,” the fail­ure of deep­er, more com­pre­hen­sive per­son­al intro­spec­tion — which means tak­ing the time need­ed to cre­ate and hon­or the view from the bal­cony of one’s life, to more than ever think for one­self and take action. 

It is all too easy for the frog to boil in the grad­u­al­ly heat­ing waters of job, career pro­gres­sion, implic­it promis­es orga­ni­za­tions might have made or that we sim­ply hoped for and think we heard. The loss of per­son­al agency is a hid­den epi­dem­ic as we try to get ahead, as we learn more and more not to lead our lives and work­places with per­son­al courage but to fol­low the hope of one day being able to lead in the roles we want — the pos­si­ble, if pre­car­i­ous future reward for good employ­ees. Per­haps too much time has gone by so that it may be hard even to artic­u­late what we do real­ly want, and this is the sad part, the loss of the think­ing, soul­ful part of our­selves. Shame on us for tak­ing the bait.

Fac­ing the Adap­tive Per­son­al Challenge

To be sure this does not mean that peo­ple inevitably up and leave their jobs when they get too stren­u­ous. To the con­trary, it points to the fact of fac­ing an adap­tive per­son­al chal­lenge, one that can be addressed best by:

• Think­ing more deeply than ever for your­self and with oth­er peo­ple, not hop­ing for upstream lead­er­ship to solve the problem.
• Assert­ing your­self in new ways to make a seat at the table
• Build­ing con­nec­tions and offer­ing solu­tions that require con­struc­tive con­flict and collaboration. 
• Acti­vat­ing poten­tials and dreams you may not know you have. 
• Step­ping across the line of attrac­tive pas­siv­i­ty to trust your­self and for­give your­self for the inevitable mis­steps along the way. 

All of these things mean risk­ing dis­com­fort, fac­ing up to that dis­com­fort with a lit­tle humil­i­ty and an acknowl­edge­ment that the way of mod­ern lead­er­ship is not safe, but can be, must be for you, active­ly mean­ing­ful and fulfilling.

So What Could Mel Do?

Mel could carve out the time she needs — an hour, a day, ten days — devot­ed to cre­at­ing the bal­cony from which to view her work and her life. The very fact that she may feel that she should­n’t or can’t take that time is a blink­ing red light that that is exact­ly what she needs to do.

It is like­ly that the effort to stand on the bal­cony will ini­tial­ly feel frus­trat­ing. Mel needs to hold her ground and wait through the time of feel­ing over­whelmed. If it helps, jour­nal. If it helps, go for a run (or many runs). If it helps, sleep. Until her heart and soul comes back to her. Then she will need to begin to build an plan that draws on her deep­est needs, desires for hap­pi­ness and capa­bil­i­ties, capa­bil­i­ties she might not even be sure she’s got.

For exam­ple, she might begin by hav­ing a much bet­ter, deep­er con­ver­sa­tion with her boss, a heart-to-heart about the lived real­i­ties of her job and where she needs imme­di­ate and ongo­ing help.

She might cre­ate a sup­port group of peo­ple inside or out­side her orga­ni­za­tion; not for sim­ply com­plain­ing, but for real­is­tic guid­ance and the offer­ing of truth­ful feed­back, a com­mu­ni­ty to con­struc­tive­ly aid her in her growth as a leader.

She can ask for a seat at the table. Even a tem­po­rary one might help. In essence, she might begin to build deep­er rela­tion­ships with peers and oth­er lead­ers with­in her orga­ni­za­tion, begin­ning to share her vision of what needs to be cor­rect­ed and how it can hap­pen — relat­ed to all the things that are under her skin: the new finan­cial man­age­ment sys­tem; the pres­sure to reor­ga­nize, the full mean­ing of “busi­ness intelligence.”

She might need to have deep­er con­ver­sa­tions with her spouse about what this time in her life means and how they togeth­er can face the chal­lenges ahead. She might begin to set bet­ter bound­aries at work so that she can also feel she’s ful­fill­ing her role as a parent.

In short, Mel needs to take more con­trol of her life. She needs to reclaim her agency as a human being. And to do that, she may also need to go deeply into her­self to con­front and begin to change the con­di­tion­ing (the old rules about what it means to be a “good employ­ee,” for instance) that con­tributed to her emo­tion­al and psy­chic over­load in the first place. This may be the tough­est but most reward­ing task of all. This is more than med­i­ta­tion and self-com­pas­sion. It is the unearthing of the whole sto­ry about “How I got here” and “My own pri­vate view of myself.”

These are not easy tasks, and none of these sam­ple actions alone is a full answer. This is not easy work with sim­ple for­mu­las that guar­an­tee suc­cess. This work can require reflec­tive lead­er­ship at very deep lev­els — as a rad­i­cal, per­son­al act of both cen­tered self-knowl­edge and orga­ni­za­tion­al care.

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If you find your­self need­ing more per­son­al time on the bal­cony and want to claim (or reclaim) more of your per­son­al agency, please con­sid­er lead­er­ship coach­ing or the fol­low­ing ded­i­cat­ed workshop: