Leadership Without Easy Answers should go a long way toward clearing up many confusions about leadership. Long a master teacher of leaders, Heifetz’s courses and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government have been standing-room only for years.
Leadership without Easy Answers (1994) is a self-help book for leadership lifestyles by Ronald Heifetz. Heifetz uses a wealth of knowledge about the evolution of political and sociological thought in the United States from the 1950s to the early 1990s to develop a system of best practices for being a leader. Heifetz argues that “adaptive work,” or the ability to connect people who have ...
Leadership without easy answers by Ronald A. Heifetz, 1994, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press edition, in English
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We are indeed facing an unprecedented crisis of leadership, Ronald Heifetz avows, but it stems as much from our demands and expectations as from any leader’s inability to meet them. His book gets at both of these problems, offering a practical approach to leadership for those who lead as well as those who look to them for answers.
Leadership is dangerous, with or without authority, because the stresses of adaptive work can be severe. Ask a white man or woman in Selma to give up the only way of life they have known, handed down to them by their parents, reinforced through school and friendships, and you ask them to undergo a sustained period of disorientation and distress.
Making progress on these problems demands not just someone who provides answers from on high but changes in our attitudes, behavior, and values. To meet challenges such as these, we need a different idea of leadership and a new social contract that promote our adaptive capacities, rather than inappropriate expecta tions of authority.