I describe Leadership on the Line as my leadership bible.  Heifetz & Linsky’s (2017) book is one that I love and come back to over and over again.  I first read it as part of my School Leadership program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and I’m currently reading it with my leadership team at Lincoln.  First of all, it’s a fun read.  I love the integration of examples across industries and countries.  Whether we’re talking about political systems in South America, peace negotiations in the Middle East, or private industry in the United States, there are plenty of fascinating leadership scenarios to explore.  I also love how Heifetz and Linsky distill the most important concepts into simple metaphors.  The concepts are “sticky,” and I often find myself referring to them with my own leadership team.  Here are just four of the “stickiest” concepts that seem to be forever imprinted on my brain.  

Adaptive vs. Technical Work: With Technical work, people have problems for which they already have the procedural knowledge and skills necessary to fix things.  It’s just a matter of identifying and implementation the right solution.  Adaptive work is much trickier.  Those are the problems that cannot be solved without adopting new ways of doing the work – new attitudes, new behaviors, new discoveries.  Of course human beings don’t like change, so Adaptive work unleashes all kinds of problems and potential dysfunction.  With Adaptive work, people get uncomfortable, especially when the leader they look to proposes change instead of stability and predictability as the formula for moving forward.  

The Balcony & the Dance Floor: When you are engaged personally and deeply in the work, you sometimes lose your perspective.  Heifetz & Linksy use the metaphor of the balcony and the dance floor to illustrate the importance of not only doing the work (the dance floor), but pulling yourself away from the action often enough to get a bigger perspective of what is happening (the balcony).  On the dance floor, we’re so busy with what is happening in front of us that we just focus on doing the dance.  It isn’t until we get up on the balcony that we can see different patterns, differences amongst the dancers, or notice some people who aren’t dancing at all.  It’s the leadership work of constantly going from participant to observer to back again in order to ensure that our actions take into consideration the full context.  

Accept Responsibility for Your Piece of the Mess: This is another concept – really just a simply question – that I go back to over and over again.  I am constantly asking myself, “what are you doing that is part of the problem?”  It’s a question that can help keep us humble in our leadership roles.  It’s also a question that can prevent us from blaming others, where we attribute fault outside of ourselves and often, misdiagnose problems.

Control the Temperature: Really, the entire chapter about orchestrating productive conflict is one of the most potent chapters of the book.  It’s the idea of strategically controlling the temperature, however, that most sticks with me.  Basically, your organization is like a pot on a stove.  Too much heat and everything boils over and makes a mess you can’t contain.  Too little heat and nothing happens.  No transformation of what’s inside the pot.  In terms of human capacity, too much change and uncertainty and your pass people’s tolerance limits.  Too little change and you don’t reach a threshold for human learning and adaptation.  The idea is to master the tools to both raise the heat and lower the temperature as necessary so that your organization constantly stays within a productive range of stress.