I hear a lot right now about “the new normal” in government administration. Like many vertical markets, governments are slowly realizing the old model of business (and its funding) is gone forever, and that new strategic and practical plans are needed to help people re-tool for “the new normal”. Re-tooling of course requires change, and change is both dangerous and scary. How do we get through these tough times with our sanity and our careers intact?
Late last week I had the chance to discuss Leadership on the Line, a book by Harvard’s Ronald A. Heifetz and Martin Linsky, with a great group of local government people. They were people from nearly every department in area local governments, at a range of levels from non-supervisor to director, gathered as part of an intergovernmental leadership development and discussion group.
The main ideas and questions that bubbled up were varied, from broad and sweeping to detailed discussions of practice. I took that as a sign that this book gave people some real food for thought as well as practice. That was due, I believe, because of the book’s mix of discussion about leading other people, leading oneself, and self-care for the leader in high-pressure situations. Leadership, they noted, is full of a variety of pressures, because it’s aim is helping people change, an inherently dangerous profession.
Leaderhip on the Line is organized around the framework of understanding whether the problem in front of us is adaptive or technical. Adaptive problems require uncomfortable changes; one example given of adaptive challenges vs technical challenges is heart disease. Repairing a diseased heart through surgery is a technical problem. Getting a person with a diseased heart to quit smoking, lose weight, or change their habits is an adaptive challenge. It requires a changes, those that are often quite difficult, in the behavior of the person in question.
One question brought up by one of the members was given that resistance frequently accompanies the change brought by adaptive challenges, and that a leader’s job is to help make that change happen, when I am in the position of having to “turn up the heat”, how do I know when the heat has been turned up high enough? Too high?
We discussed team motivation and building, including some great (and some frankly hilarious) examples of how different groups’ managers build solidarity and recognize their employees’ achievements. Some mechanisms were formal, some quite silly. Some of the people in the group weren’t sure if maybe wackiness in team building took things too far. In my own team building experiences, I can only say I’ve found it not only helpful but essential.
Coming from the software development world, I talked about the practice of standing scrums (daily short meetings used as part of agile software development) I’ve used as a project manager to communicate with my teams during software development projects. It sparked a lively discussion among some line managers about how non-technical teams might use them to ensure all members of a team are moving down the field towards the goal together.
Overall, I’d recommend the book to anyone dealing with change in their organization (which probably includes most of us right now). It gave a good blend of theory and practice, with loads of examples from real management examples. During these difficult economic times, a book like this might be just the thing to helping you find your way through the changes undoubtedly happening inside your own organization today.
