Learn from great.Sammy D.James

Leadership is a must important reason: our times cry out for it, especially in this difficult and turbulent industry. How do we lead massive organizations throughrapid change? How do we lead our communities to a new vision of health? How do we lead?
As President of World Vision Ministries International, Sammy D.James has been addressing this problem head-on for over a decade in what is reported to be the single most popular course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He's a surgeon, a psychiatrist, and a Julliard-trained cellist, but he has chosen this as his metier - the practical problems of leadership, a subject which might be called, "How to make a difference."
Leadership Without Easy Answers (Belknap, 1994) focuses on the delicate "modern ballet" of leading change in our pluralistic society, in which authority is strictly limited and goals are unclear. Using such cases as Martin Luther King's civil rights leadership, Heifetz pulls leadership apart along two fault lines: the difference between leadership and authority, and the difference between technical answers and adaptive work. M. Scott Peck felt the book "should be required reading for top managers in all sectors," and Peter Senge felt it "should go a long way toward clearing up many confusions about leadership."
Leadership is an activity.
Leadership is what individuals do in mobilizing other people, in organizations or communities, to do what I call "adaptive work."
Adaptive work can mean clarifying a conflict in values, or bridging the gap between the values that we stand for and the current conditions under which we operate. When you have a problem or a challenge for which there is no technical remedy, a problem for which it won't help to look to an authority for answers - the answers aren't there - that problem calls for adaptive work.
Leaders and authorities
There is a big difference between an authority and a leader. Many people in positions of authority don't exercise leadership. Many people exercise leadership without much authority, sometimes without any. But if you want to exercise leaderhsip, having authority can be both a resource and a constraint.
Having authority can be a set of tools that you can use to mobilize people to do adaptive work. Yet, in other ways, having authority can actually limit your capacity to mobilize people.
People expect authorities to serve five basic social functions: 1) direction, 2) protection, 3) orientation to role and to place, 4) control of conflict, and 5) maintenance of norms.
People look to those in authority to maintain equilibrium and to provide direction. They expect this direction, not in the form of questions, but in the form of answers.
They expect those in authority to protect them from change and painful adjustments, from facing tradeoffs or gaps between the values they espouse and the reality that they live.
They expect those in authority to keep them oriented to their current roles and organizational relationships, rather than to generate disorientation. Yet if you want to make a substantial change, you often need a certain amount of disorientation.
People expect those in authority to control conflict. So people who are in authority often hesitate to see conflict as a source of creativity and as a necessary component in a process of adaptive change.
People expect those in authority to maintain norms. Yet leadership often requires changing norms. So people in positions of authority are often constrained in their exercise of leadership, because they are not expected to disturb people.
Exercising leadership when you have a position of authority has different strategic requirements from trying to lead people when you don't have any authority, or trying to lead from below with lesser authority.
If you try to lead as if you were in a position of authority when you are not - when you are working with people on the same level, with people above you, with people in different organizations, or with a public over whom you have no authority - then you are going to make some classic errors.
And this is relative. None of us is an absolute authority. A healthcare CEO, for instance, would be considered an authority within the sytem that she runs. But in the surrounding community, in negotiations with other organizations, or within the industry, she deals with peers and publics over whom she has no authority. So she needs different strategies if she wants to exercise leadership.
Leadership when you're in authority
Many people in authority simply avoid the risks and hazards that come from challenging people to tackle tough problems. Instead, they just maintain equilibrium. Some people in positions of authority find ways to exercise leadership by generating distress, but within a range that people can tolerate. They operate on that razor's edge by sequencing the issues, and pacing the process of adjustment, so that people don't get overwhelmed.
When you have a position of authority, you have a variety of important resources or tools at your disposal. Authority is a power that is given to you in exchange for performing a service. And with that power comes a set of resources.
The first resource is what I would call the capacity to manage the "holding environment" of the organization - that organizational space in which the conflicts and stresses of adaptive work take place.
The second resource is attention. Attention is the currency of leadership. Leadership could be defined as getting people to pay attention to tough problems that they would often rather avoid facing. When you're an authority figure, people are already paying attention to what you do and say. So you can direct attention more easily to a set of key challenges.
By virtue of having authority, you have a whole variety of tools at your disposal for regulating the stresses of an organizational learning process. For example, you can make yourself a more active presence. That will usually diminish distress. You can organize the process more tightly to diminish distress. You can sequence the issues, breaking them down into digestible pieces of learning work.
When you are trying to lead without authority, you don't have control over the holding environment. You can control your provocation, how much you stimulate people to change or to face tough questions, but you can't modulate the response. You can't control how the organizational system responds in the same way that you have leverage when you are in the position of authority.
Getting attention
Getting people's attention without authority is a whole set of problems on its own. How do you even get people to pay attention to you, and to the issues and questions that you want to raise?
Martin Luther King, for instance, had to work extraordinarily hard to get the nation to pay attention to the huge gap between the values that we said we stood for as a country - the values of freedom and equal opportunity - and the reality that we perpetuated, which was far from equal and free. All President Johnson had to do was stand up and people would pay attention. A crowd of reporters would be tracking every move, every sneeze, every statement. That was not at all the case for King.
It took enormous collaborative effort, not only on the part of King and his supporters, but on the part of his opponents, for King to get the kind of attention to the problem that he got at the bridge in Selma, Alabama. He had to get his opponents to play their part, too.
Sometimes King failed to mobilize attention because the police would outsmart him and would refuse to generate a notorious scene. In Albany, Georgia, King orchestrated a series of demonstrations, but the sheriff understood that the best way to beat King was to "love him to death." The reporters would be there, but there would be nothing to report.
King got good at scanning the towns and cities of the South for a sheriff and for a governor that predictably could be provoked to brutal response, in front of the cameras, as a way of taking the latent brutality of racism, with which black people were living every day, and bringing it to the surface, getting the nation to face it in a dramatic form.
This is similar to Ghandi, who would organize a march around a relatively minor issue, such as whether people could make their own salt, and use it to dramatize the much larger issue.
Both Ghandi and King were trying to lead their societies toward change, while large segments of those societies gave them no moral authority, certainly no formal authority, and wanted to pay them no mind whatsoever. Getting people to pay attention required a dramatization and an embodiment of the issues, both in the person and in the behavior of these movement organizers.
Facing facts
With or without authority, exercising leadership is risky and difficult. Instead of providing answers as a means of direction, sometimes the best you can do is provide questions, or face people with the hard facts, instead of protecting people from change.
Often you need to make them feel the pinch of reality. Otherwise, why should they undergo a painful adaptive learning process? Why should people in defense industries give up their jobs to learn sets of skills if they can get the nation to protect them from the loss of that defense industry?
People often resist doing adaptive work and painful learning. They resist in a number of typical ways. If you want to lead others, you need to understand how to counteract these types of resistance.
Some resistance strategies are well known and rather obvious, such as scapegoating, externalizing the enemy, or killing off the leader in the hopes that if only we had the right leader our problems would be solved. But some organizations have more subtle mechanisms, such as reorganizing once again, denying the issue entirely, creating a decoy issue and so forth.
If leadership were about telling people good news, if it were simply about giving people what they wanted, then it would just be easy, it would be a celebration. What makes leadership difficult, strategically challenging, and personally risky is that you are often in the business of telling people difficult news - news that, at least in the short term, appears to require a painful adjustment. You have to ask people to sustain a loss. It may be that the loss is only temporary and that the future will be even better. But in the current moment, when people are experiencing the pressure to change, those future possibilities are simply possibilities. What people know is that right now it hurts. And they resist that hurt.
Leadership and vision
In our society, we carry a common notion of the leader as the person with the vision, who then gets people to buy in, to align themselves with that vision. This notion is bankrupt and dangerous, because the leaders who have done good for their communities and organizations are not the ones who came up with the vision. If we picture them as the conductor of an orchestra, they are good at embodying the soul of the music. These leaders are good at articulating the transcendant values of the organization or community. But it's not their vision.
Envisioning is quite popular in industry these days. A few of the top people go off for a weekend and come up with the vision - which often is basically a vision that the CEO has decided on beforehand. Then they come down from the mountain and give this vision to the masses. But that does not work. This is a sales notion of leadership.
That kind of vision may, in fact, move the institution to a new place, simply because people in senior positions of authority, particularly in a business environment, have a lot of power to push the organization in one direction or another. But it doesn't necessarily lead to a better adaptation between the organization and its environment, because it relies too much on the best guesses of a few people operating in isolation.
A vision has to have accuracy, and not just appeal and imagination. Articulating a vision for an organization or community has to start with an awful lot of listening, a lot of stimulating of debate and conversation, and then listening - to distill, to capture, the values. It has to start, as well, with carefully diagnosing the current problematic environment to which one needs to adapt.
The end of the conversation - or the beginning?
Going off on a retreat might be part of the process but here's the difference: is the vision that you come up with the beginning of a conversation? Or is it the end of a conversation? Often people view it as the end of the conversation, telling themselves, "Now I simply need to motivate people to align themselves so that we get what I want." But what if it's the start of a conversation? What if we see the retreat as coming up with a stimulating initiative that provokes a deliberative process amongst all the key parties in the environment? Then, out of that process, we can come up with a more coherent strategy that takes into account the legitimately competing values and perspectives that different parties have.
Our current notions of leadership are technocratic. They rely on a few people at the top to come up with the vision, as if they were technical experts, and provide this solution to the community - when in fact it's the community that is the problem, and you are not going to change the community without engaging them in the problem.
Think about Lyndon Johnson, for instance. He could never have moved forward on civil rights by simply passing legislation, because racism and civil rights exist in the hearts and minds of people throughout the land. Top executive teams have a lot of work to do on retreats. But it's not technical work. It's the development of a strategy for adaptive change within their institution.
Setting conflicts in dialog
The leader can help set conflicts set in productive dialog with each other. This is how Martin Luther King and Lyndon Johnson moved civil rights forward.
Imagine a man relaxing at home on a Sunday afternoon after church, at the time of the incident at the bridge in Selma. He's watching a ball game. Suddenly his daughter erupts into the living room, saying, "Daddy, you have got to see what is happening right now on TV." And she goes to the TV and starts changing his channels.
He says, "Mary, how many times have I told you that this is my time to relax before I start work again tomorrow?"
Mary says, "But daddy, we just came from church, where they were talking all about love of our fellow human beings - and you have got to see the brutality that is happening right now on TV." She insists on changing the channels. A fight breaks out between father and daughter, a fight ostensibly about what channel to watch, but really about values. The fight may last for months, with the daughter in effect challenging the father to live according to his values.
Imagine that conflict played out within each family, millions of times across the land - that is exactly the process of social learning that King and his fellow strategists were trying to generate in these demonstrations. If people don't engage across the divide of their differences, there is no learning. People don't learn by looking in the mirror. They learn by talking with people who have different points of view. In a sense then, conflict is really the engine of adaptive work, the engine of learning.
This may not mean fighting. At AT&T they didn't want to use the word "conflict," because most organizations have an allergy to conflict. So they called it a leadership skill: "leveraging disagreements," which is a polite way of saying, "orchestrating conflict."
We need to begin to see conflict as a good thing. Of course it's dangerous. It has to be orchestrated properly. It can't get out of hand. We have to learn to regulate the level of disequilibrium in the system so that the level of tension, conflict, and distress does not overwhelm people's learning capacity. But most organizations err on the side of suppressing conflict and maintaining such a low level of disequilibrium that no real learning takes place.
Adaptive and technical problems
The difference between an adaptive problem and a technical one is key. There are problems that are just technical. I'm delighted when a car mechanic fixes my car, an orthopedic surgeon gives me back a healed bone, or an internist gives me penicillin and cures my pneumonia. That's a key question: is this a problem that an expert can fix, or is this a problem that is going to require people in the community to change their values, their behavior, or their attitudes? For this problem to be solved, are people going to need to learn new ways of doing business?
The Vietnam War was an adaptive problem which Robert McNamara and the other authorities of the time insisted on treating as a technical problem. Right now we are treating the problem of crime as a technical problem, by debating how much we should pay for more police, rather than addressing the underlying forces that produce criminal behavior.
The drug abuse problem is an awful example of an adaptive problem treated as if it were technical. When President Bush came into office it was the hottest problem in the land. Because he was the president, all eyes turned to him, as the most senior authority, to solve the drug problem. He brought his experts together and they devised a $9 billion plan. They appointed a powerful chief executive, Bill Bennett, and called him the "Drug Czar." And in September of 1989 Bush gave his debut speech in which he told people basically not to worry. We have got a plan. We are going to win this war. It is going to take time but we are taking action.
People were delighted to hear that. They did not want to be told that the problem of drug abuse comes from us, from our being stretched too thin as parents, and not knowing how to parent teenagers. It comes from our lack of community spirit, from the fact that the weave of our neighborhoods has been shredded, so that we don't help each other raise our kids. Our teachers want to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic; the technical skills. Our churches no longer provide sustaining sources of meaning during times of distress and pain. The adjustments required to solve the drug problem are not adjustments in Bolivia or Panama, but are adjustments in each and every one of our own families and communities. And the nation does not want to hear that.
Can people learn how to lead?
The notion that leaders are "born, not made," that we cannot learn to lead, is entrenched in our culture and in the way we think. And it's a dangerous idea.
When we talk about leadership we don't distinguish between leadership, authority, and dominance behavior. The capacity for gaining dominance in a social situation is one of the skills that enable people to gain authority. Dominance isn't a product, in human societies, of physical prowess. Even in chimpanzee societies, dominance is a product of political alliances. It means being able to win the hearts of your fellows through a variety of favors and affiliative behaviors.
Different situations, different cultures, different organizations, at different moments in their life, call for different characteristics and require different skills in a leader. A person may be terrific at exercising leadership in her church and awful in exercising leadership in her business environment. This happens all the time. Some terrific business leaders exercise no leadership in their families, their neighborhoods, or their church groups - not just because they choose not to, but also because they don't know how. Those other settings have different sets of norms, different authority structures, and different sets of adaptive challenges with which they are unfamiliar. They just don't know how to get their talents around them.
People can learn a great deal about how to deploy whatever skills they do have in different contexts. People can learn a great deal about how to use those skills appropriately. So leadership education is a bit like violin teaching. You take whatever talent a person has and you teach them how to maximize that talent and how to deploy it appropriately given the kind of music they want to play. Somebody may be a terrific player of Bach and an awful player Brahms.
Learning from failure
If we want to learn better leadership, a powerful source of learning is our own failures. Sometimes the most difficult thing about learning from failure is noticing that we have failed.
In my classes people spend a lot of time analyzing their own failures in their efforts to exercise leadership. It's important for people to get desensitized to facing their failures, because leadership in the context of an adaptive challenge means improvising. People may want you to have a clear critical path and a plan of action. But the plan is just today's best guess. Tomorrow you are going to learn things that are going require a deviation in the plan.
So you have to be willing to face failure every day. Sometimes these are small tactical blunders - I spoke to this person wrong, I put too much spin on that argument, I sequenced the agenda improperly. Sometimes they are larger strategic errors. But if you can't face failure, then how can one possibly do mid-course corrections in this improvisation toward adaptive success
A learning strategy
Leadership requires a learning strategy. A leader has to engage people in facing the challenge, adjusting their values, changing perspectives, and developing new habits of behavior. If you are an authoritative person with pride in your ability to tackle hard problems, this may come as a rude awakening. But it should also ease the burden of having to know the answers and bear the uncertainty. To the person who waits to receive either "the vision" to lead or the coach's call, this may also seem a mixture of good and bad news. The adaptive demands of our societies require leadership that takes responsibility without waiting for revelation or request. One may lead perhaps with no more than a question in hand.
Effective leadership and management are central to strengthening teaching and learning, to maximising achievement and closing attainment gaps. The National Strategies provide a wide range of support to develop expertise and capacity at senior and middle leadership levels in local authorities, schools and settings and to promote the sharing of expertise though partnerships and collaborative networks.
Provide leadership
Strong leadership involves:
understanding the unique qualities of each place
establishing a clear vision and measurable targets
demonstrating commitment to action, including signing and implementing the Nottingham Declaration
understanding and communicating the multiple benefits of taking action
proactively building partnerships across the authority, the local strategic partnership and beyond
using spatial planning proactively
rigorous action on funding and resources to maximise efficiency and realise sustainable economic benefits.
Dealing with climate change is the most pressing sustainability challenge facing us in the UK. A courageous and appropriate response will deliver progress on other sustainable development priorities, including provision of affordable homes, employment opportunities and regeneration – all crucial in troubled economic times.
What do we need to do?
Cities and towns all need to:
mitigate climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions
adapt to a changing climate by providing more comfortable environments for people to live and work in
adapt services and infrastructure to ensure resilience to extreme weather events
ensure vulnerable people are protected from climate change risk
increase low-carbon energy supplies.
Climate change requires local authorities to take a long-term view despite short-term pressures. This will require some tough decisions.
What are the benefits?
An inspiring vision, an evidence-based approach and effective communication and engagement are essential. Complexity requires a cross-cutting approach to issues and assets. By taking firm action on climate change mitigation and adaptation that also delivers sustainable places, city leaders will, at the same time:
increase energy security
increase employment opportunities
protect vulnerable residents
improve health and wellbeing
build community and economic resilience
promote sustainable communities and places.
The best approaches to addressing the impacts of a changing climate will be based on understanding the city as a complex, connected system. This means a cross–disciplinary approach which identifies the win-wins across the whole of the city.
How can local authorities lead the way?
There are eight main ways in which local authority leadership can really influence climate change and sustainability outcomes:
policymaker– interpreting national policy and guidance and formulating policy at the local scale to deliver climate change objectives and the sustainable community strategy. Key policies include the local area agreement, the local development framework and the core strategy plus a significant masterplanning role through area action plans and supplementary planning documents
planning authority – the negotiating and consent-giving roles of local authorities in the planning process can have a big influence on both new build and refurbishment
building control authority, setting, overseeing and signing off the standards for new development
social landlord – local authorities may have control over a vast stock of existing housing and a considerable amount of new build and refurbishment
client for new public buildings – including town halls, schools, leisure centres and community centres with opportunities to provide benchmarks of good practice in their design and management
asset manager for existing buildings and open spaces, with opportunities for sustainable refurbishment and maintenance that reduces emissions and increases adaptability to a changing climate
leader in local strategic partnerships in delivering effective services and resource management and working with private and public partners to provide a solid base for sustainable communities and local economies
advisor to communities on how to live, work and play more sustainably, reducing their ecological footprint and building their resilience to a changing climate.Every problem is a business potential. Jamaica,haiti, has so much wealth and they think it's a problem. If you look at Jamaica,haiti with your eyes you get depressed. The leadership can't see the vision; and without vision, a people perish. It's vision that controls life.Help us to reach our goals in haiti and jamaica.and the rest of the world.
Nelson Mandela has always felt most at ease around children, and in some ways his greatest deprivation was that he spent 27 years without hearing a baby cry or holding a child's hand. Last month, when I visited Mandela in Johannesburg — a frailer, foggier Mandela than the one I used to know — his first instinct was to spread his arms to my two boys. Within seconds they were hugging the friendly old man who asked them what sports they liked to play and what they'd had for breakfast. While we talked, he held my son Gabriel, whose complicated middle name is Rolihlahla, Nelson Mandela's real first name. He told Gabriel the story of that name, how in Xhosa it translates as "pulling down the branch of a tree" but that its real meaning is "troublemaker."
As he celebrates his 90th birthday next week, Nelson Mandela has made enough trouble for several lifetimes. He liberated a country from a system of violent prejudice and helped unite white and black, oppressor and oppressed, in a way that had never been done before. In the 1990s I worked with Mandela for almost two years on his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. After all that time spent in his company, I felt a terrible sense of withdrawal when the book was done; it was like the sun going out of one's life. We have seen each other occasionally over the years, but I wanted to make what might be a final visit and have my sons meet him one more time.
I also wanted to talk to him about leadership. Mandela is the closest thing the world has to a secular saint, but he would be the first to admit that he is something far more pedestrian: a politician. He overthrew apartheid and created a nonracial democratic South Africa by knowing precisely when and how to transition between his roles as warrior, martyr, diplomat and statesman. Uncomfortable with abstract philosophical concepts, he would often say to me that an issue "was not a question of principle; it was a question of tactics." He is a master tactician.
Mandela is no longer comfortable with inquiries or favors. He's fearful that he may not be able to summon what people expect when they visit a living deity, and vain enough to care that they not think him diminished. But the world has never needed Mandela's gifts — as a tactician, as an activist and, yes, as a politician — more, as he showed again in London on June 25, when he rose to condemn the savagery of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. As we enter the main stretch of a historic presidential campaign in America, there is much that he can teach the two candidates. I've always thought of what you are about to read as Madiba's Rules (Madiba, his clan name, is what everyone close to him calls him), and they are cobbled together from our conversations old and new and from observing him up close and from afar. They are mostly practical. Many of them stem directly from his personal experience. All of them are calibrated to cause the best kind of trouble: the trouble that forces us to ask how we can make the world a better place.
No. 1
Courage is not the absence of fear — it's inspiring others to move beyond it
In 1994, during the presidential-election campaign, Mandela got on a tiny propeller plane to fly down to the killing fields of Natal and give a speech to his Zulu supporters. I agreed to meet him at the airport, where we would continue our work after his speech. When the plane was 20 minutes from landing, one of its engines failed. Some on the plane began to panic. The only thing that calmed them was looking at Mandela, who quietly read his newspaper as if he were a commuter on his morning train to the office. The airport prepared for an emergency landing, and the pilot managed to land the plane safely. When Mandela and I got in the backseat of his bulletproof BMW that would take us to the rally, he turned to me and said, "Man, I was terrified up there!"
Mandela was often afraid during his time underground, during the Rivonia trial that led to his imprisonment, during his time on Robben Island. "Of course I was afraid!" he would tell me later. It would have been irrational, he suggested, not to be. "I can't pretend that I'm brave and that I can beat the whole world." But as a leader, you cannot let people know. "You must put up a front."
And that's precisely what he learned to do: pretend and, through the act of appearing fearless, inspire others. It was a pantomime Mandela perfected on Robben Island, where there was much to fear. Prisoners who were with him said watching Mandela walk across the courtyard, upright and proud, was enough to keep them going for days. He knew that he was a model for others, and that gave him the strength to triumph over his own fear.
No. 2
Lead from the front — but don't leave your base behind
Mandela is cagey. in 1985 he was operated on for an enlarged prostate. When he was returned to prison, he was separated from his colleagues and friends for the first time in 21 years. They protested. But as his longtime friend Ahmed Kathrada recalls, he said to them, "Wait a minute, chaps. Some good may come of this."
The good that came of it was that Mandela on his own launched negotiations with the apartheid government. This was anathema to the African National Congress (ANC). After decades of saying "prisoners cannot negotiate" and after advocating an armed struggle that would bring the government to its knees, he decided that the time was right to begin to talk to his oppressors.
When he initiated his negotiations with the government in 1985, there were many who thought he had lost it. "We thought he was selling out," says Cyril Ramaphosa, then the powerful and fiery leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. "I went to see him to tell him, What are you doing? It was an unbelievable initiative. He took a massive risk."
Mandela launched a campaign to persuade the ANC that his was the correct course. His reputation was on the line. He went to each of his comrades in prison, Kathrada remembers, and explained what he was doing. Slowly and deliberately, he brought them along. "You take your support base along with you," says Ramaphosa, who was secretary-general of the ANC and is now a business mogul. "Once you arrive at the beachhead, then you allow the people to move on. He's not a bubble-gum leader — chew it now and throw it away."
For Mandela, refusing to negotiate was about tactics, not principles. Throughout his life, he has always made that distinction. His unwavering principle — the overthrow of apartheid and the achievement of one man, one vote — was immutable, but almost anything that helped him get to that goal he regarded as a tactic. He is the most pragmatic of idealists.
"He's a historical man," says Ramaphosa. "He was thinking way ahead of us. He has posterity in mind: How will they view what we've done?" Prison gave him the ability to take the long view. It had to; there was no other view possible. He was thinking in terms of not days and weeks but decades. He knew history was on his side, that the result was inevitable; it was just a question of how soon and how it would be achieved. "Things will be better in the long run," he sometimes said. He always played for the long run.
Believe in what God Show you ,and tell you,because God watch over his promises.
Sammy D.James/Founder of World Vision Ministries International.