Leadership on the Line

According to my Kindle, I am about 80% through reading Leadership on the Line. That's close enough that I'll write a brief review. Don't get wrong. I'll finish the book. But business books rarely finish strong. If I wait until I've clicked the last "next page" button, I probably won't write a review at all.

But getting to the point, I highly recommend the book.

The authors' primary thesis is that there are two kinds of leadership challenges. The first is technical. Technical challenges are the sort that can be solved through traditional management techniques. With a technical challenge, you don't need your team to do anything differently. They just need to do things better. An adaptive challenge, on the other hand, requires you to truly lead and make fundamental changes in your organization. It requires you to change hearts and minds and even shift the culture in a new direction. The book's authors posit that one of the biggest mistakes in leadership is to mistake an adaptive challenge for a technical one.

One example that's been making the headlines lately is the car industry. GM has been having problems for quite a while now, even before the current financial crisis. A technical response to this problem would be to improve marketing and reduce costs for its highest margin vehicles. GM would still focus primarily on large vehicles, at least in the U.S. An adaptive response would have been to invest in smaller, more efficient vehicles even when Hummer sales were robust. Getting the suppliers, unions, and dealers in lined up to make this change would have been enormously difficult and dangerous to your career. But if successful, GM would be in a better position today.

Technical challenges respond well to straight-forward management in existing frameworks. Adaptive challenges require leadership. Adaptive challenge is also dangerous. Most of the book deals with the pitfalls and hazards of trying to make lead an adaptive change.

For example, when you deliver an uncomfortable message, people will complain about your style without addressing the underlying issue. Another pitfall is getting seduced by your most ardent supporters and moving to far from what people will accept. You may not understand the nature of your powerbase and start to issue edicts that aren't followed regardless of your role authority. Someone's values may be threatened by the change you represent. You have to tread carefully to avoid destruction.

One of the things I liked best about this book is that the examples are almost all failures. Too many business books focus only on the success stories and are easily skewed by survivor bias. It also brought to mind the techniques of some of the best books on leaders I've read including Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon Johnson, and Alexander Hamilton, both for there successes and their failures.

The one criticism I have is that there are few precise techniques. There are a lot of abstract warnings and things to keep in mind. But without actionable steps these theories can be debilitating to someone facing an adaptive challenge. However, over the past couple of weeks I've come to think of this book as a partner to other sources of leadership information including Influencer and Manager Tools. Manager tools does a great job on the nuts and bolts of technical management. I don't mean this in a pejorative sense. After all, the day to day business of getting things done and working within an organization is critical. "Influencer" gives some specific methods for creating adaptive change. "Leadership on the Line" puts these two in context by describing the different kinds of challenges leaders face and describing the pitfalls and general approaches to tackling adaptive challenges.