Ronald A. Heifetz > Quotes

“Your behavior reflects your actual purposes.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“What people resist is not change per se, but loss.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Worry not that your child listens to you; worry most that they watch you.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Your silence creates a vacuum for others to fill The key is to stay present and keep listening. The silence of holding steady is different from the silence of holding back.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Exercising leadership is an expression of your aliveness... But when you cover yourself up, you risk losing something as well. In the struggle to save yourself, you can give up too many of those qualities that are the essence of being alive, like innocence, curiosity, and compassion.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“The improvisational ability to lead adaptively relies on responding to the present situation rather than importing the past into the present and laying it on the current situation like an imperfect template.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“In the heat of leadership, with the adrenaline pumping, it is easy to convince yourself that you are not subject to the normal human frailties that can defeat ordinary mortals. You begin to act as if you are indestructible. But the intellectual, physical, and emotional challenges of leadership are fierce. So, in addition to getting on the being and assess the tolls those changes are taking. If you don't, your seemingly indestructible self can self-destruct. This, by the way, is an ideal outcome for your foes-and even friends who oppose your initiative- because no one has to feel responsible for your downfall.

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When you take "personal" attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action-you make yourself the issue.
Attacks may be personal, understand that they are basically attacks on positions you represent and the role you are seeking to play”
― Ronald A. Heifetz

“When you need someone to talk to in difficult times, it’s tempting to try to turn a trusted ally into a confidant as well. Not a good idea.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Stay diagnostic even as you take action.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Most people instinctively follow a dominant trend in an organization or community, without critical evaluation of its merits. The herd instinct is strong.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Mental health professionals have said for a long time that individuals cannot adapt well to too many life changes at once. If you suffer a loss in the family, change jobs, and move all within a short time, the chances are your own internal stability may break down, or show signs of serious strain.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“You know the adage “People resist change.” It is not really true. People are not stupid. People love change when they know it is a good thing. No one gives back a winning lottery ticket. What people resist is not change per se, but loss. When change involves real or potential loss, people hold on to what they have and resist the change.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“Your inspiration taps hidden reserves of promise that sustain people through times that induce despair. You enable people to envision a future that sustains the best from their past while also holding out new possibilities.”
― Ronald Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“you cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you personally.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“To diagnose a system or yourself while in the midst of action requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events. We use the metaphor of “getting on the balcony” above the “dance floor” to depict what it means to gain the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“When you lead people through difficult change, you take them on an emotional roller coaster because you are asking them to relinquish something—a belief, a value, a behavior—that they hold dear. People can stand only so much change at any one time.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Your goal should be to keep the temperature within what we call the productive zone of disequilibrium (PZD): enough heat generated by your intervention to gain attention, engagement, and forward motion, but not so much that the organization (or your part of it) explodes.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“The most common leadership failure stems from trying to apply technical solutions to adaptive challenges.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“You know best who you really are by watching what you do rather than listening to what you say.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World

“An adaptive change that is beneficial to the organization as a whole may clearly and tangibly hurt some of those who had benefited from the world being left behind.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Great athletes can at once play the game and observe it as a whole.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“To sustain momentum through a period of difficult change, you have to find ways to remind people of the orienting value—the positive vision—that makes the current angst worthwhile.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“The person who has a disproportionate need for control, who is too hungry for power, is susceptible to losing sight of the work.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading

“Without conflict and tension, music lacks dynamism and movement. The composer and the improvisational musician alike must contain the dissonance within a frame that holds the audience's attention until resolution is found.
Music also teaches to distinguish the varieties of silence: restless, energized, bored, tranquil, and sublime.' With silence one creates moments so that something new can be heard; one holds the tension in an audience or working group, or punctuates important phrases, allowing time for the message to settle.
Creating music takes place in relation to structures and audiences. Structural limits provide scaffolding for creativity. Plato put it this way: "If there is no contradictory impression, there is nothing to awaken reflection."' People create in relation to something or someone. Although the audience may be safely tucked inside the composer's mind, still it is there.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers

“You stay alive in the practice of leadership by reducing the extent to which you become the target of people’s frustrations. The best way to stay out of range is to think constantly about giving the work back to the people who need to take responsibility. Place the work within and between the factions who are faced with the challenge, and tailor your interventions so they are unambiguous and have a context.”
― Ronald A. Heifetz, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading