A concept presented well some years ago by Ronald A. Heifetz in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers.
When discussing leading without authority, Heifetz notes that leadership means engaging people to make progress on the adaptive problems they face. Because making progress on adaptive problems requires learning, the task of leadership consists of choreographing and directing learning processes in the organization or community.
A concept presented well some years ago by Ronald A. Heifetz in his book Leadership Without Easy Answers. Ronald Heifetz is one of my favorite authors on the subject of leadership and has continued his teachings with a more recent book Leadership on the Line. He presents views in a common sense approach as represented in a great quote "Attention is the currency of leadership." Fast Company Magazine had a good article on Dr. Heifetz "The Leader of the Future."
Good news! for those team leaders who may feel, because they are not members of "management" that they cannot be effective leaders in daily operations/activities.
Heifetz also points out the constraints of authority suggest that there may also be advantages to leading without it:
* First, the absence of authority enables one to deviate from the norms of authoritative decision making. Instead of providing answers that soothe, one can more readily raise questions that disturb
* Second, leading without or beyond ones authority permits focusing on a single issue
* Third, operating with little or no authority places one closer to the detailed experiences of some of the stakeholders in the situation. One may lose the larger perspective but gain the fine grain of people’s hopes, pains, values, habits, and history. One has frontline information.
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