Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading by Ronald A. Heifetz & Marty Linsky

Author:Ronald A. Heifetz & Marty Linsky
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2002-08-08T14:00:00+00:00

Show Them the Future

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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. For Roosevelt, that meant creating a New Deal for Americans, saving the freemarket system, and protecting democracy in the era of Stalin and Hitler. His vision, however abstract in his high rhetoric, moved people.

As you catalyze change, you can help ensure that you do not become a lightning rod for the conflict by making the vision more tangible, reminding people of the values they are fighting for, and showing them how the future might look. By answering, in every possible way, the “why” question, you increase people’s willingness to endure the hardships that come with the journey to a better place.

That was Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, aim in his famous 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, in which he pointed to a future where “little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.”4

Sometimes it is possible to make the future even more concrete than King was able to do in that speech. In 1983, the Spanish government appointed Ricardo Sanchez to be the Director General of IPIA, the regional industrial promotion agency for the Andalusian region of Spain.5 The government gave him the job of reversing the pattern of economic stagnation that characterized the region. The local industries struggled along with antiquated production methods, primitive marketing, and an assumption on the part of the citizenry that being an economic backwater was an inevitable and permanent condition. Not only was there no innovation, there seemed to be no interest in it or spirit for it.

Sanchez focused his attention on the marble industry in the Macael region, located in the desert mountains of eastern Andalusia. Although Macael enjoyed one of the world’s largest deposits of white marble, production and profit were way below its competitors. The Macael marble industry specialized in primary marble production, a low-profit and fragmented segment of the marble market compared to the more lucrative finishing processes. There were more than 150 small marble firms in the region, averaging seven employees. Firms did little or no marketing, had no brand identity, and were vulnerable to competition from larger firms and to the market power of both suppliers and customers. The ownermanagers of these small firms valued their independence above all else, even above profit and growth. Sanchez came to Macael to promote growth, but he had virtually no resources at his command. He found himself with no funds to dispense, no authority with which to organize people, and a formidable adaptive challenge.

Sanchez realized that one powerful way he could help his people face the need to give up a way of life they loved was to show them a better future. He knew that the members of the employers association could not envision any organizational model different from the one in which they had been embedded for generations.

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