257: The Work of Leadership (inspired by Francesca Albanese and Audre Lorde, with strategy scaffolding from Ronald Heifetz)
Dear friends
Leadership is often mistaken for position or expertise. It is neither. It is a way of being. The work of leadership is how we choose to live.
/self
Today, we start with self. Our stepping stone is Audre Lorde’s 1977 The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. Although its insights are rooted in her experience of cancer, she draws wider lessons, leadership lessons.
Facing the possibility of death, she reflects that what she regretted most were her silences.
We silence ourselves for fear of hurt, or – ironically – of not being heard, but the death’s proximity taught her, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”
She asks us, “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
She told her daughter she was struggling to prepare her speech.
She replied, “Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”
We choose silence hoping to be safe. Even the small visibility of speaking in a management meeting or sharing a need with someone can feel threatening, overly revealing. What if we’re attacked or ignored?
In Lorde’s account, both personal healing and leadership require breaking silence.
She reminds us, “… that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever… we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid”.
She exhorts, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us…”.
The luxury of fearlessness never comes, but we can teach ourselves to act.
//strategy
Three decades later, in the context of the 2008 global depression, authors Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow and Marty Linsky in an HBR article titled for our times – Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis – echo Lorde.
Eight years earlier, Heifetz co-authored The Work of Leadership with Donald L. Laurie.
We draw from both.
Heifetz, Grashow and Linksy tell us, in times of complexity and crisis, leaders must choose to “Hunker Down—or Press Reset”.
The temptation is to carry on as we always have, to – in effect – remain silent. The challenge Lorde names at the level of self — to speak, to act, to resist paralysis — is, at the organisational level, the core of adaptive leadership.
Leaders who succeed, “… seize the opportunity… to hit the organization’s reset button. They use the turbulence of the present to build on and bring closure to the past. In the process, they change key rules of the game, reshape parts of the organization, and redefine the work people do”.
We are in a global moment of profound change. I’ve watched leaders try to return to ‘the way things were’—and fail
The countries, businesses and people that show any glimmer of hope are those who seek opportunities in the turbulence, who are stepping ahead, mindful of Lorde’s insight that even if they remain silent, they will still suffer. Instead they seek learning, knowing that learning creates possibilities.
In the earlier article, Heifetz and Laurie identify six principles for leading adaptive work:
- ‘Getting on the balcony,’
- Identifying the adaptive challenge,
- Regulating distress,
- Maintaining disciplined attention,
- Giving the work back to people, and
- Protecting voices of leadership from below.
Five of the six are self-explanatory. Getting on the balcony means zooming out to get perspective. It is easy to drown in daily operations. Effective leadership requires disciplined exploration of systemic linkages.
Of course, doing this is hard. Heifetz, Grashow and Linksy remind us leaders have two jobs to do – “They must develop ‘next practices’ while excelling at today’s best practices”.
Achieving this means acknowledging that people find change hard. They will resist (Read more in Leading Change).
You must balance creating awareness of the need to change, whilst knowing that “if people feel too much distress, they will fight, flee, or freeze” and “a leader must sequence and pace the work. Too often, senior managers convey that everything is important. They start new initiatives without stopping other activities, or they start too many initiatives at the same time. They overwhelm and disorient the very people who need to take responsibility for the work”.
In short, the work of leadership is both technical and cultural, additive and subtractive.
It is an ongoing orchestration of complexity – maintaining situational and personal awareness, balancing momentum with not burning out.
This is the work of leadership in this moment. Zoom out for perspective. Know that change must come. Involve people in creating the change and manage the emotions (Read how Pixar did it in Unlocking Excellence).
The old is dying. In this chaos there are no known solutions, but we can speak, we can explore and, in those actions, generate ongoing learning that helps us take the next step and the next.
Waiting for the solution, dreaming of the past, that won’t work.
///soul
The work of leadership always asks more than expertise and organisational effectiveness. Our lens must be wider.
Muhammed Bhar. A 24-year-old Palestinian man with Down’s syndrome and autism, savaged by IDF attack dogs. Soldiers forced his family out of their home, leaving him to die alone.
42 and 21. Stitches and injections for three-year-old Ibrahim Hashash after a military dog attack.
Fatima Abdullah. Nine years old. Died when the booby-trapped pager she was carrying to her father exploded in her hands.
Golden pager. The same weapon — a gift from Netanyahu, accepted by Donald Trump
232. The number of journalists killed in Gaza by April 2025.
Lisa Nandy, the UK Media Secretary demanding BBC staff be fired for screening Gaza documentaries.
798. The number of people killed at Gaza food hubs and aid convoy routes between late May and 12 July.
Between three and four thousand. Child amputees in Gaza — more per capita than anywhere else in the world.
36. Elected representatives of the UK’s largest Jewish organisation, the Board of Deputies, disciplined after criticising Israel’s operations in Gaza. Speaking out.
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK. Countries that have imposed travel bans and asset freezes on Israel’s National Security and Finance Ministers. Acting.
Francesca Albanese. UN Special Rapporteur. Not a silent person.
With love
Karl