Take the Heat

Learning to take the heat and receive people’s anger in a way that does not undermine your initiative is one of the toughest tasks of leadership. When you ask people to make changes and even sacrifices, it’s almost inevitable that you will frustrate some of your closest colleagues and supporters, not to mention those outside your faction. Your allies want you to calm things down, at least for them, rather than stir things up. As they put pressure on you to back away, drop the issue, or change the behavior that upsets them, you will feel the heat, uncomfortably. In this sense, exercising leadership might be understood as disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.

No two people are wired exactly alike, and so we all respond differently to our environment. Some of us have a higher tolerance for heat and stress than others; indeed, there are those who thrive under peak pressure. But for most of us, who prefer to minimize opposition or avoid it altogether, the truth is that rarely, if ever, can we escape people’s anger when leading any kind of significant change. Thus, the more heat you can take, the better off you will be in keeping your issue alive and keeping yourself in the game. As we saw in chapter 5, Henry Fonda’s character took intense heat from his fellow jurors in Twelve Angry Men. They attacked him verbally and threatened him physically, hoping to get him to back down. His willingness to be the “skunk at the lawn party” and then to take the heat gracefully was essential to keeping himself, and the legitimacy of his position, alive in that jury room. Increasing your capacity for taking the heat takes practice. Again and again, you must train yourself to be deliberate and keep your cool when the world around you is boiling. Silence is a form of action.

For over a decade, Mary Selecky administered public health programs for a three-county health district in rural northeast Washington State.¹ She also played an active role statewide at the forefront of several successful legislative initiatives, including the AIDS Omnibus Act, which required local health agencies to provide AIDS-related services, as well as the law establishing the state Department of Health. Her success led to her appointment as acting secretary of health for the state of Washington on October 1, 1998, when Governor Gary Locke made her the head of the agency she helped to create.

From the moment of her appointment, she found herself in the midst of a ferocious ongoing controversy over whether people who tested HIV-positive should be reported to the department by name or by a unique numerical code. AIDS activists argued adamantly that the reporting should be by numbers to protect the identity of the patients and to encourage people to be tested for HIV. Public health officials insisted that the interests of public health required that names be used. They argued that this was the simplest and most accurate system to administer and that it could more quickly and easily track the spread of the disease, better facilitate counseling and notification, and more effectively protect against further infections. Reporting by name was the standard procedure for the other fifty-four illnesses on the state’s list of reportable diseases.

The previous February, the Governor’s Council on HIV and AIDS, dominated by AIDS workers and activists, voted overwhelmingly (14–4) in favor of using numerical identifiers. Supporters of numbers expected the governor to accept the recommendation and pass it on with his approval to the state Board of Health, which had the statutory responsibility for adopting regulations governing the reporting of diseases. The governor enjoyed widespread support in the gay community, which made up the core of the pro-numbers constituency, and he had been a strong privacy advocate throughout his political career. Instead, the governor stuck with his neutral position. He tried to form an ad hoc committee to resolve the issue, but was not able to put together a group that would be acceptable to both sides.

Finally, he asked the state Board of Health to settle the matter, which then placed it on the agenda for a preliminary vote at the board’s October meeting. The board consisted of ten gubernatorial appointees, all members of the health professions. Selecky served as an ex officio member of the board, and therefore would have to cast her vote on this highly divisive issue just two weeks after coming into the job. Although she did not chair the board, as state health secretary her words and actions would have a strong impact on the proceedings.

In her previous job at the county level, Selecky sided with her public health colleagues in favor of using names. But now she found herself in a different environment. She had a new role with different responsibilities, a new mix of constituencies, and little guidance from her appointing authority. She assumed that Locke knew she had earlier taken a public position on the question at hand.

There would be a discussion and a vote at the board meeting, and Selecky would have to declare herself. The board’s vote would not be final, but it would serve as the basis of a draft rule, subject to further discussion and public hearings. There would be considerable political momentum behind whatever position it took.

As the meeting date approached, Selecky gave no indication of her plans, though her staff was heavily weighted toward reporting by name. At the meeting, the extensive prevote discussion made it clear that the public health professionals, supporting names-based reporting, had done their homework. Selecky said nothing throughout the conversation. She waited until some but not all of the council members had voted. All eyes were on her. She abstained. The vote was 7–0 for names-based reporting and Selecky’s department was now charged with drafting a preliminary rule reflecting that vote.

Her action, or inaction, upset almost everyone. Both sides expressed disappointment that she did not vote with them, but they agreed on one thing: She had abdicated her responsibility. The governor’s office also expressed concern.

Selecky endured a trying period in the aftermath of that meeting. Criticism came at her from many quarters. Outraged AIDS activists protested with public demonstrations. But Selecky took the heat and held steady, refusing to cave in or even to respond to the pressure to take a stand.

Then, slowly and hesitatingly at first, she began to meet with the two sides, first separately and then together. Neither felt happy with what she had done, but both would have been much more upset if she had sided with the other. Eventually they came to a compromise. The names of people infected with HIV would be destroyed after ninety days. Local health authorities would record the names but would provide the state only with numerical identifiers.

Selecky found herself tested here, not for the technical aspects of the issue, the right or wrong of policy options, but rather for her tolerance for taking heat. She had to willingly incur everyone’s anger and disappointment, and then absorb it. Her old public health colleagues had every reason to think her views on the issue would remain consistent with those she had taken previously. And the AIDS activists had known her and the governor to be sympathetic to their cause.

She found it difficult to get through that period. She had to absorb intense criticism from people whose friendship, collegiality, and support she had valued and enjoyed in the past. By holding steady, however, she retained access to everyone and eventually found a way to get the two sides to face each other and to accept the legitimacy of each other’s concerns.

Taking heat from your friends and allies is very tough. In a way, it’s easier to tolerate abuse from the opposition. After all, you know you must be doing something good if the forces of evil are after you, calling you names. The people who speak in front of an angry crowd or submit to interviews on a hostile talk radio show may appear especially courageous, but those who have been in that role know the ameliorating secret: When the enemy throws tomatoes in your face, a part of you feels ennobled and reaffirmed.

As Henry Fonda’s character and Mary Selecky illustrate, the challenge of exercising leadership often involves taking intense heat from people whose support you value and need. Neither of them could have accomplished their aims without the help of those they were frustrating and disappointing. To withstand such pressure demands a broad perspective and extra measures of patience, maturity, courage, strength, and grace.

The people you challenge will test your steadiness and judge your worthiness by your response to their anger, not unlike teenagers, who want to know that they can blow hot without blowing their parents away. Receiving people’s anger without becoming personally defensive generates trust. If you can hold steady long enough, remaining respectful of their pains and defending your perspective without feeling you must defend yourself, you may find that in the ensuing calm, relationships become stronger.

History delights in people who demonstrate this capacity. Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Joan of Arc, Mohammed, Jesus, Moses—all gained extraordinary credibility and moral authority by receiving anger with grace. Receiving anger, then, is a sacred task because it tests us in our most sensitive places. It demands that we remain true to a purpose beyond ourselves and stand by people compassionately, even when they unleash demons. Taking the heat with grace communicates respect for the pains of change.

Let the Issues Ripen

In your efforts to lead a community, you will often be thinking and acting ahead of them. But if you get too far ahead, raising issues before they are ready to be addressed, you create an opportunity for those you lead to sideline both you and the issue. You need to wait until the issue is ripe, or ripen it yourself. True, patience is not a virtue typically associated with people passionate about what they are doing. But holding off until the issue is ready may be critical in mobilizing people’s energy and getting yourself heard.

Of course, most organizations and communities have a whole spectrum of challenges confronting them at any given time. Common sense tells us we can’t tackle them all at once. The availability of resources often dictates the agenda—we attack a problem when we have the wherewithal to do so. But resources are just one factor in determining the willingness of people to tackle an issue. The primary factor consists of the psychological readiness to weigh priorities and take losses. The political question becomes: Has the psychological readiness spread across enough factions in the organization or community to provide a critical mass?

An issue becomes ripe when there is widespread urgency to deal with it. Something that may seem to you to be incredibly important, requiring immediate attention, may not seem so to others in your organization, at least not at the moment. But it may become important to them in time. The activism of individuals, like Maggie Brooke, who took on alcoholism in her community, can ripen an issue over time by drawing people’s attention to the contradictions in their lives. Or dramatic events, like the attacks on September 11, 2001, can immediately accelerate work on a whole set of issues.

Once again, this is a matter of perspective. Think back to the story in chapter 3 about Amanda and Brian, in which Amanda’s intervention went nowhere and Brian’s almost identical comment, made a little while later, engaged the attention of the people at the meeting. You probably have had a similar experience, raising an issue in a meeting and having it fall on deaf ears, only to see the same issue come up again later and dominate the conversation. Though the process may confuse you and generate dismay, notice the outcome: The issue became ripe.

The history of the civil rights movement in America provides a powerful illustration at the national level. By 1965, after ten years of demonstrations, the civil rights movement had succeeded in creating national demand for civil rights legislation. They had ripened the issue by using demonstrations to draw attention to the unlived values in America. Yet in many parts of the South, black people still could not vote. In spite of the historic 1964 Civil Rights Act, the issue of voting rights had not yet ripened. The 1964 legislation had avoided the issue intentionally—it was one thing to let black people onto white buses and into white restaurants and bathrooms, but quite another to give black people access to power.

The men and women who allowed themselves to be beaten by Alabama policemen in the 1965 voting rights marches in Selma ripened the issue, not only because they built upon previous progress, but also because they illustrated the problem of racial injustice clearly and dramatically. By keeping the demonstrations peaceful, no one could turn this into a law-and-order issue. The organizers made sure the television cameras were capturing scenes for the American audience, and the demonstrations themselves showed the problem’s central stakeholders playing their roles: black adults who were of voting age and white officials standing in their way. Having galvanized widespread political will, the demonstrations cleared the way for President Lyndon Johnson, who quickly seized the opportunity to send before Congress what soon became the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In the United States, drug abuse surfaced as a ripe issue during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Global warming, poverty, and health care did not. Health care surfaced briefly in 1993–1994, but the new Clinton administration formulated a solution that was so far beyond any prevailing conception of the problem that it never stood a chance. Yet Clinton’s massive initiative did sow the seeds for future steps. Several years later, pieces of the issue—the plight of uninsured children, the high cost of prescription drugs for seniors, and accessibility for all—began to gain momentum.

What determines when, or whether, an issue becomes ripe? How does it take on a generalized urgency shared by not just one but many factions within the community? Although there are many factors, we have identified four key questions: What other concerns occupy the people who need to be engaged? How deeply are people affected by the problem? How much do people need to learn? And what are the senior authority figures saying about the issue?

First, what else is on people’s minds? If most of the people in your organization are handling a crisis, you may have greater difficulty getting them to shift their attention to the issue you think is most important. Sometimes you can get a better hearing by postponing your issue to a later time. During the Persian Gulf War in early 1991, the attention of many nations in the world focused on the Middle East. In these nations, issues other than the Middle East could not compete for popular attention. No other problems were going to be seriously addressed. In contrast, at the same time, within the former Soviet Union, the stirrings of a capitalist economy began to raise expectations. A growing discontent would threaten the fledgling capitalist economy if the Soviets could not meet the expectations of citizens to provide basic commodities at reasonable prices. Yet because of the Gulf Crisis, you would have found it extraordinarily difficult to get a serious hearing in the NATO countries for the predicament of the Soviets. And conversely, because of the economic crisis in the former Soviet Union, you would have found it extraordinarily difficult to get the Soviet people to concern themselves with peace in the Middle East.

Sometimes, you have to hold steady and watch for the opportunity. However, if you notice that there is never a time for your issue, you may have to create the opportunity by developing a strategy for generating urgency. When Lyndon Johnson told Martin Luther King, Jr., after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act that he would have to wait years before anyone would be ready to act on voting rights, King replied that black people had waited too long already, and that he would begin marching in Selma the following January. Johnson advised against it, but told King that if he and the organizers could raise public urgency, Johnson would use the presidency to seize the moment, which he did.²

Second, how deeply are people affected by the problem? If people do not feel the pinch of reality, they are unlikely to feel the need to change. Why should they? Sometimes, fortuitous events ripen an issue by heightening the severity of a problem. Used properly, a crisis can provide a teaching moment.

For example, when President Richard Nixon and Postmaster General Winton Blount tried in 1969 to reverse two hundred years of political patronage at the U.S. Post Office by turning it into a government corporation, few people cared enough about the issue to support such massive reform. Post office patronage was close to the hearts of the members of Congress who, after all, were going to have to vote on the proposal. But members of Congress were hearing from every postal employee in their district about the need for a pay raise, and very little from anyone at home about the need for reorganization.

A wildcat walkout of postal workers in New York City, followed by a nationwide strike to demand a pay raise, changed all that. Most people, particularly businesspeople, felt an immediate and devastating impact. Millions of dollars were lost, important documents fell into limbo, and social security checks were delayed. There were threats of a court order and on March 23, 1970, Nixon threatened to send in the National Guard to deliver the mail. Bringing in the military had the effect of breaking the strike, and most postal workers were back on the job by March 25.

The postal strike became the number one news story throughout the country. It affected almost everyone. Because the public largely supported postal pay raises, the administration feared that the strike would actually set back reform efforts. What they had not anticipated was that the strike brought home to people just how dependent they were on a smoothly functioning postal service. Because the public had felt the effects of the mail’s disruption, the administration was able to pressure the unions to link the pay bill with union support for reform, and on August 6, 1970, the Congress sent a pay raise/reorganization package to the White House. Although the strike was not about the reorganization of the post office, the disruption in people’s lives made the issue of post office operation salient. People felt they had experienced the problem and, for the first time, wanted something done to ensure that delivery of the mail would be in the hands of capable professionals.³

Events ripened the issue of nuclear safety in 1978 when the reactors at Three Mile Island began to melt down. For many years, warnings about the danger of a nuclear energy plant meltdown had come only from marginalized interest groups long identified as antinuclear. Their claims were not taken seriously, and an energy-guzzling public eagerly accepted the assurances from government and industry that all was safe and well. After that frightening incident, the claims of the nuclear power industry regarding the safety of nuclear energy plants sounded very different than they had before (even though no deaths and apparently very little significant, long-term damage resulted from it). Coincidentally, the film The China Syndrome, a fictitious account of a nuclear power plant disaster, was released at the same time as the incident, ripening the issue further. Building nuclear power plants suddenly became highly problematic. The issue of safety versus the need for more energy had ripened. People began to face the trade-offs.

Third, how much must people learn in order to make judgments? The lack of knowledge on an issue is almost always in direct proportion to its lack of ripeness. A crisis can change this quickly. The risks of nuclear power were not well understood until the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Those incidents generated public learning in short order. On an even larger scale, the events of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath schooled the nation, and to a significant extent the world community, on the grave risks and potential consequences of terrorism, and the need for new international norms and cooperation. By contrast, global warming is an issue that is slowly, gradually impressing itself on the public consciousness. As weather patterns change and new trends emerge, affecting people’s lives, education increases and the issue develops. No doubt a teaching moment will develop in this area when we experience a string of catastrophic and weird weather events with losses of life and property.

Because crises and tragedies generate the urgency to tackle issues, sometimes the only way to bring focus to an issue and move it forward is to create a crisis. These can be small, like budget crises, which are often available to draw attention to the need to reevaluate priorities and direction. Or they can be large. Martin Luther King, Jr., lived in constant fear for his life, but in Selma he deliberately created a situation that was almost certain to result in violence. He knew he was putting not only his own life at risk, but many other lives as well. The marchers understood the dangers, to be sure, but that did not make King’s decision any easier, particularly when three people were killed.

If you do not take into consideration how difficult the learning will be, the organization or community will box you off as an outcast, impractical visionary, or worse. You may have to take baby steps. It may take years to ripen the issue in an organization to the point that people understand what is at stake and can decide their fate. As we saw in chapter 1, the IBM corporate culture of 1994 did not recognize the new challenge of business on the internet. At that time, IBM operated from a full agenda that had no place for dealing with it. People were busy with other things. So it was up to engineer Grossman, middle manager Patrick, and other volunteers with little authority to ripen the issues in baby steps over a five-year period.

Fourth, what are the people in authority saying and doing? Although the rhetoric and even the commitment of authorities often are not enough by themselves to ripen an issue, they always figure significantly. Formal authority confers license and leverage to direct people’s attention.

Notice an important distinction between the U.S. Post Office reorganization and Selma. With the post office, the Nixon administration took advantage of a tangential event to focus attention on an issue and thus make it ripe for political action. But in Selma, King took the initiative himself to ripen the issue. Worse than lacking authority, King had to challenge authorities across the nation—first the Alabama police, then the federal court, and finally the Congress. The less ready a group is to resolve an issue, the more you may need to challenge authority.

Of course, King also had a major ally among the nation’s authorities, namely Lyndon Johnson, the president. So you might ask, “Shouldn’t the president have just taken the lead and persuaded Congress it was wrong to keep black people from voting?” After all, people expect their authorities to persuade people to do what they should do. Furthermore, society has formal rules and procedures for authorities to take charge. The person running the meeting prepares an agenda. The president gives a State of the Union message. The head of the labor union proposes a set of target goals for the upcoming negotiation.

If you are the person in authority, you are not only expected to set the agenda, but also to select the issues that warrant attention. You cannot keep your authority in your organization if you insist on projects that your organization opposes. In other words, those who have authority put it at risk by seeking to raise unripe issues. For example, while jogging before dawn during his first week in the White House in 1993, Bill Clinton felt cornered by reporters to comment on “gays in the military.” By taking a stand long before the public, Congress, or the military had had the chance to work through this issue, Clinton inadvertently became a lightning rod and created a spectacle. Forced to expend an enormous amount of energy on developing and defending his position, he sacrificed a significant measure of the credibility and goodwill he needed to establish other priorities and launch his presidency.

In contrast, Lyndon Johnson approached civil rights strategically. He did not move out front to take a stand. Instead, he helped other people ripen the issue so that his hands were free to orchestrate the ensuing conflict. For example, to gain enough Republican votes to end a filibuster by Southern Democrats on the 1964 Civil Rights Bill, Johnson personally prodded Roy Wilkins and other civil rights leaders to woo Senator Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader, with the possibility of black electoral support in the coming presidential election and beyond. Johnson was in no way authorized to be a behind-the-scenes civil rights strategist, advising activists on techniques for winning Republican support. If he had been exposed, he would have lost credibility. He went outside his authority, but he did so in a way that minimized the risk of undermining his position. He did not, for example, hold a press conference in which he declared the priority of civil rights. He helped others ripen the issue.

For people exercising leadership without or beyond their authority, ripening an issue becomes more difficult, requiring more dramatic and therefore riskier steps. For example, in a meeting for which the chairperson has set the agenda, you decide that your best chance for drawing attention to an important issue is to put yourself forward and change the course of the meeting. When the time for new business comes, you stand up and start to speak. At that moment, you become the center of attention, a likely lightning rod for, and personal embodiment of, the issue. Parties on different sides of the issue will perceive you as a threat, upsetting the status quo. Some will likely move to restore equilibrium by finding a way to silence your voice, perhaps by criticizing your style or noting that the meeting is running late. Perhaps they will look to authority to fend off the challenge. But if you hold steady, taking the immediate heat and keeping your intervention short and clear, your odds of success increase. Your position may be heard and people may respect you for putting yourself on the line. If you back down quickly, you merely reinforce your lack of credibility.

Focus Attention on the Issue

Getting people to focus their attention on tough problems can be a complicated and difficult task, particularly in large organizations or communities where, typically, ways of avoiding painful issues—work avoidance mechanisms—have developed over many years. The most obvious example of work avoidance is denial. Even our language is full of shorthand reminders of this mechanism: “out of sight, out of mind;” “swept under the carpet;” “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Other typical work avoidance mechanisms are seeking a Big Man to fix things, scapegoating, reorganizing (yet again), passing the buck (setting up another committee), finding an external enemy, blaming authority, character assassination, and physical assassination. Actual physical assassination usually represents an extreme act of work avoidance.

These mechanisms reduce the level of distress in an organization or community by deflecting attention from the tough issues and shifting responsibility away from the people who need to change. In leading, you need to hold steady in the face of these distractions, counteract them, and then redirect attention and responsibility to the issue at hand. In an important sense, this book is about sensing and counteracting work avoidance mechanisms that will endanger you and your organization.

Again, a person in authority can more easily redirect attention than someone lower on the ladder. Typically, authority figures have established mechanisms for focusing attention: calling a meeting, sending a memo, holding a press conference. However, these methods do not always succeed. If you employ a routine mechanism for getting attention, people may well see the problem as routine and ignore it. So even with authority, you need to find creative ways to signal that the new situation is different.

When John Lehman became secretary of the Navy in 1981, he faced the very big challenge of reasserting the Navy’s control over its major contractors, including General Dynamics and its subsidiary Electric Boat, which built Navy submarines.⁴ Electric Boat had not delivered any of the ships promised in 1980, and the company was incurring huge cost overruns, which it wanted the Navy to absorb. This was both a money issue and a production issue for Lehman, who had made creating a 600-ship Navy the key goal of his tenure. He needed General Dynamics to back off on its financial claims and to dramatically speed up its work, and he knew that neither would happen without putting some pressure on the company.

Initially, Lehman used conventional strategies to try to focus the attention of key parties on the issue. He sent a vice admiral to testify at a congressional hearing. He called David Lewis, the CEO of General Dynamics, to the Pentagon and told him he was canceling a request for bids on new attack submarines and negotiating sole source contracts with Lewis’s only competitor. Intent on avoiding responsibility for its delays and cost overruns, General Dynamics counterattacked in predictable fashion, revving up support from its favorite senators and representatives. These included the late John Chafee (R-RI), himself a former Navy secretary, whose state of Rhode Island reaped significant economic benefits from the presence of Electric Boat in Groton, Connecticut, close to the Rhode Island border. Chafee dragged Lehman out to Groton and forced Lehman to speak in a more conciliatory tone lest he alienate a key senatorial ally.

Back and forth it went throughout most of the spring and summer. There were meetings, reports, threats, and counterthreats, most of them reported in the press. Lehman seemed to vacillate, sounding critical, offering an olive branch, and then taking it away. Lewis and Lehman were engaged in an elaborate chess game, in which they both followed the rulebook fairly closely. But then, in early August, Lewis went over Lehman’s head to see presidential counselor Edwin Meese III in the White House in an effort to get Lehman to back off. Lehman realized that unless he did something dramatic, he was in danger of losing the issue. Rather than continue the back and forth pattern of press conferences, meetings, and leaked memos and reports that had characterized the past six months, Lehman decided to make a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. The Press Club was a venue that would ensure broad coverage, forcing all the relevant players—General Dynamics, the White House, Congress—to take definitive steps. For the same reason, the move was extremely risky, putting his credibility squarely on the line. If he did not have enough support within the White House, the Congress, and interest groups, his strategy could backfire, resulting in a solution that would set back his objectives and undermine his tenure.

The Press Club speech was a major departure from routine. Ordinarily, someone in Lehman’s position might never give an address there. The coverage of the speech, which Lehman followed up with an op-ed synopsis in the Washington Post, forced all those involved to put the issue at the top of their agendas. For the first time since he had begun to engage the company, everyone’s attention began to sharpen. A week after the speech, Lehman and Lewis had an intense and difficult meeting that led, a month later, to an agreement between the Navy and General Dynamics, capping the government’s financial exposure and tying Electric Boat to clear performance measures in return for more work.

In a more routine way of signaling the nonroutine, the senior management at Xerox Corporation drew attention in the early 1990s to the enormous challenge of becoming a customer-responsive organization by holding a series of three-day retreats with their top managers. Moreover, in a period of cost containment, they hired an expensive consultant who could make the case for the need to change cultural norms. At that time, the Xerox frontline sales and service personnel had no latitude whatsoever to respond creatively and quickly to the needs of customers. Instead, they were expected to follow the rulebook, even if it meant angering clients needlessly. People down the line were controlled rather than entrusted.

It would have been easy for senior management to pull people together at corporate headquarters, where they interacted regularly anyway. But doing so would have signaled that the message was nothing out of the ordinary. By meeting off-site, with presentations and discussions orchestrated by outsiders who had spent months interviewing and assessing the company, they generated seriousness and new focus for the company’s adaptive work.

If you are not in a position of authority, drawing attention entails risks as well as greater challenges. You might form alliances with people who have more authority and can direct attention to the issues you see. For example, at IBM, Grossman luckily found Patrick, who had far greater authority and credibility with which to draw companywide attention to the internet challenge, and in ways less provocative than barging alone into Armonk Headquarters.

To get the attention of higher-ups, chances are you will need to escalate your behavior or rhetoric to a level that creates some personal risk. For example, you might generate a story in the press. Leaking a story to a reporter might be effective in focusing people on your issue, but will likely be considered an act of institutional disloyalty if you are discovered. Rising to ask a CEO a provocative question at a companywide picnic will surely get attention, but it may well be focused exclusively on you and not the issue. Your impertinence could even cost you your job, or at least cause some of your colleagues to put themselves at a safe distance from you.

A friend told us of a situation in which her lack of authority seemed to her an insurmountable barrier in mobilizing people to focus on an important issue. She had been at a meeting of the senior management team of a small company when a new department head asked what seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. The CEO responded with an outburst, attacking the idea as “the most stupid thing I have ever heard.” This stunned everyone, and the question was dropped. The meeting deteriorated, as everyone else felt silenced. She realized that a nerve had been touched and some unspoken issue had surfaced, but she felt unable to pursue it in her role as just another member of the group. She also realized that the department head’s appropriate and important question would not be addressed. She discovered later that the issue underlying the CEO’s outburst was his hope that the new department head would relieve him of some of his responsibilities. He felt stretched too thin. He took the question as a deeply frustrating signal that the new colleague was not experienced or knowledgeable enough to help him out.

Could our friend have intervened in that situation without putting herself at risk? Could she have put the department head’s question back on the table? More critically, could she have helped the CEO and the group address the issue of the overburdened CEO and the need for more talent? How could she have refocused the attention of the group?

A few possibilities: She might have waited a short while and then asked the question again, in a different way. She might have offered the observation that the CEO’s strong response seemed disproportionate to the question, or she could even have asked him why he felt that way. Perhaps after the tenor of the meeting changed, she could simply have stated what everyone knew to be true, that something was getting in the way of being productive.

Getting a group to focus on a tough issue from a position without authority is always risky business. But you can lower the danger by speaking in as neutral a way as possible, simply reporting observable and shared data rather than making more provocative interpretations. It may be more than enough simply to ask a straightforward question in order to bring the underlying issue to the surface.

When you are operating beyond your authority, you tread a thin line between acting out of role such that people will notice, and being so extreme that your issue (and perhaps you) will be dismissed. The late Silvio Conte, a U.S. congressman from Massachusetts, once took the microphone in the House of Representatives wearing a pig mask to debate a budget bill that he thought contained a lot of “pork.” As a member of the minority party, Conte had little hope of mustering the votes to eliminate the items he questioned. Most members wanted to avoid focusing on the merits of his issue. He risked drawing attack and ridicule, professionally and publicly. But he also struck a responsive chord and got the attention of reporters and key colleagues—which led to some changes in the budget.

Once again, Martin Luther King, Jr., provides an example of the gambles of provocation. In the early days of the civil rights movement, without the authority to require the nation to address racial injustice, he engaged extensively in demonstrations and nonviolent civil disobedience. Although he did not know for certain that there would be violence along the way, he knew that if he kept it up long enough there would likely be trouble. All King could do was make sure that if violence did occur, the media would be there. When Sheriff Bull Conner brought out the attack dogs, King had a national audience. Once he had people’s attention, King did not have to be so provocative. He began to have moral authority, and as his authority grew, he had a wider spectrum of attention-getting devices at his disposal. In 1963 it was numbers, not violence, that focused the nation on civil rights, when 240,000 marched with him in Washington, DC, and heard him say, “I have a dream.”

. . .

Undoubtedly, you have experienced and observed the pressure on you to back off when you point to difficult, conflictive, value-laden issues in an organization or community. Although hard to do, holding steady allows you to accomplish several things at once. By taking the heat, you can maintain a productive level of disequilibrium, or creative tension, as people bear the weight of responsibility for working their conflicts. By holding steady, you also give yourself time to let issues ripen, or conversely to construct a strategy to ripen an issue for which there is not yet any generalized urgency. Moreover, you give yourself time to find out where people are so that you can refocus attention on the key issues.

Holding steady under a barrage of criticism is not just a matter of courage; it also involves skill. In part two of this book, we have suggested a series of approaches to keep your bearings when you are under fire. For example, getting to the balcony, finding partners, adjusting the thermostat, pacing the work, making your interventions unambiguous and timely, bringing attention back to the issue, and showing the relevant communities a different future than the ones they imagine are all methods of dealing with the disequilibrium that you generate. In addition to these ways of assessing and taking action, however, we suggest a series of perspectives and practices that address the personal challenges of sustaining the stresses of leadership. We explore these in part three.