Take the Work off Your Shoulders

When Marty worked on personnel issues in the office of Massachusetts governor William Weld, he often found himself in the position of trying to resolve a conflict between two senior state employees before it hit the newspapers or the evening news. Typically he would call the protagonists into his office to hash out their differences. He took some useful survival lessons from that experience.

First, the people involved usually framed the conflict quite inaccurately, attributing the problem to personality or stylistic differences. Marty would interview them and listen to their separate versions of the story. Most of the time, more was going on than met the eye: The differences they described were not superficial or merely technical but, instead, represented underlying value choices, either individual or organizational. “Personality conflicts” turned out frequently to mask a fundamental conflict in the division of responsibilities, the primacy of cultural values, or even in the vision for the agency. Not surprisingly, the protagonists shied away from addressing the deeper, more difficult issues affecting their working relationship. Second, they looked to him to resolve the problem. Sometimes the only thing they could agree on was to hand the issue over to Marty, saying, “Look, we’ll do whatever the governor’s office wants us to do here. Just tell us which way you want us to go.” A tempting proposition. He could truncate an uncomfortable, tense meeting, put the immediate crisis to rest, and avert a publicly embarrassing story. And if he chose the alternative, attempting to deal with a deeper, more intractable problem, it would take more time and energy than any of them preferred to expend. Sometimes he took the easy way.

Marty discovered that taking the easy way usually resulted in two consequences, neither of which served his or the governor’s purposes. First, the underlying issue would inevitably rise again, sometimes in a less controllable form, because it had never been put to rest. Instead, it festered, particularly if the protagonists represented significant factions within the organization. Second, by assuming responsibility for resolving the issue, Marty turned it into his issue, or the governor’s, or both. Whenever a senior authority in an organization resolves a hot issue, that person’s position becomes the story. Winners and losers are created simply by virtue of authority, and no learning takes place. And because the person with authority has taken sides, that authority may later be in jeopardy if the “winning” position on the issue no longer receives adequate support in the organization. Marty created trouble for himself and undermined his own credibility on those occasions when he resolved the issue and, later on, the person or position he chose fell out of favor.

Return to 1994, the NBA (National Basketball Association) Eastern Conference finals.¹ The New York Knicks are facing the Chicago Bulls in a best-of-seven series. Chicago is trying desperately to show that they are more than a one-man team, that they can win without Michael Jordan, who had retired at the end of the previous season (his first retirement). The Knicks have won the first two games, played at Madison Square Garden. Now they are back in Chicago. The score is tied at 102, with only 1.8 seconds left in the game. The Bulls cannot afford to go down 0–3 in the series. Chicago has the ball and they call a time-out to plan a final shot. The players huddle around Coach Phil Jackson, already considered one of the best professional basketball coaches of this or any other era. The discussion is animated, perhaps even heated. Jackson’s play calls for Scottie Pippen, the Bulls’ number one star now that Michael Jordan has retired, to inbound the ball to Toni Kukoc for the final shot. Kukoc is the only person on the team who could challenge Pippen’s status as the new, post-Jordan first among equals. Pippen is angry that he was not selected to take the final, critical shot and is heard mumbling “bullshit” under his breath as the huddle breaks. Jackson says something to Pippen and then turns his attention back to the floor. Then he notices Pippen sitting down at the far end of the bench. Jackson asks him whether he’s in or out. “I’m out,” Pippen responds, thus committing a dramatic and rare act of insubordination in organized sports: refusing the coach’s direction to enter the game. With only four players on the floor, Jackson has to quickly call another time-out to prevent a penalty. He inserts a reserve player, an excellent passer named Pete Myers. Myers tosses a perfect pass to Kukoc. Kukoc spins around and sinks a miraculous shot to win the game. The Bulls are alive, but the euphoria of the win dissipates quickly in the wake of Pippen’s action.

The Bulls make their way back to their dressing room. Jackson enters the room. The air is thick. What will he do? Punish Pippen? Pretend the whole thing never happened? Make Pippen apologize? All eyes are on him.

As Jackson is trying to decide what to do, he hears the veteran center Bill Cartwright gasping, overcome with the emotion of the moment. Finally, everyone on the team has reassembled there in the dark, dank room (Jackson describes it as smelling like an “old, forgotten gym bag”), and the coach looks around, making eye contact with the players. Then he says, “What happened has hurt us. Now you have to work this out.”

Silence and surprise pervade the locker room. Then Cartwright makes an unusually emotional appeal to Pippen. “Look Scottie,” Jackson quotes him as saying, “that was bullshit. After all we’ve been through on this team. This is our chance to do it on our own, without Michael, and you blow it with your selfishness. I’ve never been so disappointed in my whole life.” Cartwright, known for his quiet stoicism and invulnerability, was crying. Jackson left the room and the team talked.

Jackson knew that if he took action and resolved the issue, he would have made Pippen’s behavior a question of insubordination, a matter between coach and player. But he understood that a deeper issue lay at the heart of the incident. This moment had reflected something about the relationship among the members of the team. What did they owe to each other? What was their responsibility to each other? Where was the trust? The issue rested with them, not him, and only they could put it behind them.

By not taking the conflict on his own shoulders, by externalizing it and putting it back on the players, Jackson located the issue in the only place where it could be resolved, in the team itself. It did not matter what they decided at that moment; what mattered was that they and not Jackson were doing the deciding. Jackson said later when complimented about the way he handled the situation, “All I did was to step back and let the team come up with its own solution.” With all eyes on him, Jackson got to the balcony and saw that any intervention by him might solve the immediate crisis but would leave the underlying issues unattended.

We know from our own mistakes how difficult it is to externalize the issue, to resist the temptation to take it on ourselves. People expect you to get right in there and fix things, to take a stand and resolve the problem. After all, that is what people in authority are paid to do. When you fulfill their expectations, they will call you admirable and courageous, and this is flattering. But challenging their expectations of you requires even more courage.

Place the Work Where It Belongs

To build new adaptive capacity, people must change their hearts as well as their behaviors. The Phil Jackson story illustrates that solutions are achieved when “the people with the problem” go through a process together to become “the people with the solution.” The issues have to be internalized, owned, and ultimately resolved by the relevant parties to achieve enduring progress. Jackson had to locate the conflict and place the issue where it belonged.

A boundary of authority separates team and coach, and individual boundaries separate each teammate. But the boundaries between close-knit teammates can be more easily crossed over than boundaries that delineate authority or divide highly divergent factions, teams, or parties. Someone within the team could address the impact of Pippen’s action on the team more compellingly than someone from outside. Jackson situated the issue, placing it within the group and not between the group and some outside arbitrator. He left a crucial boundary intact, knowing that the most effective work could only be done within the Bulls team “family.”

So, taking the work off your own shoulders is necessary but not sufficient. You must also put it in the right place, where it can be addressed by the relevant parties. Sometimes this is within one faction; other times this means getting different factions within the organization to work on the problem together. When those senior officials tried to impose their adaptive work on Marty, his response should have been to push it back on them. In taking on their problems, he also accepted all the risk. Better to agree to endorse whatever resolution the contending parties choose. At those times when he did place the work, Marty found that the resolution was often sustainable, and that the problem was more likely to go away without backfiring. Even if this resolution differed from the one he would have fashioned, or even the one he thought was the best available, the outcome was better (and much safer for him) when he let the people involved determine their own resolution.

Placing the conflict in the right location is not a function or an opportunity that is the sole preserve of those in authority. Ricardo Sanchez (whose story appears in chapter 5) understood this. When he first entered the Macael community, and with the local mayor leading the way, Sanchez spent two days visiting marble production firms and listening to the small-business representatives talk about their issues. He then had the mayor call a meeting of the senior people from both the local employers association and the trade unions. He told them that he understood the problems, but that a solution was not self-evident. Faced with the question of how he could get them to think about collaboration rather than autonomy—without being shown the door—he decided to make a dramatic process intervention. He told them that they needed an action plan, one they would have to develop themselves. IPIA would serve as coordinator, not as author of the plan, and would help mobilize the resources needed to implement it. He placed the work within the community. He was not going to become the person embodying that plan if they refused to collaborate.

Then came the radical part of his strategy. He said that he would walk away from Macael then and there if they did not immediately decide to proceed as he suggested by a unanimous vote. Furthermore, he would guarantee his and IPIA’s help only if every element of the plan were also approved unanimously. By creating that threshold for his ongoing involvement, he forced the stakeholders to focus on the underlying difficult question: Would they be willing to work collaboratively at the expense of their treasured autonomy? Once they passed that difficult first vote, they would have already begun the process of figuring out how to work together.

Kelly worked as an academic administrator in Colorado and participated actively in the Denver civic and political community. After an eight-year tenure, she left her job as a staff member for the Denver City Council. Friends on the council asked her to be a candidate for appointment by the Council to the Denver Civil Service Commission. She agreed, enthusiastically. But when the retiring incumbent decided to seek one more two-year term, she withdrew her candidacy. The incumbent suggested that she would be an ideal successor two years hence. Two years later she was again approached about her interest in the appointment and agreed to have her name submitted. Once again the incumbent decided to seek reappointment. This time Kelly decided to stay in the game and let the council decide what to do.

With the appointment pending, a newspaper story detailed how the Civil Service Commission had approved the hiring of a police recruit with an extensive history of drug use, domestic violence, and theft from an employer. The ensuing crisis put the commission on the defensive. The media and some self-styled reformers called for change. The brouhaha transformed Kelly’s pending appointment into a symbol of reform on the commission, even though it was uncertain which way the incumbent had voted on the approval of the recruit.

For an entire week, the newspapers and radio talk shows focused on some aspect of the story. Kelly figured prominently in all the stories, but only through comments from others about her. Reporters called her. They pressed her to comment on her vision for the commission and her views on the approved appointment of the recruit. She wanted to define herself and felt flattered to be thought of as a force for reform. Moreover, she had a hard time restraining herself from responding to the personal criticisms she received from those who defended the recruit or who favored the reappointment of the incumbent to the commission. But Kelly stayed quiet. She declined to be interviewed and refused to take part in discussions on talk radio.

Eventually, the Council appointed Kelly by a 7–4 vote. She survived because she resisted the temptation to collude with those who wanted to make her a symbol of reform. Otherwise, she would have cast the incumbent negatively and would have created sympathy for him among the council members who had served with him and considered him a friend and colleague. Kelly even held back from responding to public criticism, because that would have made her, personally, a larger part of the story. She tried hard to separate herself from the issue by refusing to take a public position on the hiring of the recruit, even though she had a clear viewpoint on the matter. By staying outside the fray, she kept the dispute as external to her as she could, and kept it located within the commission itself, where it belonged. This increased her chances of winning the appointment and allowed her greater flexibility once she came aboard.

It’s a common ploy to personalize the debate over issues as a strategy for taking you out of action. You want to respond when you are attacked or, in Kelly’s case, set up to be the attacker. You want to leap into the fray when you are mischaracterized or pigeonholed as embodying someone else’s issues. But by resisting attempts to personalize the issues, perhaps by fighting the urge to explain yourself, you can improve the odds of your survival. You prevent people from turning you into the issue, and you help keep the responsibility for the work where it ought to be.

Marty received the first, most powerful, and most painful lesson on placing the issue in the right location early in his professional life. He was fresh out of law school. His friend and mentor Elliot Richardson had been elected lieutenant governor and hired him to be the research and legislative assistant on his small, five-person staff. One day, about three months into the job, Richardson asked Marty to do some research on an issue now long forgotten. Marty did the work and later that week turned in a memo. A couple of hours later it came back to him. Richardson had not written a word on it, not even a pencil mark, nothing to show that he had even looked at it. Marty assumed it had come back by mistake and returned it to Richardson’s secretary, asking her to send it to him again. Before he had returned to his desk a short distance away, Marty’s intercom was buzzing. “Come in here,” Richardson said. The boss didn’t sound happy.

Marty found Richardson formidable even when he was in a good mood; an angry Richardson completely intimidated him. When Marty entered the inner sanctum, he saw Richardson’s jaw set firmly. He knew he was in for a lecture.

“Is this your best work?” Richardson asked.

“I dunno,” Marty mumbled.

“Well, I don’t think it is. I can only add about 5 percent on your best work. It’s a waste of my time to have to add more than that. So don’t send it back in until it’s the best you can produce.”

Richardson located the issue right where it ought to have been, squarely on Marty’s shoulders. He did not take it up himself, even though it would not have taken much time or effort to fix the memo. That would have been a technical solution to an adaptive problem: how to get his new, young staff person to work at a higher level. Both the critical factions existed within Marty himself: the faction that wanted to do the very best work and the faction (which too often won out) that was happy to settle for something perfectly OK, but less than the best he could do.

The worst-case scenario in assuming the conflicts and adaptive work of other people occurs when you place yourself directly in the line of fire. That’s what happened to Mark Willes at the Times Mirror Company.

After a successful tenure as vice chairman of General Mills, the giant food and cereal conglomerate, Mark Willes became CEO of Times Mirror on June 1, 1995. His goals were to cut losses, increase profitability, and raise the price of the company’s stock. In fairly short order, he presided over the closing of the Baltimore Evening Sun, closed New York Newsday, sold off the company’s legal and medical publishing operations, got rid of some cable operations, and in the process fired over 2,000 Times Mirror employees, all of which earned him the nickname “Cereal Killer.” With the newly found cash, however, he was able to buy back stock, boosting share price, and then buy some time from his board and from Wall Street.

Willes’s longer-term strategy focused primarily on the Los Angeles Times newspaper, the flagship property of the corporation. He named himself publisher of the paper in October 1997. He had ambitious, unconventional, and provocative plans, which he proclaimed at every opportunity, both within the newspaper and to national media. He intended to significantly boost readership at a time when dominant metropolitan newspapers around the country were cutting back on circulation because new readers were more expensive (in terms of print and distribution costs) than they were attractive to advertisers. He would attract these new readers by creating a separate Latino desk and by collaborating with small Los Angeles–based Latino and Asian newspapers. Willes ordered coverage that would have as its objective improving literacy among elementary school children so that they were more likely to become newspaper readers as adults. He even talked about, but never implemented, tying editors’ compensation to the number of times women and minorities were quoted in articles under their jurisdiction.

All of these steps challenged conventional journalistic values about the sanctity of the editorial product and its separation from commercial considerations. But the most radical idea, which he trumpeted loudly, was to blow apart the traditional thick wall that separated the news and business sides of the organization. In his initial and dramatic effort to cross this divide, he assigned a business-side person to each of the senior editors, with the goal of working together to increase profitability. He was trying to create a partnership between factions that had traditionally remained at arm’s length from each other in mutual suspicion, if not outright hostility.

Willes had gained some support for this objective from his board, from sales and marketing, and even from a few folks on the editorial side. But Willes was not a journalist, and he had never worked in a news organization. Everyone knew Willes was boss, but most people on the news side of the organization saw him as an outsider, trying to change a deeply held value within the newsroom. From their perspective, collaborating with the business side threatened their independence and integrity, and because it was Willes’s cause, they aimed their firepower at him, not at their colleagues in circulation and advertising.

The board had invested heavily in his strategy and its success. They backed him initially and Willes survived the first couple of skirmishes. He met with enormous criticism from both inside the Times newsroom and from national media watchers. Some industry people acknowledged that he was raising important issues and appropriately challenging previously unquestioned assumptions. However, Willes had clearly moved out on the limb alone, and people were watching him closely both inside and outside his own organization.

Having survived the initial attacks, in mid-1999 Willes turned the publisher’s job over to a protégé from outside the newspaper. The stock price had moved steadily upward and the board had rewarded him handsomely. Then, in the fall of that year, the Times made a deal to split the advertising revenue from a special edition of its Sunday magazine with the Staples Center, the new sports and convention facility that was the subject of the special issue. Such an arrangement was way outside conventional practices, and a firestorm of protest erupted inside the newsroom and from national newspaper-watchers. The editor assigned a respected reporter to do a lengthy investigation of how the deal came about, and the publisher had to make a very public apology to calm the waters. The criticism focused on whether the Staples Center deal was the inevitable result of Willes’s aggressive drive to smash the separation of news and advertising domains. The public critics included Otis Chandler, scion of the family that started the paper and Willes’s predecessor as CEO.

Less than six months later, Willes was out of a job. The Chandler family, which controlled the board, sold the company out from under him without even letting him know that negotiations were underway. Even though they had rewarded him when the stock rose, he didn’t realize how his strategy—or, more precisely, how he implemented his strategy—might make him expendable when the heat rose. Willes had allowed himself to become the issue. He never placed the issue of the relationship between the business and editorial sides of the organization in the newsroom. He never made collaboration with business employees a subject of debate among the news employees, forcing editors and reporters to come to grips with current realities, to question each other and explore their own conflicting assumptions. He did not even try to orchestrate the conflict between the news and business factions, in order to generate greater mutual understanding. As long as he was willing to take it all on himself, most people on both sides were happy to sit back and watch the war between him and the traditional journalists and see who would survive.

Make Your Interventions Short and Simple

Exercising leadership involves interventions. These need to be both strategic and tailored to the particular situation. Generally, short and straightforward interventions are more likely to be heard and to be accepted without causing dangerous resistance.

Four types of interventions constitute the tactics of leadership: making observations, asking questions, offering interpretations, and taking actions. In practice, they are often combined with one another. Which you choose will depend on your own skills, your particular purpose, and your assessment of which intervention is most likely to move the organization’s work forward and leave you unscarred. The interventions you make will of course be calculated to have different effects. Some are meant to calm and others to disrupt; some will attract attention and others deflect it. And there will always be unintended effects.

When Franklin Roosevelt said during the depth of the Depression, in his first inaugural address, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was making an interpretation of the emotional state of the nation and its paralyzed economy. He intended to calm the nation and, followed by an action-filled 100 days, he succeeded. On the other hand, in his famous “malaise” speech at the height of the 1979 oil crisis, Jimmy Carter said the nation was also suffering from a crisis of confidence. Carter was making an interpretation that the problems of the country lay in the attitudes of the people themselves. At first, he was very well received and his poll numbers jumped 11 percent. But two days later, he fired his entire cabinet. In facing both of these crises, the country needed their president to provide a strong holding environment, to be a rock of stability. If the people were going to take up his challenge, they needed to trust him. By firing his cabinet, Carter suggested he had no trust in his own administration. If he had no confidence, why should they? Carter then became the crisis.²