Adaptive Leadership: The Heifetz Collection (3 Items)

Act Politically 143

you are seeking to address. First, you need to prepare them for the dise-

quilibrium you are going to generate in the organization. Second, once

the disequilibrium sets in, you must “read” them for signals suggesting

how much heat the organization can stand.

In those consulting engagements in which we are asked to work pri-

marily with people one or two levels below the CEO and executive

team, we have learned to interact first with those top-level authority

figures. At the very least, we describe to them the pushback they can

expect to experience once the intervention rolls into action. And we try

to give them a taste of what that pushback may look like at its worst

(complaints of confusion, conflict, or urging that we be fired after ...