Heifetz and Laurie (1997) say that vision is not the answer. They say that the senior executive needs to alter his or her approach to match the needs of 21st century organizations. They say that what is needed is adaptive leadership. This is about challenging people, taking them out of their comfort zones, letting people feel external pressure and exposing conflict.
‘Followers want comfort and stability, and solutions from their leaders. But that’s babysitting. Real leaders ask hard questions and knock people out of their comfort zones. Then they manage the resulting distress.’ They believe the call for vision and inspiration is counter-productive and encourages dependency from employees.
There is a difference between the type of leadership needed to solve a routine technical problem and the type of leadership needed to enable complex organizational change. Leaders of change should concentrate on scanning the environment, and drawing people’s attention to the complex adaptive challenges that the organization needs to address, such as culture changes, or changes in core processes. This means not solving the problems for people, but giving the work back to them. It also means not protecting people from bad news and difficulty, but allowing them to feel the distress of things not working well. These ideas are quite a long way from the concept of transformational leadership mentioned above, which indicates that successful leaders are charismatic, visionary and inspirational.