Blog by Shoshana Boyd Gelfand, Director at JHub and speaker at Clore Social residential – May 2016

"She has issues with authority."

That’s what my second grade teacher told my parents after I led my classmates in a minor mutiny around lack of snack choices. My parents weren’t sure whether to be delighted at my leadership potential or terrified that I was going to get kicked out of primary school for challenging authority!

Many social activists experience similar issues around authority because creating social change fundamentally involves pushing up against the boundaries of established structures and ways of doing things. But that doesn’t mean authority is negative or evil. On the contrary, authority is a crucial force which leaders can mobilize for good.

There are even times when authority is exactly what is needed to solve a complex technical challenge. When an army needs to capture a position or when a surgeon needs to excise a cancer, it is wise to entrust the regiment or the operating room to a competent authority figure who has the know-how to fix the immediate problem. In situations which are not technical, however, authority will rarely be sufficient to produce the necessary change. So when a society needs to ask what issues are worth going to war over, or a person needs to stop smoking in order to preserve their health, something beyond an expert authority figure is needed. That something is leadership.

In his seminal work, Leading without Easy Answers, Ronald Heifetz defines leadership as "mobilizing people to do adaptive work." Unlike technical challenges, which require expertise and can be addressed with authority alone, adaptive work happens with new situations which challenge a group's established beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. Leading a group through an adaptive challenge requires engaging them in finding a way forward as opposed to telling them what to do. So while authority figures can often be successful at solving technical problems and maintaining stability, leaders doing adaptive work will need to use other tools - such as raising challenges constructively and creating healthy disequilibrium within a system. That disequilibrium is what provides the necessary momentum for people to examine and alter their values, attitudes and behaviours. It is dangerous work - and often the person exercising this kind of leadership will not be a person who holds formal authority. That’s because the pressure on authority figures to maintain the status quo is huge - so huge that they often cannot lead change effectively.

But that doesn't mean that authority should be demonized. On the contrary, the most effective results can arise from an alliance, often implicit, between those in authority positions (e.g. an elected official) and those leading without authority (e.g. a social activist). A clever authority figure will therefore use the disruption caused by an activist as a catalyst to help stakeholders examine their values and behaviours and create systemic change.

So don’t knock authority. It’s a necessary and useful tool in our leadership toolkit. Whether applied to a second grade snack time revolution or the Middle East crisis, we would benefit from creating alliances between those in positions of authority and activists who can serve as catalysts for social change.

For more on adaptive leadership, watch this video interview with Ronald Heifetz.

Blog by Emily Sun: Catalysing and Leading Change short course facilitator and HR specialist.

I’m certainly not the first to write that the UK’s social sector is facing significant and disruptive challenges: decreases in public funding sources, increased pressure to deliver measurable outcomes and results, and an unprecedented knock in the public’s trust in the sector as a whole. The demands on leaders within the sector are greater than ever, and the ability to lead change effectively is becoming an increasingly critical skill.

Here are three things to consider when leading change:

1) 'Yesterday I was clever and tried to change the world; today I am wise and am changing myself.' - Rumi, 13th century Persian poet.
We often focus a great deal of our energies on the processes, systems or tasks that need to be changed, and not enough on the attitudes, values and mind-sets that underlie these behaviours that need to adapt to the new context. Before we can even begin to influence others’ attitudes and behaviours, we need to start with an understanding and awareness of our own conduct to understand how it might affect the change we would like to see happen. This is where honest introspection and some candid feedback from those who know us well can be invaluable.

2) Solve problems by focusing on what’s going well.
It’s human nature to zero-in on problems and all the things we feel aren’t right or good enough. An approach called Appreciative Inquiry developed by David Cooperrider of Case Western Reserve University, encourages us to look for success stories within our own teams and organisations. It is based on a powerful assumption that building on strengths brings better results and is much more motivating than focusing too much on weaknesses and failures.

3) 'People do not resist change; people resist being changed.' – Richard Beckhard, organisational change pioneer.
We often think that if a necessary change makes a lot of sense to us, that all other rational beings will also clearly understand the need and benefits of the change we’d like to make. Leaders can underestimate the degree to which we react to change through our emotions, rather than our rational, logical selves. No matter how beneficial a change may be to the future of an organisation, if we perceive it as having a negative impact on our status, sense of control, certainty or fairness, we aren’t going to warm to it very quickly. This doesn’t mean of course that we shouldn’t go ahead with the change; it’s just that if we want to bring the rest of the organisation with us in this change, we will need to be very mindful of the impact it will have on people affected and how best to engage them positively.

In light of these considerations, those working in the social sector who deal with organisational change may want to further develop their skills by attending the short course I am delivering for Clore Social Leadership.

Find out more by visiting here and call 020 7812 3770 to book.