October 2003

Leadership in the Profession of Law

by Dan Leahy

To lead is to live dangerously because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear—their daily habits, tools, loyalties, and ways of thinking—with nothing more to offer perhaps than a possibility. Moreover, leadership often means exceeding the authority you are given to tackle the challenge at hand.

—Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002)

We live in challenging, some would even say dangerous, times. Arguably, some of our most respected professions are in crisis. Healthcare, education, accounting, and corporate management have all come under scrutiny for their apparent inability to provide the service expected, or to do so in an ethical manner. These professions are the mortar that makes community, the social contract itself, viable. Certainly, the law is fundamental to civilized order and behavior. But, in the current climate of crisis, the legal profession has also come under scrutiny. Areas of concern include:

A decline in professionalism exemplified by how lawyers interact with each other and how they interact with judges.
A low public opinion of lawyers and the legal profession
High levels of lawyer dissatisfaction as evidenced by alcoholism, drug use, and psychological issues.

Stress, disillusionment, anxiety, decline in ethical and professional standards—all currently threaten not only the profession of law, but numerous other professions. When the prevailing moral/ethical currents seem bent on eroding professional bedrock, we look to a different kind of leadership to reshape and rebuild. These are leaders who are capable of living dangerously in the face of difficult change, the kind reflected in the statement by Heifetz and Linsky that prefaces this article.

As the president of LIOS (Leadership Institute of Seattle), I have come to grasp —personally and theoretically—the powerful truth of Heifetz's concept of "dangerous" leadership. Out of that truth I have developed a repertoire of useful "tools" I can rely on to help me find my way as a leader in these complex times.

The first of these is a personal "compass" whose purpose is to orient me to my "true North" in those times where I am lost or bewildered within my surroundings. The name of this compass is integrity. It requires that I get clear about my "purpose on this planet," my sense of purpose or calling, and how well that purpose aligns with the purposes of those I serve. The degree to which those points of purpose line up is the degree to which I will be "on course" and in right relationships with my colleagues, my clients, and myself.

Next is my mental "map," a way both to make meaning out of my surroundings and to plot a course through to the desired destination. I have found the Ron Heifetz (faculty at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) and Marty Linsky (founding director of Harvard's Center for Public Leadership) model particularly useful in this area. As outlined in Leadership on the Line, they make an important distinction between leadership as a role and leadership as an activity. They point out that the role focuses on the individual that we authorize to fulfill certain functions, primarily to provide us, the followers, with direction, protection, and order. The activity of leadership focuses more on the process of mobilizing one's followers to face, rather than avoid, the difficult dilemmas they live with, an activity that often entails surfacing and re-evaluating the organizing values that guide our actions.

Heifetz and Linsky also distinguish between what they call "technical" and "adaptive" leadership work. Technical work refers to the application of existing tools or technologies to familiar problems. Adaptive work requires creative learning that allows the leader "to address conflicts in the values people hold, or to diminish the gap between the values people stand for and the reality they face. . . . Getting people to clarify what matters most, in what balance, with what tradeoffs, becomes a central task."1

The application of this map in the field of practice is a constant process of assessing what function is called for, and whether it represents technical or adaptive work. If the situation involves a sense of confusion (Where are we? What's our position on this? Where are we going?), what's needed is direction. In the case of a technical challenge, the approach that constitutes the most effective leadership action is providing a clear and cogent definition of the problem complete with an accompanying solution. If, however, an adaptive issue arises, then the action of choice will be a matter of identifying the adaptive challenge by framing key questions and issues rather than defining the problem and giving the solution. If the situation relates to a perceived threat, the technical leadership activity will be to protect one's followers from the external threat. If the work is adaptive, disclosing the external threats allows the system to begin developing new capacities that will allow it to adapt to the threat.

Then there are those situations that call for order. Heifetz and Linsky describe the following three aspects of order: (1) orientation, (2) conflict, and (3) norms. In attending to orientation (What is my role in this system?), the technical response is to orient people to the current role responsibilities and expectations. The adaptive work calls for actions that disorient people to existing roles or resist orienting them to new roles too quickly. The second type of order focuses on conflict. The technical problem calls for the leader to restore order through effectively managing or resolving conflicts that arise. The adaptive challenge calls for the leader to expose the conflicts or allow them to emerge so that they can be fully explored and learned from. Norms, the third form of order, are the conscious and unconscious working agreements we establish with each other. Technical work calls for the leader to support the maintenance of existing norms, while adaptive challenges require the leader to challenge norms that are holding the system in its current configuration and impeding the adaptation needed.
Below is a graphic of the "tool chest" of leadership roles and activities analyzed in the preceding paragraphs.

One of the best ways I have found to distinguish between a technical and an adaptive challenge is to try the technical approach first. If it does not work after repeated attempts, there is a good chance you are facing an adaptive challenge. The legal profession, by identifying the elements of the challenges it faces today, has taken the leadership action best suited for adaptive work. It has raised some key issues needing to be engaged by the profession, and is inviting its members to engage them directly, rather than providing the solutions for them. This may be all the invitation you need to lean into leadership. Should you accept the invitation, I hope you find this "compass" and "map" useful as you face your leadership choices.

As a consumer of your services from time to time, and a member of the society you serve, I leave you with a final thought. I believe your profession plays an essential role in the adaptive work facing our society as a whole. We live in polarized times. Our approach to diversity, an indispensable element of sustainable living systems, is driving us to destruction. Finding justice in the face of increasingly complex and apparently competing demands seems beyond us. Our approach to conflict seems to have become increasingly dependent on the art of war.
Historically we have looked to the law to provide society with civil and just methods of holding our differences in productive, rather than destructive, ways. Lady Justice upholds the societal standards against which our behaviors are measured and to which we are held accountable. As a profession, the law plays a significant role in weaving the social infrastructure of our society together and creating a durable pattern of conscience and acceptable behaviors.

Diversity is challenging. Its existence causes stress on the system. This tension can pull the system forward in its development—or it can literally tear it apart. Nature has developed ways to respond to this pressure through creative collaboration. Human nature has not. I think this is one of the fundamental adaptive challenges we face. And I think it is the challenge where the leadership of the law is most appropriate and needed. We have not yet developed the art of evolutionary conflict, that which allows us to engage our differences in service of the vitality and sustainability of our systems. Yet our survival depends upon our doing so. Perhaps, with your leadership, we will find ways to successfully face this adaptive challenge.

"Generally, people will not authorize someone to make them face what they do not want to face. Instead, people hire someone to provide protection and ensure stability, someone with solutions that require a minimum of disruption. But adaptive work creates risk, conflict, and instability because addressing the issues underlying adaptive problems may involve upending deep and entrenched norms. Thus, leadership requires us to disturb people—but at a rate they can absorb."2

Dan Leahy, MA/ABS, is the president of the Leadership Institute of Seattle (LIOS).

NOTES
1. R.A. Heifetz, Leadership Without Easy Answers (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1994).
2. Heifetz and Linsky, Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School Press, 2002).

Back to table of contents >>