GETTING ON THE BALCONY – THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT SKILL FOR EXERCISING LEADERSHIP

By Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky

For the past 25 years we have worked with thousands of professionals from all over the globe, from the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, men and women who seek to exercise leadership. We have heard their stories, their successes and often their failures, in an effort to understand what are the essential skills required for maximizing the likelihood of successful leadership interventions and minimizing the possibility of being taken out or pushed aside. In this process we learned that the single most consistent factor leading to failure or marginalisation was that people seeking to exercise leadership misread the environment. They never saw what was happening to them and to their initiative until it was too late. They never saw it coming.

This is not surprising. When you are raising a difficult issue, trying to move your community out of a comfortable if dysfunctional status quo, or surfacing a long-repressed conflict that is holding back progress, it is difficult to stand back and see the broader patterns, to look around the corner, to see what is beneath the surface. You are understandably caught up in everything that is going on around you. But nothing is more important to both success and survival than the skill of gaining perspective in the midst of action.

Great athletes, for example, can at once play the game and observe it as a whole—as Walt Whitman described it, “being both in and out of the game.” Jesuits call it “contemplation in action.” Hindus and Buddhists call it “karma yoga,” or mindfulness. We call this skill “getting off the dance floor and getting on the balcony,” an image that captures the mental activity of stepping back in the midst of action and asking, “What's really going on here?”

Why do so many of the world's forms of spiritual and organizational life recommend this mental exercise? Because few tasks strain our abilities more than putting this idea into practice. We all get swept up in the action, particularly when it becomes intense or personal and we need most to pause . Self-reflection does not come naturally.

For example, we were recently at a business meeting in which a woman named Amanda made a provocative comment, questioning whether everyone in the room was pulling their weight during a challenging restructuring of the firm. Her comment didn't seem to go anywhere. Then some time later Brian, a man a bit senior to her in the organization, offered what amounted to the same comment. Suddenly, the group engaged around the idea and the conversation moved, or at least lurched, in the direction Amanda had originally hoped. Brian walked away feeling influential, and Amanda felt invisible and frustrated.

Groups often devalue someone by ignoring them, by rendering them invisible—a form of marginalisation. Surely this has happened to you at least once or twice. Women tell us this happens often to them.

Amanda had a tough time getting on the balcony. She wondered why she had been ignored, but mostly she felt trampled and angered, diminishing her capacity to distance herself from the situation. She was totally engaged on the dance floor: preoccupied by the fear of being ineffective, reacting to having been brushed aside, and unable to get an overview and see what was really going on. To be more effective going forward, she would have had to step back and take a broader view, understand the roles she and Brian played in the meeting and in the organization as a whole, been open to systemic explanations of what took place, assessed the threat she represented, perhaps by being a woman, perhaps by the implications of her idea.

Typically only a few people see these dynamics as they happen. Swept up in the action of the meeting, most never notice. They simply play their parts. The observational challenge is to see the subtleties that normally go right by us. Seeing the whole picture requires standing back and watching even as you take part in the action being observed. But taking a balcony perspective is tough to do when you're engaged on the dance floor, being pushed and pulled by the flow of events and also engaged in some of the pushing and pulling yourself.

The most difficult part to notice is what you do yourself, whether you play Amanda's or Brian's part. So you might imagine looking down on the room from a sky camera and seeing yourself as merely another player in the game.

The balcony metaphor captures this idea. Let's say you are dancing in a big ballroom with a balcony up above. A band plays and people swirl all around you to the music, filling up your view. Most of your attention focuses on your dance partner, and you reserve whatever is left to make sure that you don't collide with dancers close by. You let yourself get carried away by the music, your partner, and the moment. When someone later asks you about the dance, you exclaim, “The band played great, and the place surged with dancers.”

But if you had gone up to the balcony and looked down on the dance floor, you might have seen a very different picture. You would have noticed all sorts of patterns. For example, you might have observed that when slow music played, only some people danced; when the tempo increased, others stepped onto the floor; and some people never seemed to dance at all. Indeed, the dancers all clustered at one end of the floor, as far away from the band as possible. On returning home, you might have reported that participation was sporadic, the band played too loud, and you only danced to fast music.

Achieving a balcony perspective means taking yourself out of the dance, in your mind, even if only for a moment. The only way you can gain both a clearer view of reality and some perspective on the bigger picture is by distancing yourself from the fray. Otherwise, you are likely to misperceive the situation and make the wrong diagnosis, leading you to misguided decisions about whether and how to intervene.

If you want to affect what is happening, you must return to the dance floor. Staying on the balcony in a safe observer role is as much a prescription for ineffectuality as never achieving that perspective in the first place. The process must be iterative, not static. The challenge is to move back and forth between the dance floor and the balcony, making interventions, observing their impact in real time, and then returning to the action. The goal is to come as close as you can to being in both places simultaneously, as if you had one eye looking from the dance floor and one eye looking down from the balcony, watching all the action, including your own. This is a critical point: When you observe from the balcony you must see yourself as well as the other participants. Perhaps this is the hardest task of all—to see yourself objectively.

To see yourself from the outside as merely one among the many dancers, you have to watch the system and the patterns, looking at yourself as part of the overall pattern. You must set aside your special knowledge of your intentions and inner feelings, and notice that part of yourself that others would see if they were looking down from the balcony.

Moving from participant to observer and back again is a skill you can learn. For example, when you are sitting in a meeting, practice switching roles, watching what is happening while it is happening, even as you are part of what's happening. When you make an intervention, resist the instinct to stay perched on the edge of your seat waiting to defend or explain what you said. Simple techniques, such as pushing your chair a few inches away from the meeting table after you speak, may provide some literal as well as metaphorical distance to help you detach just enough to become an observer. Don't jump to a familiar conclusion. Open yourself up to other possibilities. See who says what; watch the body language. Watch the relationships and see how people's attention to one another varies: supporting, thwarting, or listening.

Sustaining your leadership, then, requires first and foremost the capacity to see what is happening to you and your initiative, as it is happening. This takes discipline and flexibility, and it is hard to do. You are immersed in the action, responding to what is right there in front of you. And when you do get some distance, you still have the challenge of accurately reading and interpreting what you now observe. You need to hear what people are saying, but not accept their words at face value. Groups want you to take their viewpoint. People want you to understand their motivation and the explanation of their behavior in their own terms. Creating alternative interpretations, listening to the song beneath the words, is inherently provocative, but necessary if you are going to address the real stakes, fears, and conflicts.

Leadership is an improvisational art. Think of your plan, your strategy, as nothing more than today's best guess. Make your intervention, then get up on the balcony to observe the effects of your actions, particularly watching for unanticipated consequences, and then make your adjustments.

You may begin with an overarching vision and clear orienting values, but what you actually do from moment to moment cannot be scripted. To be effective, you must respond to what is happening. Move back and forth from the balcony to the dance floor, over and over again throughout the day, week, month, and year. Take action, step back and assess the results of the action, reassess the plan, then go to the dance floor and make the next move. Maintain a diagnostic mindset on a changing reality.

Exercising leadership gives voice to the deepest purposes of your life. But the passion behind those purposes can get in the way of seeing what is really going on and thereby undermine both your success and your survival. Getting on the balcony can make the difference.

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This article is adapted with permission from Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading , by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Harvard Business
School Press (2002).

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