Ronald A. Heifetz Quotes

Your behavior reflects your actual purposes.

But to practice leadership, you need to accept that you are in the business of generating chaos, confusion, and conflict

And leadership then is about mobilizing and engaging the people with the problem rather than trying to anesthetize them so you can go off and solve it on your own.

Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation. People don't learn by staring into a mirror; people learn by encountering difference.

Progress on problems is the measure of leadership; leaders mobilize people to face problems, and communities make progress on problems because leaders challenge them and help them to do so.

Values are shaped and refined by rubbing against real problems, and people interpret their problems according to the values they hold.

Knowing how the environment is pulling your strings and playing you is critical to making responsive rather than reactive moves.

Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

If you find what you do each day seems to have no link to any higher purpose, you probably want to rethink what you're doing.

Worry not that your child listens to you; worry most that they watch you.

What people resist is not change per se, but loss.

Attention is the currency of leadership.

Yesterday's adaptations are today's routines.

Stay diagnostic even as you take action.

Conflict is the primary engine of creativity and innovation.

I think that notion of leadership is bankrupt.

Your silence creates a vacuum for others to fill The key is to stay present and keep listening. The silence of holding steady is different from the silence of holding back.