Ronald Heifetz
Academic and authorWikipedia
22
MENTIONS
15
EPISODES
15
PODCASTS
Search complete. 22 mentions across 15 episodes found for "Ronald Heifetz".
Sep 24, 2026
Kevin NovakHOST
And most of them, of course, are doing something else completely, but they completely don't see it.
Kevin NovakHOST
So Ronald Heifetz distinguished between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
Kevin NovakHOST
And I probably bring this up too much, but I think it is something that people continue to struggle with.
Kevin NovakHOST
where a technical problem has a known answer and the job is to apply it.
Caroline AdelmanGUEST
your metaphor of the balcony and the dance floor.
Caroline AdelmanGUEST
Ron Heifetz talks about that a lot with his like, how you deal with adaptive challenges.
Caroline AdelmanGUEST
And I think that's the other piece too, is really sort of continuing to be aware of, make myself aware of, have guardrails to keep me aware of things that are adaptive challenges, meaning we've got to sort of shift something more fundamental.
Caroline AdelmanGUEST
The stakeholders have to be involved, et cetera, and not falling for the trap of treating them as technical challenges.
Daniel AtlinGUEST
You know, Deborah Ancona, who has continued that and how to apply it in the workplace.
Daniel AtlinGUEST
And also the adaptive leadership work of Minsky and Heifetz, too.
Daniel AtlinGUEST
So really great sort of works that actually I think have influenced me in my approach as well.
Daniel AtlinGUEST
So, yeah, I'd say that, you know, leaders who don't sort of operate this way, They end up, you know, having situations that, you know, are not successful.
Tony WalmsleyGUEST
Yeah, absolutely.
Tony WalmsleyGUEST
And I think it's like I do a lot of work with I don't know if you've heard of Ronald Heifetz.
Tony WalmsleyGUEST
He's a Harvard expert on adaptive leadership.
Tony WalmsleyGUEST
And what tends to happen, I've worked a lot in the Middle East over the last couple of years with leaders in all sorts of sectors and verticals.
Ty FrancisGUEST
O.D. books about leadership.
Ty FrancisGUEST
One of my favorites is a bit old now, probably about 15, 20 years old, but it's by a guy called Ronald Heifetz.
Ty FrancisGUEST
Good called Leadership Without Easy Answers.
Ty FrancisGUEST
That's a fantastic book.
Sam BlochGUEST
I think it all kind of spawns from a place of being able to pick your head up.
Sam BlochGUEST
There's a really wonderful book I love called Adaptive Leadership by an author named Heifetz.
Sam BlochGUEST
he talks about this idea, and it's very leadership focused, but there's this one idea that I come back to a lot, which is called getting on the balcony.
Sam BlochGUEST
And it's similar to Heads Up, where it's kind of just saying like, hey, you might be in this position at work where you have all these politics going on, or Kathy and Paul are fighting, or this and this is happening, and you want to solve this problem, or your boss asked you to get this project out there, or you want to... falling behind on your number of tickets you're working on a day.
Andy CrouchGUEST
Because what AI is going to be able to do most of the things that involve getting things right.
Andy CrouchGUEST
So the more you can say you got this problem right, the more you have, I've been very influenced by Ronald Heifetz at the Kennedy School at Harvard, who has this distinction between technical problems and adaptive challenges.
Andy CrouchGUEST
He calls them adaptive problems, we'll say.
Andy CrouchGUEST
And the more a problem can be right or wrong, the more it's a technical problem.
Doug NollGUEST
Um, it's...
Doug NollGUEST
Y- y- if you go back, even go back to the 1990s, and Ronald Heifetz at Harvard wrote a book called Leadership Without Easy Answers, and he talked about the three psychological services that a leader provides a group.
Doug NollGUEST
Direction, focus, and safety.
Doug NollGUEST
And Amy Edmondson at Harvard talks a lot about psychological safety.
Chanda Smith BakerGUEST
So I would say that I have been really good at this.
Chanda Smith BakerGUEST
And then Ron Heifetz's book, Leadership on the Line, I think it's chapter three, he talks about getting to the balcony.
Chanda Smith BakerGUEST
And I schedule balcony time every week in terms of a micro opportunity, for sure.
Elizabeth KitzenbergHOST
I'm taking notes.
Andrés SpokoinyHOST
You said, if we rely on approval from the people we serve, we fail at leadership.
Andrés SpokoinyHOST
And it reminds me of a quote by Ron Heifetz, a big theoretician of leadership.
Andrés SpokoinyHOST
He says, leadership is the art of disappointing people at the rate that they can absorb leadership.
Andrés SpokoinyHOST
So walk us through experiences about when you had to say, I feel this thing I'm going to do is not popular.
Andrés SpokoinyHOST
And I trust my community that they can they can take it.
Angela BuchdahlGUEST
Yeah.
Angela BuchdahlGUEST
I mean, you mentioned Ron Heifetz and, you know, he is the person who precipitated this story that I share in which, you know, he had me do this very awkward exercise with my Wexner graduate class.
Angela BuchdahlGUEST
And as I was doing it, you know, when I finally kind of did it right, then I was falling over myself to kind of explain, oh, it was so awkward at first, but now I figured it out and I was feeling something happening.
5 more episodes mention Ronald Heifetz.
Create an account to see the whole feed, search across every transcript, and follow the entities you care about.