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Empowering Effective Leaders
by Alan Howell
As a graduate of Harding's Master of Arts in organizational leadership program who is now teaching the Leading Change and Innovation class this semester, I’ve loved returning to this community, connecting with the students and seeing how they are learning and leading in a variety of contexts. One of the key concepts that has oriented our exploration together is how we can approach diagnosing difficulties and discerning what to do about them.
The key practice we keep coming back to is this: Take the stairs.
Don’t stay glued to the floor.
Don’t take the elevator.
Take the stairs.
There is often real pressure for organizations to solve problems as quickly as possible. Deadline stress can cause us to skip or minimize the diagnostic step and move straight to action. Unfortunately, by not taking the time to ask questions, get multiple perspectives and allow for alternatives, we can easily mistake our action and ambitious activity for actual advancement and real improvement.
In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky suggest a helpful metaphor for diagnosing problems intentionally. They encourage leaders to “get on the balcony” as well as spend time on the “dance floor.”
When we are on the dance floor, all we see are the people dancing with and around us. We may feel like the party is great and get swept up in the music and action! But when we go up to the balcony, we are likely to see a very different picture. From that vantage point, we might notice the band is playing so loudly that everyone is dancing on the opposite side of the room. We might notice that when the music changes from fast to slow (or back again), different groups of people decide to dance. We may even notice that many people hang back near the exit doors and do not dance at all. It may not be such a great party after all. If someone asked us later to describe the dance, we would paint a very different picture if we had seen it from the balcony rather than only from the dance floor.
Heifetz, Grashow and Linsky suggest that when we learn to see things from both the dance floor and the balcony, we’ll get a firmer grasp of the complete picture and system dynamics. While I certainly agree that we can and should improve our awareness of both “dance floor” and “balcony” perspectives, I’m not sure how realistic it is to assume a single individual can steadily do that split-level synthesis from a single field of vision.
Instead, I propose that by moving back and forth between the balcony and dance floor, we can better assess what is happening and determine more informed ways to respond. When I picture this approach to diagnosis and improving systems, I see it involving a lot of time, not just on the balcony or on the dance floor, but also time in the transitional space in between: the stairwell. And while it may seem smart to minimize time and effort by taking the elevator, time in the stairwell may be important.
That transition time is good for processing obserevations from both the dance floor and the balcony. Additionally, taking the stairs with others — rather than alone — is good for naming what we are seeing, too. Whether we are noticing issues in our community, company or church, we need to lean on our companions. We need to take advantage of the good acoustics in the liminal space of the stairwell to sound out and work through next steps.
We need real-time conversation partners, and we also need to leverage the resources we have on our mental bookshelves to accompany us in the stairwell. Getting input from multiple sources can ensure our stairwell acoustics won't turn into an echo chamber — a very real danger for leaders!
Bringing what we can with us to synthesize with others in the stairwell is certainly going to require a lot of stamina. Tod Bolsinger puts it this way:
To be sure, this work of looking from the balcony and listening on the floor is both exhausting and often confusing. It’s difficult to switch back and forth between the balcony and the dance floor. It’s very hard not to become defensive when you are a leader of an organization being observed, and even more, it’s easy to feel like all you are doing is running up and down stairs, changing viewpoints and taking in data without making any immediate progress. (How Not to Waste a Crisis, p. 50).
Bolsinger believes that “the balcony is where we disrupt the default to past best practices and counteract the quick-fix mentality that happens almost unconsciously” (p. 45). He sees the “balcony” as the space where the team sees the problem and works to solve that problem together — calling it “balcony work,” as “an iterative process of observations, interpretations, questions and interventions” (p. 44). Let me make an important adjustment to Bolsinger's suggestion, though. Instead of “balcony work,” I think we would all be better served by seeing this as “stairwell work.”
Framing the development of a change process as “balcony work” can cause even the best-intentioned team to spend too much time removed from the dance floor and allow them to come up with ivory tower solutions. What we need is to intentionally take the stairs. We need to leverage the stairwell as a liminal, threshold space for processing and diagnosis.
Leading people through transformational change requires spending significant time going back and forth from the balcony and the dance floor in order to innovate effectively.
I'm thankful for the MAOL learning community as a space to lean into making good use of our time in the stairwell and leaning on and encouraging one another to have the endurance to stick with it and do what is needed to help all of us level up.
For more on why taking the stairs matters for innovation and change in churches and in cross-cultural mission settings, check out a previous version of this material and Alan's substack.
Alan Howell and his family resided in Mozambique from 2003-18 as part of a team working among the Makua-Metto people. From 2019-23 he was the visiting professor of missions at Harding University and an adjunct for Harding School of Theology. He holds a Master of Divinity and a Master of Arts in organizational leadership with a concentration in executive and workplace coaching. He currently serves as director of church relations at Mission Resource Network.
