Get on the Balcony

As a leader, you may have heard the concept of ‘get on the balcony.’ An important concept to understand. Why?

“Business leaders have to be able to view patterns as if they were on the balcony. It does them no good to be swept up in the field of action. Leaders have to see a context for change or create one. They should give employees a strong sense of the history of the enterprise and what’s good about its past, as well as an idea of the market forces at work today and the responsibility people must take in shaping the future. Leaders must be able to identify struggles over values and power, recognize patterns of work avoidance, and watch for many other functional and dysfunctional reactions to change.

Without the capacity to move back an forth between the field of action and the balcony, to reflect day to day, moment to moment, on the many ways in which an organization’s habits can sabotage adaptive work, leader easily and unwittingly becomes a prisoner of the system. The dynamics of adaptive change are far too complex to keep track of, let alone, influence, if leaders stay only on the field of play.”

Ronald A. Heifetz and Donald L. Laurie, The Work of Leadership, Best of HBR, Harvard Business Review