1) Leadership is a practice

Heifetz said that too often we think of leadership as a set of personality traits. You're either born with it or you're not. He argued that this doesn't explain why so many successful leaders fail a lot of the time. It doesn't explain the variance in achievement by very successful people across their careers - whether excellent leaders or successful sports-people.

Heifetz argued that it's not useful to equate leadership with personality. We need to think of it as a practice, and one that requires different activities, different responses in different contexts at different times.

To view leadership in this way we will never draw a bottom line on ourselves or other people. This is an approach that allows us to say "how can I do better next time?" and gives us more freedom to think about how we can become leaders or become better leaders.

Heifetz also argued that we ought to teach children that leadership is an activity, something that everyone can practise and not something that comes with authority or social dominance - which is an assumption that children can learn very, very early.

2) Leadership is a practice that can be performed with or without authority

When we distinguish leadership from personality we can also distinguish leadership from authority. And we want people to be exercising leadership without authority, beyond their pay grade.

Heifetz argued that in western cultures we structure problem-solving by authority relationships, turning to authority when there is a problem. Children look for direction, protection and order from their parents and by the time we are twenty we have this behaviour hard wired into us: if there is a problem we turn to authority for a solution.

This culture only works well when you can look to the elders for direction. But in times of change, looking to authority for a solution doesn't work as they don't always have the solution and are not as adaptive as they could be. Our expectations of authority make it far too difficult for people in authority to say to those around them: "I'm in way over my head". Leaders, particularly in a time of crisis, need the people they lead to share some of the responsibility for making the change that is necessary.

3) We need to understand the difference between adaptive work and technical work

Heifetz argued that the most common source of failure in leadership is that people diagnose adaptive problems as if they are technical problems. In other words, leaders too often see the difficult problems facing them as problems that can be solved using the techniques we have used in the past. He argues that leaders need to identify those parts of a problem that can be solved with the 'technical' knowledge we have built up in the past and those that need them to be adaptive, to admit that they they do not have all the answers.

Heifetz believes that many of the issues and challenges we are faced with on a daily basis sit beyond our technical knowledge and training - they require us to work in partnership with other professionals. However, we're under pressure to restore equilibrium quickly, to treat the difficult problems as things that can be handled managerially. Heifetz contends that so much of leadership is really about holding people together in these situations where no individual knows the way forward.

Heifetz concluded by suggesting that "the best thing I can do for all of us is to bless our incompetence". There is no way, he argued, that any of us as individuals can do justice to every problem we face or every child we have to teach. We need to get over the shame of our incompetence and engage much more collaboratively with our colleagues. We need a culture of taking risks, learning in an ongoing way about how to do what we do better. We need to ease up a little bit with ourselves and acknowledge more quickly when we are having difficulty. That way we would take corrective action more quickly and invite others in to help more quickly.