Lessons In Leadership: It's Not About You. (It's About Them); NPR, 11/11/13

Shankar Vedantam, NPR; Lessons In Leadership: It's Not About You. (It's About Them) : "Heifetz trained as a psychiatrist, and he describes his view of effective leadership with an analogy from medicine. "When a patient comes to a surgeon, the surgeon's default setting is to say, 'You've got a problem? I'll take the problem off your shoulders and I'll deliver back to you a solution.' In psychiatry, when a person comes to you with a problem, it's not your job actually to solve their problem. It's your job to develop their capacity to solve their own problem." Many intractable political issues, such as civil war, poverty or ethnic tension are complicated, and solving them may require a whole nation of people to change their mindset. As they approach these sorts of "nontechnical" problems, Heifetz says, leaders should think less like surgeons, and more like psychiatrists."