A Retrospective on KONU’s Inaugural Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents

Leadership is a balancing act between meeting expectations and disappointing them to mobilize collective learning and shared ownership. We know that subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) cultural expectations on women add complexity to how they practice leadership. That's why we decided to run our first-ever Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents last month. 

Our Lab invited participants on a journey to explore our guiding question: How do we lead with greater creativity and self-trust in a sea of competing voices, pressures, and projections? Participants knew we’d be delving into root causes of systemic challenges – both external and internal – and expanding our toolkits for responding. Our aim was to help them shift from feeling stuck, torn, and/or overwhelmed to a sense of agency, optionality, and creativity. 

Our inaugural cohort of 15 women-identifying change agents showed up ready for this work. They were tired of coping with their reflex responses to challenging contexts. They wanted lasting change.  

We spent the first morning of this Adaptive Leadership Lab in an experiential simulation modeled off the work of human systems pioneer Barry Oshry. Participants were assigned roles within a fictitious nonprofit organization: executives, middle managers, frontline workers, or funders. Over the course of five “work days” – each 10 minutes long – they sought to make progress on a particular initiative. Along the way, they encountered challenges extracting information around budget constraints, navigating internal politics and imposed regulations, and stumbled to manage a desire to be inclusive with the need to get the work done. 

In between various work days, we took some time to get off the dance floor of the action and onto the balcony for systemic diagnosis and learning. Participants noticed patterns of behavior based on role – what Oshry calls the “Dance of the Blind Reflex” – and their own reactive conditioned tendencies when faced with frustration, stress and pressure (e.g. retreat or speak up, people please or fight back, include or exclude, etc.) Together, we explored what other moves they might make instead. 

• Executives

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Continue to absorb even more responsibility

  • What else is possible?: Distribute responsibility throughout the system

• Frontline workers

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: In their place of confusion, blame higher-ups

  • What else is possible?: Take responsibility for their condition

• Middle managers

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Run around trying to make everyone happy (...everyone but themselves)

  • What else is possible?: Maintain independence of thought and action

• Funders

  • “Dance of the Blind Reflex” move: Wonder why this organization can’t just give them what they need

  • What else is possible?: Get involved in making the outcome happen

After a lunch break, we dove into some fundamental Adaptive Leadership concepts to make sense of what happened in the simulation – and what happens in all systemic challenges we face. For instance: 

• Applying technical solutions to adaptive challenges will result in failure. We can’t open more vaccine clinics and expect that trust and willingness to get vaccinated will automatically increase. We need to tend to the hearts and minds of change. 

• In order to work through folks’ resistances, you have to manage their losses. It wasn’t easy for the frontline workers in our simulation to deal with the uncertainty of what they needed to produce. That uncertainty produced some heat and frustration! Instead of ignoring those realities, it’s important to engage with them – to say, “This is an uncertain situation. I know that’s uncomfortable – it is for me too. How can we cope together?” 

• Being in an authority role is not the same as practicing leadership. When people are in charge, we expect them to provide direction, protection, and order. (“The executives and funders should have had the answers!”) But in adaptive work, you can’t always meet those expectations. You need to mobilize the collective to face a difficult reality they would rather avoid. That’s real leadership. 

“[I now see] how leadership is not about role and can be exercised from any vantage point - [it’s] not just about solving problems, but also helping others relate to problems differently”

Drawing on Day 1’s systemic diagnosis of what makes leadership hard, what losses are at stake for people, and what leadership actions are often difficult, Day 2 focused on the internal work required to break out of reactive patterns, see new options, and take action on those options. We looked closely at gender messages we often receive throughout our lives and the voices in each of our own individual backgrounds that continue to shape our lenses and actions.  

From there we dove deeper into how those internalized voices shape our triggers and reactive tendencies. We identified key stakeholders from our leadership challenges that are triggering to engage with (yet, for the sake of progress, do require engagement) and unpacked the ways in which our internal voices can limit our leadership practice (e.g. causing us to miss out on possible partnerships, generate diagnostic inaccuracy, or limit our repertoire of action options).

“A more solid process for naming choices; more expanded language (eg for things like loyalties and losses) brings texture to some internal work I’d been doing in my personal practice.”

“A big part of this was moving through my own fear reactions to making decisions and learning my own discernment. In taking the time to feel the space, it gave me a better sense of how I react and what triggers me”

Drawing from extensive research on how our reactive tendencies become programmed into our bodies, participants worked in pairs to investigate somatically what happens when they’re triggered. By shedding light on their felt experience without jumping into an immediate response, participants began to build the muscle of pausing before reaction, and thereby creating more space to strategically choose a more effective response.  

“The power of discovery the conflict our body holds. The gift of releasing it.”

“I loved the physical, somatic exercises. They were very helpful in feeling space, decision moments. I am in control of how I react and how I show up in the world.”

“While I’m really good at identifying and brainstorming opportunities to exercise leadership, it reminded me of the power of a pause, reflect, and strategize in moving forward. Oftentimes I charge forward in action without taking the time to think, and I can get paralyzed in the fear of disappointing people, and just working through this internal challenge for me makes the options more possible to say yes to.”

This internal framework for understanding the systems inside ourselves enabled us to return to our leadership challenges with an even more accurate diagnosis and new ideas for how to better engage diverse stakeholders. Participants broadened their perception around what's at stake for others and the rationale behind the resistances they face.

“Strong reminders that behind every system and structure are people, and people are complex; and that, while I can’t choose my feelings, I can choose to listen better to what they are telling me and choose how to respond.”

“I can bring my “difficult” people on the balcony with me to align (or realign) on our understanding of the shared challenge. And I can do that without betraying my authentic self.”

We weren’t seeking solutions to “solve” participants’ challenges, but rather to build their capacity to hold complexity, manage ongoing adaptive change, and take new creative leadership actions. 

Day 3 focused on synthesizing next steps and increasing our stamina to stay in the game without burning out. We focused on the idea of leadership as a collective work, and thereby the vital role of having allies and confidants – and why not to confuse the two. Through an embodied exercise, participants sensed and felt what it’s like to have confidants on your side and having your back. 

“Processing a challenge takes time and engagement of allies and confidants. I’m eternally grateful for learning that through this training.”

In refining their leadership experiments – specific moves participants would make to make progress on our work challenges – we also anchored in the reminder that leadership is a choice. You can choose to make leadership interventions – and you can choose not to make them. Participants engaged in a somatic exercise to discover what “yes,” “no,” and “maybe” feel like in their bodies – and made their choices from a centered place about what moves they would and would not make. We spent a lot of time in our final hours together on somatic work, deepening our capacities to notice triggers in our bodies, re-center, and then – with agency and clarity – respond.

“I’m feeling compassion for my burnout. That it’s not a sign that I’m bad or not intelligent or even not exceptional. The flaw was in not exercising my choice to say no and use creativity to find solutions rather than just piling on.”

“In many ways I have only control over myself ... that was a powerful conclusion. Then the strategies offered in how I keep myself anchored were really powerful.”

It was beautiful how tightly this group bound together, offering their vulnerability and support in such a short space of time. 

Change is possible. In community, we have the courage to shed light on where we feel stuck, challenged, and ashamed. This Lab left participants with a framework for how to think about and approach their challenges, and a network of diverse and committed women-identifying change agents they can continue to tap into for support in their leadership endeavors – a space to reconnect to their inherent dignity, free choice, and creative impulses amidst the challenges of mobilizing real change. 

Given the impact of this pilot, we plan to offer another Adaptive Leadership Lab for Women-Identifying Change Agents in the coming year. Stay tuned! 

“Having done this work with people in my professional sector of all genders, it was meaningful to revisit it with female ID participants so that we had a safe space to dig in to power dynamics. I also felt people were open with and respectful of others’ intersectional identities in a way that added to our learning.”

“I think discussions/tensions of exercising leadership as a woman were more readily brought up and focused on. There also felt like shared understanding and connection from the beginning because of the group’s makeup.”

“I felt safe for the first time since I started in my role almost two years ago. I was embraced and validated for bringing forward my authentic self.”

*All quotes in this blog post are from Lab participants. They were pulled directly from the anonymous evaluation survey results.

Leadership is Not About Being the Expert – It’s About Changing People’s Relationship to Their Challenges.

Often, we think of leadership as an opportunity for us to – finally! – deploy our expertise. That’s understandable: It’s usually our expertise that gets us promoted into an executive role, voted into office, or looked to for answers. Yet, expertise alone does not make for effective leadership. Many leaders fail because, while they know what needs to be done, they don’t actually get things done. Tim O’Brien of Harvard Kennedy School recently published a beautiful case study of a leader who resisted the temptation to deploy her expertise to steer people to a solution: Gina Raimondo, who mobilized the state of Rhode Island to pass groundbreaking pension reform. Her leadership is a model for all of us who aspire to become more effective leaders.

Gina Raimondo
(copyright: Shiho Fukada for the New York Times)

The context: In 2010, Gina Raimondo, a political newcomer, became Rhode Island’s General Treasurer. She faced a significant challenge with the state’s troubled pension system. State employees – teachers, civil servants, firefighters, and police, among others – paid monthly contributions into the pension fund and retirees received pensions. In 2011, the pension system was only 58% funded, with the state spending a growing portion of its budget to cover the fund’s $4.7 billion unfunded liability. Generous benefits contributed to the problem: Employees were allowed to retire early while collecting 80% of their average salary. Cost of living adjustments could boost benefits above 100% of retirees’ final average earnings. Rhode Island had been making modest reforms, such as raising the retirement age, since 2004, without addressing the underlying challenge: Its pension policies were making the state go broke. Keeping its current promises to retirees would require significant sacrifices from all Rhode Islanders, be it increased taxes or reduced state services for schools, libraries, roads, and public transportation.

Gina Raimondo was an expert in the field: She had worked as a venture capitalist covering health care investments. Yet rather than using her expertise to offer a solution, Raimondo chose to involve stakeholders in dialogue about the problem and the reforms needed. Raimondo began by adjusting the assumptions on the return the pension fund would generate, revealing the pension shortfall to be much larger than previously reported ($6.8 billion as opposed to $4.7 billion). She published these findings in a 2011 “Truth in Numbers” report to create urgency for reform. Raimondo then brought together major stakeholder groups from labor, business, government, and academia in a Pension Advisory Group. The Group met five times over the course of two months to engage in problem-solving. Each meeting took place in a public institution at risk of cuts. At the same time, Raimondo brought the challenge to the grassroots by conducting multiple town hall meetings over a four-month period. She would set a microphone in the front of the hall, inviting attendees to share their stories – including their fears and angers – in relation to the pension crisis. The concurrent bankruptcy of a Rhode Island city due to an unfunded pension liability offered a glimpse of the grim future the entire state would face if it did not act.

Raimondo’s efforts culminated in the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act (RIRSA), which included suspending cost-of-living adjustments until the fund was 80% funded, raising the retirement age, and implementing a hybrid pension plan. Despite opposition from labor unions, the legislation passed with significant support and was signed into law in November 2011.

The passage of RIRSA was a major political and policy achievement. Raimondo’s leadership is exemplary of leadership as we define it at KONU: Leadership is the activity of mobilizing people to make progress on a tough, adaptive challenge. Some of Raimondo’s leadership moves that stand out are:

• Raising the heat and drawing attention to the challenge through the Truth In Numbers report

• Involving stakeholders – both representatives of key constituent groups and ordinary citizens – in dialogue and problem solving, in the Pension Advisory Groups and townhall meetings

• Building “holding environments” – spaces in which attendees could voice their turmoil and develop new relationships with each other and a new relationship to the challenge

• Directing attention on the challenge, rather than on herself. Pension Advisory Group participants recalled that, beyond framing the issue, Raimondo was not very active in meetings, deferring to the group to debate pros and cons; at town hall meetings, Raimondo would set a microphone in the front of the room, inviting others to share their stories

• Holding anger directed towards herself with grace rather than reacting defensively. Raimondo would acknowledge anger, name that she shared that anger, and redirect it towards the challenge.

Leadership is never easy: Raimondo faced political backlash for the reform, including a class action lawsuit and challenges from labor unions in her subsequent run for governor. Yet the reforms she implemented were crucial in averting the state’s pension crisis. Raimondo’s leadership success lies not in the expertise she provided – in fact, the reforms passed were not all that different from the ones that had been proposed just three years earlier by a special commission. Instead, Raimondo’s leadership is so exemplary because she was able to mobilize collective problem solving on the challenge at hand.

Further reading:

• Learn more about Tim O’Brien’s teaching and research on leadership here

• You can purchase Tim O’Brien’s full Rhode Island pension reform case study from the Harvard Kennedy School case program here for just $3.95

• The Washington Post and New York Times have reported on Gina Raimondo’s leadership on pension reform

Want to learn more about how to develop leadership for collective challenges? Get in touch or sign up for our newsletter.

Effective Leadership Development is Risky

At KONU, we believe that, to be effective, we must rethink and re-do “leadership development” so that it prepares us to lean into and lead progress through the challenges of today. To get there, leadership development must shift to be more…

1.     Developmental

2.     Experiential 

3.     Risky 

This blog is the final of a 3-part series about each of these fundamental shifts.

Part III: Leadership Development is risky - And the risk is worth it

I’ve shared so far that transformative leadership development needs to be developmental AND experiential.

Core components of developmental and experiential leadership development are:

1. They work with real, challenging problems of individuals and groups;

2. The challenges that are not only cognitive, but also emotionally demanding and gripping; and

3. they provide a “coaching” environment that leaves the problems with the participants instead of taking them off their hands.

So why are such approaches still not commonplace in leadership development programs? Why do so many leadership development programs play it safe? Why do so many participants take part in programs wanting to “prove” rather than “play”, and leave feeling they haven’t learned or developed?

A fundamental reason is that developmental and experiential work is risky!

The word "experience" has the same linguistic root as the word "danger". We have known since childhood that experiential learning can be dangerous: when learning to ride a bicycle, there is a risk of losing your balance and injuring yourself. The paradox is that only if you accept the risk of losing your balance can you discover balance.

What risks do we run if we – learners and facilitators – allow ourselves to lose our balance in leadership development work – and how can those risks be managed?

Risk to the Learner - and How to Manage Them

“Because many professionals are almost always successful at what they do, they rarely experience failure. And because they have rarely failed, they have never learned how to learn from failure.”

— Chris Argyris

The Biggest Danger: Shame

When my son, at three years old, had just learned how to ride a bike, he was incredibly proud. So proud, in fact, that he raced off on his bike one day, hit a patch of loose sand, skid, fell off his bike, and skinned his hands. He cried bitterly – less from the physical pain, it seemed to me as I comforted him, as from the shame of realizing he might not be quite as competent a cyclist yet as he had imagined himself to be.

Adults find it particularly difficult to be confronted with the limits of their own competence. That’s particularly true when we’re in a realm in which we feel we ought to be competent.

I wouldn’t feel bad being an absolute beginner at learning how to play a guitar – but shouldn’t I be competent at leading an organization if they’ve made me the boss?

Experiential learning approaches in leadership development programs confront people with their own incompetence - sometimes even publicly. Imagine a workshop starts off by asking a group of managers to share a challenge that keeps them up at night, something that they just haven’t figured out. The participant may shut down (“I don’t have any problem that keeps me up at night”), blame others (“it’s only a problem because that guy isn’t doing his job”), or withdraw from the group or program (“I’m not learning anything here – I’ll just sit and answer emails instead”). These fight-flight-freeze reactions are the masked adult equivalent of the bitter cry after the bike crash – they come from the shame, fear, and embarrassment of being exposed to the group as incompetent.

Why is “learning” – learning to fail, learning from failure, learning to learn – so difficult, particularly for adults? Robert Kegan's developmental stage model offers some clues: Particularly for those of us in the “socialized mind” stage, being perceived as competent or clever is important. When our own leadership behavior (and its limitations) is mirrored publicly, we may feel shame or embarrassment. Opening up in this way is particularly difficult for managers and executives because it harbors the risk of a (real or perceived) loss of authority. However, it is precisely in this challenge of exploring and overcoming shame that the manager encounters a development opportunity.

Risks to Facilitators - and How to Manage Them

For us as facilitators, too, experiential and developmental leadership development work comes with risks. We, too, as facilitators feel shame about not being perfectly competent and know the all-too-human drive to please and impress all too well. And we know: Clients aren’t happy when their participants aren’t, so we feel the pressure to make participants happy! To address this conundrum, we, as facilitators, must cultivate a space that both challenges AND supports learners, keeping the “distress” of learning at a tolerable level and supporting sensemaking around the learning process.

Here are some of the strategies we employ as facilitators:

Program Participants

• Clarifying expectations and naming that exercises might generate uncomfortable feelings

• Inviting participants to learn at their own pace and “be in charge of themselves”

• Modeling vulnerability and public learning as the facilitator in order to invite the same from participants

Authorizer in the Client System

• Receiving authorizers’ permission and support for this type of intervention (No surprises here, please!)

• Working with senior leadership, e.g. the CEO or Managing Director, to model and publicly invite and acknowledge vulnerability and public learning so that program participants see that such behavior is being encouraged at all levels of the organization

• Inviting them into the sessions to observe and learn alongside the program participants and you as facilitator

Why the Risk is Worth it

Experience-oriented approaches have an enormous effect. The uncomfortable, exciting, and potentially transformative nature of experiential and developmental approaches makes them a riveting experience for participants.

Research is increasingly demonstrating the effect of such approaches on the development of adults and their leadership skills. Tim O'Brien (Harvard University)’s research findings show that experiential methods (such as here-and-now exercises and peer case consultations) in Professor Ronald Heifetz's Adaptive Leadership courses at the Harvard Kennedy School are associated with measurable leaps in Kegan’s development stages (O'Brien 2016). D. Scott DeRue and Ned Wellman from Michigan University found that managers who had experienced significant development challenges at work (e.g. taking on new tasks, assuming greater responsibility, initiating change, working across silos, managing diverse teams) and were given the opportunity to systematically reflect on their experiences in feedback processes also developed further (De Rue & Wellmann 2009).

The probability of developmental steps is therefore increased if targeted spaces for experiential learning are created.

In our experience running leadership development programs for the past 15 years across the world, experiential approaches help develop participants "to the next level.” We find them to be particularly effective for managers transitioning from Kegan's development stage 3 (socialized mind) to stage 4 (self-authoring mind) – a developmental transition that many early or mid-career managers and executives are facing.

After a leadership development series for managers, including workshops and case consultations, participants spoke to several themes of how their thinking and behaviors have changed:

• Shifts in self-awareness and how to navigate their role and surroundings

• More initiative

• A more open and less reactive approach to criticism

• Increased empathy

• A greater ability to deal with conflict

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Source: KONU Workshop Evaluations

Willing to Lose Your Balance AND Gain New Perspectives? Let’s Talk!

If you’ve made it to the end of this blog post series, I already know a thing or two about you. I know that leadership development as a discipline is either something which you are also deeply invested in (awesome!), or it is something that has piqued your interest and you would like to learn more about (also awesome!). As I have laid out in this 3-part series, undergoing such a journey with KONU means engaging with leadership development as:

1. A continuous growth process (developmental)

2. A journey focused on doing as opposed to learning about theoretically doing (experiential)

3. A practice that is risky…and worth it. For you, for your team, for your organization.

I look forward to meeting you on the developmental PLAYground and creating meaningful and sustainable change together.

Effective Leadership Development is Experiential

At KONU, we believe that, to be effective, we must rethink and re-do “leadership development” so that it prepares us to lean into and lead progress through the challenges of today. To get there, leadership development must shift to be more…

1.     Developmental

2.     Experiential 

3.     Risky 

This blog is the second of a 3-part series about each of these fundamental shifts.

Part II: Leadership Development is Experiential

Remember when you learned how to drive a car? You likely sat down for theory lessons, learning about traffic signs, speed limits, and right of way rules. But then, at some point, you also sat in the driver’s seat of a car – and drove. Where you nervous? Did your hands sweat? (Mine did!). No doubt, learning how to drive a car happens when we are actually driving. And the learning likely involved driving too close to that other car in the lane, even missing a red light, or confusing the clutch and the gas pedal – and then debriefing with an instructor what went well and what did not.

In the same way, leadership development doesn’t happen simply through theoretical training – by reading about leadership theories or studying cases of others’ leadership. While theory can be useful for our foundational understanding of leadership, learning how to exercise leadership is best done by actually exercising leadership (sweat and all) – and then debriefing to learn what went well and what did not. Thus, effective leadership development must be experiential in that it must

• draw on participants’ actual experiences of exercising leadership AND

• encourage participants to practice and experience, rather than simply “talk about”, leadership.

So, how do we create experiential spaces in which participants can “practice, exercise, and learn leadership” instead of “learning about leadership?”

The way that KONU brings “learning leadership” into leadership development workshops is through methods that allow participants to learn from real experiences. These are twofold: 1) experiences happening in the here-and-now of the workshop itself and 2) current experiences participants are grappling with in their day-to-day work.

(1) Using the Here-and-Now of the Workshop Group

Leadership development workshops and programs are themselves in many ways replicas of the real world – and can be used as “laboratories” to learn about group dynamics and practice leadership. To do so, we generate here-and-now exercises that use the dynamics of the workshop group to “experience” core leadership concepts and provide a space for participants to exercise leadership. One such exercise is the authority vacuum described below:

Exercise: Authority Vacuum in the Here and Now

Monday Morning, 9am. A group of 20 managers from a medium-sized company in the service industry are sitting in a circle. It’s the first day of their one-year leadership program. After a round of introductions, the facilitators present the workshop objectives: The program is designed to help managers initiate and accompany change processes effectively, across organizational hierarchies and divisions. A facilitator presents the group with the first task. She writes on the flipchart: "Learn and experience the difference between leadership and authority in the here and now."

The facilitator sits down and remains silent. Confused looks in the group, whispering. After a few moments, a participant asks what the facilitator means. The facilitator remains silent, her facial expressions blank. Another participant says: "I don't think they're giving us an answer." Cue nervous laughter.

A participant suggests: "Maybe we should talk about situations in which we have experienced authority or leadership." Silence. A participant gets up to go to the restroom; another participant goes to get a coffee. Then one participant speaks up and says: "I think we need a bit more structure. Let’s split into small groups and discuss." Relief is palpable. Small groups form. After ten minutes, the facilitator intervenes: "Isn't it interesting that the group seems to feel more comfortable in small groups? I wonder whether this is actually helping the group learn about authority dynamics in the here-and-now, or whether the group is avoiding the task." One participant defends the small group work, while another wishes to return to the large group. A discussion ensues. After ten more minutes, the facilitator ends the exercise.

Each group reacts differently to this exercise. And yet there are universal, recurring patterns that the facilitator now debriefs with the group.

• Emotions: In the first debrief step, participants are invited to name the feelings they had during the exercise: Confusion, nervousness, even anger.

  By asking participants to name emotions, we build their awareness of the emotions that surface when they are leading change – and build their capacity to manage those emotions productively, including regulating the “heat” of change to levels that are tolerable to the group.

• Actions: In the second debriefing step, participants reflect on their actions during the exercise. What did they do and what did they avoid? They were silent, they tried to create order, to facilitate, to voice their opinion, they told jokes, they tried to provoke the unspeaking facilitator.

  By asking participants to reflect on actions, we help participants recognize the behaviors they default to in moments of challenge. And we begin expanding their leadership repertoire, by identifying the actions that others took as well as as-of-yet inconceivable actions they or others might have taken.

• Expectations of authority: In the final step, we ask participants to name their expectations of us, the facilitators (the “authorities”): "clarify the task", "give us some helpful feedback”, “tell us what’s going on”, etc.

  In this debrief, participants inductively come up with the services authorities are expected to provide – protection, direction, and order. It is precisely the “absence” of authority during the exercise that beautifully illuminates the purpose of authority in groups. We encourage participants to examine their own relationship with authority ("I view authority skeptically”, "I seek approval from authority.") and to begin assuming a more neutral view of authority in order to develop their capacity to use their authority wisely and purposefully when exercising leadership.

For many participants, this short exercise is an unsettling but profoundly developmental experience. Participants feel insecure because it is not clear what is expected of them, leaving them feeling disoriented (development stage 3). Gradually, they learn to name the cause of their insecurity and to deal with it more confidently (development stage 4). The exercise also trains the participants' ability to observe their own behavior and that of the group (i.e. the social system) - in other words, they become more mindful and think more systemically.

• For example, a participant shared how difficult he finds it to hold steady in the face of the silence – and how his default move is to speak up just to break that silence. For him, leadership development may mean building his stomach for silence and uncertainty and waiting before they intervene.

• Another participant reflects on how the here-and-now exercises helped her develop her skill to lead in settings of conflict: "I was told by the workshop group that my default behavior is to mediate and that that wasn’t helpful. I was initially shocked – I saw myself as a peacebuilder who is doing the group a great service. But by reflecting further I realized that I was often also quelling necessary conflict. I realized I needed to build up my own stomach for conflict and develop the skill of 'reading' group dynamics: When should I be letting a conflict unfold – and when not?".

Through such exercises, we create experiences that allow participants to learn about core leadership concepts (e.g. authority) and to exercise leadership (by trying to mobilize the group towards purposeful action) in the here-and-now of the workshop group itself – and to develop in their own leadership, as they reflect on their own and others’ behaviors during the exercise.

Here’s a second way that we bring real experiences into leadership development:

(2) The Case for Our Own Cases

Rather than relying on “ready-made” business school type cases in our programs, we invite participants to share a current, personal case of a leadership challenge or failure for consultation from their peers. Such cases have a much stronger practical relevance to participants: If we can capture lessons from our own case material and see new options, those lessons will stick so much more than if we were to present a curated case. Moreover, working participants’ own cases makes the learning experience more than just cognitive: We are emotionally attached to our own cases, particularly when they involve challenge or failure. Bringing in real cases allows us to bring “below the neck” learning into leadership development programs – engaging participants more fully and building their muscle to learn from and exercise leadership in complex situations. Finally, when we use real cases, learning becomes collaborative. When the case is not prepared, there’s no easy, expert answers from facilitators. Instead, all participants share the responsibility for discovery and learning – and all walk away having flexed their leadership muscles, instead of having “merely” downloaded insights from an “all-knowing leadership expert.”

How It Works: Peer Case Consultations on Leadership Challenges and Failures

Participants are asked to bring to the leadership development program a case of a leadership challenge or failure. Participants take turns acting as case presenters and consultants. The process is outlined in the box below: 

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Case Consultation in Practice

It’s 3pm, almost at the end of a day-long leadership development training. The small group gets together to hear the case of the Marketing manager – she’s working on standardizing communications but finds that stakeholders keep pushing back, wanting to use their unique voice and own branding instead. She asks the group’s help to figure out how to bring people along with this new change.

The group asks questions: “What have you tried so far? Who else is involved?” Then, the timer chirps, and the presenter goes off video.

The time is quick, and the group begins their discussion with frustration: “I wish I’d had time to ask another question!” They reluctantly move to offering interpretations of the challenge. “Maybe it’s about not having clear direction, and the stakeholders need more top-down rules!” chimes in one participant. Another challenges, “Maybe it’s too many rules, and people are losing their sense of identity in this new top-down push!” A third voice adds, “We haven’t heard anything about which stakeholders are going along with the new rules. Maybe we’ve assumed that there is resistance from the whole group, and we’re missing some stakeholders that could help bring the change into action.”

When the group moves to action options, the consultants brainstorm ideas: “The marketing manager could reach out to her boss for help.” “She could hold an all-team meeting to provide time and space for the resistance and frustration.”

When the presenter comes back to share her reflections, she’s surprised: “It seems so obvious now to hear that I should ask people why they don’t want to follow the new guidelines, but I’ve been so focused on implementing this policy that I never slowed down to do that!”

The group then debriefs its experience. One group member shares: “I wish we’d been more thoughtful about the questions we asked initially, so we could have learned more early on and consulted better.” The group nods thoughtfully, letting the learnings sink in.

Surfacing Learnings

Case consultations on “real” cases provide both the case presenters and the case “consultants” manifold opportunities to practice leadership capacities in the here-and-now. These include:

• Grappling with the “messiness” of real-life cases in which it’s rarely clear what to focus on and what information may be missing, and in which we are often only presented one view of the case (that of the case presenter)

• Asking open-ended questions from a place of curiosity in order to learn more - rather than jumping to conclusions or “having the answers”

• Thinking systemically by identifying the stakeholders involved in a challenge and offering hypotheses on what their perspectives on the challenge may be

• Offering multiple interpretations (and listening to others’ interpretations) of the challenge at hand

• Offering (and receiving) ideas for next steps and action options, even in the absence of complete information

• Staying open to new ideas and resisting the (reactive) urge to defend yourself, your interpretation of the case, and your actions to date

• Taking time to reflect on and learn from a group’s experience

Wrapping Up

Leadership is a practice – and practice requires practicing. By making leadership development experiential, we allow participants to practice leadership in the here-and-now of leadership development programs. That way, participants come out of programs not having learned about leadership but having built the muscles to put leadership into action.

The key idea behind this type of experiential learning is that we are learning together, not just showing off what we already know – it is an experiential PLAYground and not a PROVEground. 

If leadership development is particularly impactful when it focuses on development and on experience, then why do many such programs shy away from such approaches – staying on the PROVE- rather than the PLAYground? I’ll explore this further in my final blog post in this series: Leadership Development is Risky (cue anticipation and sweaty palms).

The Need to Rethink Leadership Development

Wicked (problems), pernicious (issues), complex (systems): just a few terms that might describe our current global – and local - reality. Making sense of all this is no simple task – yet we collectively yearn for someone (or maybe even ourselves?) to step up as a leader to navigate this dizzying new normal. There is no shortage of opportunities for leadership development out there; you can visit seminar after seminar and online course after online course. And yet the question remains: Do these offerings prepare us to exercise leadership on the challenges of today?

At KONU, we believe that, to be effective, we must rethink and re-do “leadership development” so that it prepares us to lean into and lead progress through the challenges of today. To get there, leadership development must shift to be more…

1.     Developmental

2.     Experiential 

3.     Risky 

This blog is the first of a 3-part series about each of these fundamental shifts.

Part I: Effective Leadership Development is Developmental

What we Know About Knowing (and Growing)

Remember the childhood dream of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Did you want to be a firefighter, a marine biologist, a “boss”? No doubt you assumed that there was a clear path towards this end goal: You would finish school, learn all about how to do the job, and then you’d be finished. This way of thinking assumed a linear path to full development: our learning would stop once we were all grown up. Indeed, until the mid 1980s, experts on adult development believed there was that there a time limit and cap on mental growth, just like physical growth.

Yet, has this been your lived experience as an adult in the working world? Are you all done learning? Our guess is probably not.

Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey (1984) turned the assumption of the cap on mental growth upside down in their seminal research about the developmental stages of the self (see box). They illustrate the developmental stages of the self as a gradual stairway leading to higher capacities of recognizing and holding the complexity of the world (”orders of mind”). The model differentiates, for adults, between

• the socialized mind (I think and act based upon the norms and beliefs in the tribes of which I am a part) (stage 3),

• the self-authoring mind (I am able to differentiate myself from my tribe(s), I tell my own story and see the world through the lens of my values, beliefs, and convictions) (stage 4), and

• the self-transforming mind (I am capable of stepping back and realizing that my reality is just one piece and that there is no complete, one system, belief, or truth) (stage 5).

Development is a practice in subject-object relation. You progress from looking through your reality and therefore being subject to it (I “am” this reality) to being able to look at your reality, therefore holding it object (I see “my” reality).

As you can see, most adults (80%) are in or between stage 3 and stage 4.

Quick Gut Check

How do these numbers resonate with you? Do you feel optimism because you know that meaningful adult development is possible? Take your inner firefighter, inner marine biologist, inner boss – can you give them some grace and do you feel some relief, knowing they are not at and do not yet need to be at their peak? Or do feel insecure and worried, perhaps because you have self-assessed your current stage and have awareness for the stage that the world/your world requires of you.

Why Development Matters

While each stage does come with its strengths and weaknesses, development does allow us to get better at managing complexity. We do not have to be the one to tell you that our modern-day world is a much more complex landscape than it was 50-60 years ago. The information age, the global economy, and the plurality of beliefs whizzing around us at a mind-boggling rate is reason enough for our hunter-gatherer brains to yearn for more simple times (frolicking across the valley, foraging for berries, cave painting, to name a few).

As the challenges we encounter as managers and change agents become more complex, there is pressure and temptation to grasp at quick solutions. These might be sufficient for a bit to quiet down the problem, but the complexity remains. To make the kind of progress that these complex problems demand, we need to develop our capacity to hold complexity.

Consider a higher education administrator: How can she hold the polarities of making her university a leading institution of innovation while navigating tight budget constraints? How can she inspire students to take on the “new” challenges of the world while recognizing that there is huge uncertainty surrounding what progress on such challenges even looks like?

A Way Forward: Making Leadership Development Developmental

So how do we get there?

Traditional (“horizontal”) leadership development is still strongly grounded in a linear path to development. If each of us is a phone, there are a series of apps that we need to download, such as negotiation and public speaking. At some point, the phone has the apps it needs and storage capacity has been reached. In vertical psychological development, learning takes another shape: upgrading the phone’s operating system so each of those apps can run better and the entire device has increased capacity. An example: Many feedback trainings fail to have the intended impact. While participants learn feedback techniques, they fail to actually give (critical) feedback on-the-job. It’s only by digging more deeply into reactive tendencies (e.g. pleasing) and underlying assumptions (e.g. “I won’t be liked if I give critical feedback”) allows participants to step into new behaviors.

At KONU, we embark on the vertical development journey with our clients. We enter that uncomfortable and sometimes scary space with you, your team, and your organization as you uncover and take on learning edges. For example, a team might be stuck in a default mode of always having the right answers. This serves the team well when finding quick fixes but gets in the way of making progress on more complex issues that require collaboration with other teams. Shifting to a curiosity mindset helps the team understand more complexity beyond its own right answer and make progress on complex challenges.

That’s why all of our work draws on tools grounded in adult development research. One example is the Leadership Circle Profile, a 360-degree feedback tool that helps you uncover limiting mindsets and lean into more creative behaviors. We also offer a collective version of the LCP to help teams increase their capacity for complexity together. When we take this developmental approach to “leadership development, your journey – the one that started with that inner firefighter, marine biologist, or boss, and has led to you in this moment – has a new way forward.

Stay tuned for our second blog post, where we’ll explore a second shift in leadership development: Leadership Development is Experiential.

Is Change Challenging You - Or Are You Challenging Change?

Ten years ago, fresh out of graduate school, I took on a Herculean task: I was assigned ten of Berlin’s lowest performing schools, given a small project team, a meagre budget, and told: Go turn around these schools!

Phew. Needless to say, it was the most challenging assignments I’d ever taken on. We built work plans and strategies to drive change, but often had little to show for them. I brought together key players — principals, school officials, parents — but they disagreed about the right way forward, blamed each other, or looked to me to fix their problems. It often felt like a lonely and futile endeavour.

Many of the change agents we work with at KONU share similar stories. Here are two voices:

Driving change is just so challenging. It’s tempting to throw your hands up in the air and proclaim: “It’s too much! I can’t do it.”

My own experiences — both the triumphs and trials — of driving change are what motivate me to support change agents in their endeavours today.

At KONU, we bring together practical, research-based frameworks and insights from leadership development, change management, and adult development theory to help you successfully drive change in your teams, organisations, and communities. Here’s how we help you:

CHALLENGE YOURSELF: BUILD YOUR CAPACITY TO LEAD CHANGE

Driving change requires challenging others — and that will be challenging! Being the person who drives change won’t earn you brownie points. As Steve Jobs said: If you wan’t to make everyone happy, don’t be a leader — sell ice cream.

For many of us, leading change means starting with the person in the mirror. What are the assumptions and patterns that are holding you back from leading change? If you, like me, lean towards people pleasing, that might be a desire to avoid the conflict that comes with change. We help you develop yourself, so you can be the change you want see in your team, community, or organization.

CHALLENGE SYSTEMS: VIEW CHALLENGES FROM A SYSTEM PERSPECTIVE AND UNCOVER ROOT CAUSES TO ENABLE PROGRESS

You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created them, Albert Einstein said. Driving change therefore requires shifting the way we look at challenges, taking a more comprehensive view. A low-performing school is often the result of many stakeholders’ failures.

At KONU, we draw on frameworks from systems thinking, and organisational learning to help our clients diagnose challenges, uncover perspectives, and understand resistance. By digging deeper, we help you go beyond surface-level change work. Some questions that guide us are: What will be preserved and cherished? What sacrifices are required and how can we grieve in order to forge a way forward? What does a compelling vision for the future look like?

CHALLENGE EVERYONE: BUILD CHANGE COALITIONS THAT HOLD STAKEHOLDERS ACCOUNTABLE

Complex problems can’t be fixed by one person alone: Heroic leadership looks great on movie screens, but rarely matches reality. Change leadership means mobilizing groups to take on their challenges collectively. When I worked with schools, that meant holding principles accountable for developing and upholding their school’s mission and programming; holding teachers accountable for improving instruction; and school operators accountable for much-needed renovations.

Today, at KONU, we equip change agents to do just that: To identify relevant stakeholders, have them articulate their part in the change, and hold them accountable for implementation. And we support clients by holding the space to engage in collective change work, offering support, provocation, and accountability. A recent example are the UN SDG Leadership Labs we facilitated in Somalia, the Philippines, and Bangladesh.

Driving change ten years ago, I wish I’d had these learnings and insights to guide me. Join our community of change agents and receive the support you need to drive change: Get in touch or join one of our upcoming workshops.

Coaching, A Powerful Tool for Tackling Organizational Change

by Alice Feng

How transformations Fail

Every year, organizations spend millions of dollars on transformation programs, only to accumulate rephrased mission statements and “refreshed” policies and procedures. When the workshops have finished and the trainers have left, the impact on decision-making tends toward zero. In typical transformation initiatives, only 10 percent of what is taught in training is transferred into practice[1]. Even well-intentioned, well-funded transformation efforts will lead to little material change unless reform architects facilitate the final step of transformation: the transfer of new skills, knowledge, and practices from workshops to the workplace. This last step is notoriously elusive. However, organizations can dramatically increase their odds of success by integrating one crucial practice: coaching.

There is an untested assumption that undermines most training and change initiatives. We assume that once a workshop participant can demonstrate their new skills in a simulated learning environment, those skills will automatically transfer into daily work. Unfortunately, the acquisition of skills and knowledge in training does not lead to the transfer of skills into practice[2]. Trainees who participate in these programs frequently fail to sustain their new techniques in the workplace, frustrating efforts for change.

Take, for instance, education reform. Education researchers are painfully familiar with failed reform efforts from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Despite a substantial federal budget, widespread willingness to change, and meticulous research quantifying the impact of new teaching methods, nationwide reforms led to few material changes in teaching. Hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars later, classrooms exhibited the same problems with academic quality and social equality that had first motivated reforms in the first place.

Coaching is the missing puzzle piece

Dissatisfied with these failures, education researchers Beverly Showers and Bruce Joyce sought answers. Thirty-five years later, after dozens of papers, school trials, and tweaks to their implementation strategies, Joyce and Showers isolated the critical component for skills transfer: coaching. According to their research, a best-case scenario without coaching – i.e., training that included theory and discussion, demonstrations, and practice and feedback – led to only a 5 percent adoption rate in the classroom. Coaching improved that rate to 95 percent.

The table below summarises Joyce and Showers’ findings:

Source: Fixen and Blase, Implementation Research, 2005.

These results are not limited to education. Researchers have observed similar effects in every field where working with people is at the core: community health providers, family specialists, clinicians learning motivational interviewing, managers, and finance professionals, among others. Coaching enables change across a broad range of professions because it targets the issue at the heart of change and transformation efforts: the necessarily messy, trial-and-error process of transferring any new practice, method, or set of principles into daily operation.

The reasons that coaching can target these core issues include:

• Coaching supports trainees in taking risks necessary for learning. When applying new skills, mistakes are inevitable and can be confronting. For example, a new manager learning agile may need to unlearn methods she once relied on for success – precisely when she feels the project is at risk of failing her standards. Coaching can provide support at critical moments when the new manager feels most vulnerable and are most likely to abandon new strategies.

• Coaching takes place in real-time. It deals with specific and contextual issues, facilitating transfer to a world that demands flexibility and adaptation. Without understanding how to “think” in a new model, trainees will likely imitate an ineffective textbook strategy or revert to old practices. Coaching allows trainees to practice “thinking” using a new model to adapt to situations they have not encountered in training.

• Coaching helps trainees build the patience they need to help others adjust. For example, a manager shifting to an outcomes-based management style may find his direct reports resisting change by demanding to be assigned specific tasks rather than accepting ownership of a project. Team members need time to adapt to a new environment where their previous strategies for gaining favor no longer work. Coaching provides the space for managers to facilitate behavior change from others. 

How is coaching possible at scale?

One-on-one coaching is costly. Sourcing coaches with the right expertise can take time. Reform leaders may only accept the idea of incorporating coaching if they can overcome scale and cost considerations.

Joyce and Showers also faced concerns from schools about the cost of scaling. In response, they replaced external consultants with peer coaches. When they made this change, they found that not only did peer coaches help teachers transfer their new skillsets just as well as external consultants, but the coaching structures also generated school-wide benefits. Teachers had learned how to teach themselves. When faced with further reform initiatives, teachers in Joyce and Showers’ studies reused the same peer structures to teach themselves to change. Peer support has ultimately helped schools learn how to learn.

Peer coaching structures come in many forms, and each organization will require a different setup. As they continued to experiment with peer coaching, Joyce and Showers distilled three practices on which the success of peer coaching depends:

• Omit personal feedback evaluating performance. Input of this kind may cause performance anxiety and distract from the learning task. Focus instead on joint planning, goal setting, and problem-solving to apply the new skill; the goal is to experiment to learn how to use a newfound skill with fidelity . Joyce and Showers were surprised to find that coaching was effective without evaluative feedback, contrary to their expectations.

• Reverse the role of coach and coachee. The observing peer should think of himself as a coachee, whereas the peer applying her new skills fulfills the coach role. This reinforces a less obvious fact: the observer is learning as much as the person practicing. In addition to seeing what works, the observer learns from his partner’s mistakes by seeing what doesn’t work. Together, they learn by problem-solving what isn’t working. This reversal of roles creates a safe environment for mistakes, which, instead of being the cause for embarrassment, become crucial fodder for learning.

• Ensure the engagement of the whole organization. Joyce and Showers found that teachers who were involuntary participants in peer coaching had similar transfer outcomes as teachers who were not coached. Here, it is assumed that before reform efforts are given the green light, those involved have the backing and push from senior leadership to motivate change.

Coaching is a powerful component of any initiative, potentially driving material changes forward where other transformation methods have failed. Peer coaching can help organizations scale, laying the foundations for sustained progress by giving organizations the tools they need to teach themselves. When designing and implementing change initiatives, as in any effort to transfer theory into practice, it’s essential to welcome the messiness that will come. Coaching will increase the odds that reform will bear fruit in that process, even in the trickiest of transformation efforts.

[1] Roger In a white paper in 2002, Robert Rogers of DDI

[2] See Beverly Shower and Bruce, and Implementation research, which arrives at a similar conclusion

Reflections on 2022 from Emily Wyner

A couple weeks ago, a handful of KONU colleagues and I had one last team huddle for 2022. We crowdsourced questions with which to reflect on the year, and took turns sharing highs/lows, joyful and meaningful moments, what we said “yes” to and what we said “no” to, our most memorable mistakes, and more. In the interest of staying accountable to my own learning and development, I’m writing to share some of my reflections from 2022 with KONU. 

Alongside my colleagues, this year, I’ve supported clients working in cutting-edge scientific research, hospitality, public school systems, federal government agencies, and, especially close to my heart, Jewish nonprofit organizations. KONU's focus is on building capacity for individuals and teams to make progress on sticky, complex challenges—climate change, deep hxstories of colonization and racism, influencing and managing amidst bureaucracy or structurelessness, partnering across difference, and so much more. My best days taught me a lot about the value of centering curiosity and connection, and holding a learner’s stance in this work. 

It hasn’t always been easy. A few of us were implicated in a client project in which we noticed participants weren’t really sinking into the learning experience. We ended up diagnosing a rather significant oversight from the contracting phase. (One of my grad school professors once told me, “90% of what you and a client need to know about each other, you learn in the contracting phase.” Yet we didn’t pay close enough attention to the signals emerging in this one). Unfortunately, too, we realized—perhaps too late—that we hadn’t truly built a safe, shared container for mutual learning with our client contacts. So when we encountered the aforementioned challenge, we weren’t equipped to adapt together, and the decision was ultimately made to sunset the project. 

I also held a lot this fall while my teammate Andy was (mostly) out on parental leave. In many ways, I’m proud of how we prepared for this season. We made space to ensure smooth handoffs with our client partners and involved other members of the KONU system in building up support structures for me while Andy would be out. We also danced well together in adaptable, sometimes-improvisatory ways once Andy came back 1.5 days per week to co-facilitate virtual programs with me. And still, it was a lot! I found myself working early mornings and late nights with the increased workload and feeling lonely in the distance between knowing that others wanted to help while also feeling that accessing such help would itself be difficult (“so much contextual catch-up!”) 

Now, I’m sitting with questions and ideas for experiments around how smallish organizations can absorb the shocks of capacity transition while honoring—and protecting space for—sacred transitions such as new (or new-again) parenthood. What expectations need to shift or be challenged among ourselves and with our client partners? For future parental leaves, might we experiment with the team members staying on “practicing” the roles they’ll hold in the parent-to-be's absence while they are still working, so there’s time for mentorship and feedback before the rug is pulled out from under? 

Both this season and earlier in the year, one of the not-so-helpful patterns I noticed in myself was asking for help too late (or what felt like “too late”). There are lots of hypotheses I could offer as to why that may have been so—being a new team member trying to prove myself, the gendered tendency of women/femmes not wanting to “burden” others, individualism as a pattern of white supremacy culture, embarrassment that I wasn’t finishing things in as timely a manner as I sensed other colleagues could, and so on. Whatever the reason, I’m committed to working that edge in 2023. While the big goal is to ask for help and invite collaboration earlier—namely, as soon as I sense I do or might need it—I’m keen to identify and test my worries and assumptions that may be getting in the way of that, with help from the Immunity to Change framework. 

In case it isn’t obvious yet, something I cherish about KONU is our collectively shared commitment to ongoing learning and development—for our clients, of course, and very much for ourselves! This year, KONU has supported me in pursuing coach training through Coactive Training Institute. (I finish up in February—ping me if you’re interested in working together!) Just a couple weeks ago, too, I participated in a certification program that enables me to facilitate the Organization Workshop from Power and Systems. Created by Barry Oshry, a pioneer in the field of human systems thinking, the Organization Workshop is an immersive experience designed to help participants see common—and often difficult—conditions and patterns of behavior in organizational life, then explore new and more powerful possibilities. Oshry’s work acknowledges the challenging conditions of “burdened Tops,” “oppressed Bottoms,” and “torn Middles”—which track to organizational hierarchy and other, more shifting contexts, too—while identifying choice points that enable more system-empowering results. I reference Oshry's work frequently in my facilitation and consulting practice, and getting certified as an OW facilitator has been a years-long dream of mine, ever since being an Organization Workshop participant in grad school with Ilene Wasserman and Jeffrey Branch. 

As I look ahead to 2023, one of my top intentions is to bring more humor and playfulness into my facilitation practice, while maintaining focus on the work at the center. (Humor can be a tool—and it can also be a mechanism for work avoidance!) I’m also teaching Nonprofit Management at Temple University again this spring under the departmental leadership of Jeffrey Doshna, and I look forward to developing new ways for my students to engage in praxis alongside local nonprofit organizations. 

Through this transitional year, I feel profoundly grateful to work alongside colleagues who both challenge and support me. Co-designing and co-facilitating, sparring about podcast production (check out KONU’s “On the Balcony”!), practicing productive disagreement, co-creating a staff retreat in which two spirits of our organizational system were named*, practicing case consultations on our real work challenges, and so much more—it’s been a beautiful ride, y’all. Michael, Netaly, Tim, Liz, Andy, Judit, Josh, Ariana, Pascal, Ashley, and Dörte—it is a joy and an honor to work alongside you. 

See you in 2023, world! 

Emily 

*Psst, ask me about Thor and Sh’babble, and creative ways to play with polarity management. 

Orchestrating Conflicts

The story could start in a kitchen, in front of a large pot in which a wonderful vegetable soup is simmering. A nice variety of vegetables bring in different flavors, and your job as chef is to make sure that no single flavor dominates, that the vegetables stay crisp - but not raw - and that a delicious soup can be served in which the vegetables aren’t overcooked or bob in the pot, limp and tasteless.   

To orchestrate conflict in a way that people grow, learn from it, and ultimately advance, you must make sure that it is meaningful and urgent and at the same time people don’t burn out from intensive pressure, learning, and conflict. So how can you manage a team or an entire organization in the way that the temperature is right and it's neither too cold nor too hot?  

Conflicts can be very helpful and drive learning and development if they offer the right balance between challenge and support for those involved. Especially as a leader, you might ask: How can I control this balance? How can I regulate conflicts to the right temperature? For one, you need to constantly be on the lookout for signals on where the temperature is at (What signals? See this blogpost!) and then regulate the heat so that the temperature is just right for a productive learning and change.  

When you experience a conflict next time, try experimenting with the following ideas if you feel the heat needs to be increased for learning to occur:  

1. Focus on difficult and key issues  

2. Give the participants more responsibility than they feel comfortable with (well-dosed (over-)demand)  

3. Let conflicts become noticeable and explicit  

4. Tolerate provocative comments  

5. Name the group dynamics in the here-and-now and use them to illustrate key challenges of the group (e.g., handing over responsibility to authority, branding someone as the buck and seeing all responsibility on that person, getting stuck on technical solutions)  

When it gets too hot, no one has enough bandwidth to be able to learn. To reduce the heat, try one of these ideas:  

1. Address those aspects with the most obvious and technical solutions (technical?! Check out this link to tech/adapt) 

2. Give structure by breaking the problem into smaller pieces and giving a time horizon, you can also set rules for decisions and tasks for different roles 

3. Take responsibility for difficult problems for a short time  

4. Use avoidance mechanisms (take a break, tell a story or a joke, do an exercise, ...) 

5. Decelerate the process: Challenge norms and expectations less rapidly or less at once  

People in formal authority roles tend to act all too quick and cool down the atmosphere to ensure harmony. And I honor that, we often want to avoid escalation and not be blamed for a lousy, tense atmosphere. In addition, authority figures must also live up to the expectations of their role, ensure order, provide orientation and also protect against conflicts escalating beyond what is tolerable. So, especially as in a position of power, it's important to regulate the temperature high enough for learning to take place while keeping the heat in check so that everyone continues to feel safe enough to act bravely. Not an easy task!  

The Evolution of Leadership Without Easy Answers with Professor Ronald Heifetz

On the season finale of On the Balcony, Michael Kohler welcomes Professor Ronald Heifetz, author of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the book that has formed the focus of this season. Professor Heifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. His work addresses two challenges: developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership and developing transformative methods for leadership education, training, and consultation. He joins Michael on this episode to discuss the evolution of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the erosion and rebuilding of trust in our polarized world, and the new frontiers for his framework.

The Adaptive Challenge of Parenthood

Heifetz  opens the episode by discussing how his own thinking in the  last thirty years has been shaped by his role as a parent. Parenting is fundamentally a series of adaptive challenges filled with curve balls and developments unique to each child, requiring parents to develop a stance of adaptability. Parenting, therefore, provides a good model for thinking about the stances that are demanded by people practicing leadership and responding to the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges that organizations, companies, governments, and our societies as a whole are facing.

Developing Leadership Without Easy Answers

Heifetz traces  the origin of his interest in leadership and authority to his identity as a Jew and his mother’s experience growing up in Nazi Germany, as well as his own experiences coming of age in the 60s when the anti-war and civil rights movements were dominant themes. This developed into considerations of the dangers of charismatic authority, the value-laden nature of the term “leadership,” and how he might teach people to be immunized against the temptations of grandiosity and power in order to practice leadership that would serve people instead of one’s personal interests.

The Virtues and Significance of Authority

While working as a young doctor, Heifetz began to see authority as an integral part of social relationships that can’t just be tossed away. He now believes that a blind spot in current thinking, especially in areas of innovation like the tech industry, is a failure to recognize the virtues and significance of people in positions of authority. Instead, there is widespread distrust of authority in society, often because the violation or abuse of trust by authority is an extremely common experience. Heifetz uses the example of politicians, who are in the business of selling their point of view in return for votes but often change their tune to pander to their constituents, thereby eroding their trustworthiness. It requires bravery on the part of a politician to stand their ground and engage with people in an attempt to change their minds, but—as seen during the COVID pandemic, when countries with the lowest trust in government suffered the highest death rates—it is a vital part of effective leadership.

The Practice of Repairing and Restoring Trust

Heifetz points out that, in these days when distrust is endemic, anybody’s authority is at risk, and even once people’s trust is given, it can be brittle and removed in an instant (as seen in the rise of cancel culture). Therefore, people in positions of authority must develop a mindset of ongoing repair, particularly those with the privilege of assuming they will be trusted. Heifetz points to himself—a white man, a doctor, and an established academic—as someone who walks into a room full of students expecting to be trusted. He admits that learning this trust is easily lost was hard. He has developed a model called the non-defensive defense, which helps him to receive anger and critique with grace and respond in a way that owns the need for amends without being overly apologetic beyond what’s true.

Activism and Mobilizing for Adaptive Work

Heifetz looks at the massive adaptive challenge of systemic racism and sexism from the point of view of an individual who wants to be an activist. Taking on such a role requires a willingness to understand what they are asking of people in wanting them to change. However, often those who are the most passionate activists are those who have been oppressed and, therefore, may find it understandably hard to engage with the world of the oppressor. Without this empathetic imagination, though, it is much less likely that sustainable change in hearts and minds will be achieved. For example, in the case of sexism or racism, activists often rely on pressure and protest which tends to create some progress, but also resistance. Heifetz, therefore, thinks we need to come up with additional strategies for working these issues and recognize that change will ultimately come when those within the system challenge it, so activists cannot afford to reject them wholesale.

The Future for Leadership Studies

Heifetz finds it enormously meaningful that people are building on his ideas, taking them to new places, and pushing the ideological frontiers. He hopes to keep encouraging that process by developing new courses on adaptive leadership and writing new works dealing with issues like renegotiating loyalty, dealing with traumatic history, and managing multiple identities. He sees the future of Leadership Studies as building from its focus on the intermediary processes of influence, persuasion, and proper managerial efforts to analyze what it takes to respond to challenges that require cultural innovation and evolution.

Listen to the season finale here:

On The Balcony With Prime Minister Papandreou

A very special guest joins Michael Koehler in Episodes 10 and 11 of On The Balcony to discuss “Assassination”, Chapter 10 of Ronald Heifetz’s seminal work, Leadership Without Easy Answers, which not only touches on the challenges of adaptive work and leading beyond your authority, but also the dangers of becoming a lightning rod when the heat gets too high, and the importance of inclusion, pacing and purpose in adaptive work.

Why Distress Can Be Disastrous 

Having served as the Prime Minister of Greece in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, George Papandreou is more than familiar with the challenges of leadership, leading beyond his authority, and acting as the butt of contempt. When Papandreou took office, the Greek government was riddled with corruption and debt and in necessary need of change. And when Papandreou took on the challenge to make that change happen, he was met with a lot of resistance. 

But as a long-time friend and colleague of Heifetz himself, Papandreou wasn’t surprised.  Adaptive work is challenging, especially when society at large is in distress. 

Severe distress can make people cruel. 
Empathy, compassion, and flexibility of mind
are sacrificed to the desperate desire for order”
— Ronald Heifetz

The Search for Scapegoats

In the months following the financial crisis, when Greeks and other Europeans yearned for the very normalcy that created the problem in the first place, Papandreou bravely elected for change and transformation instead.  During this time, he found that instead of looking for solutions, people were searching for scapegoats: “others” to which they could easily attribute their blame, frustrations, and hatred.

Countries turned toward isolationism instead of working together.  Above all else though, Papandreou found that, despite the resounding changes he created in his own country, other countries outside of Greece continued to distance themselves from them. At least partially due to this fact, other countries refused to acknowledge that the financial crisis was not solely a Greek problem but one that affected the rest of Europe.

In Greece, I had the authority to make the changes. 
Outside of Greece, I was the leper in a sense.
— George A. Papandreou

The Challenges of Change

It’s no secret that there is immense danger in practicing leadership.  Papandreou shares how he and his family received death threats and verbal blows in the street as a result of the crisis, despite the fact that it occurred through no fault of his own.  Even still, Papandreou is honored to have been asked to lead the country during the most difficult of times.  

Intervention Through Inclusion

During the Euro crisis, Papandreou was involved in negotiations in two different arenas: internally, as he asked the Greek people to make huge sacrifices around yet another set of tough austerity measures, and externally, as Europe negotiated new systems of financial protection. In the midst of this, on Heifetz’s advice, he also planned an intervention built on the idea of inclusion, proposing a referendum on accepting the conditions of a bailout and the creation of a wider coalition. He faced a backlash from the traditional political world for this risky idea and ultimately chose to resign in order to allow the coalition to form. However, Papandreou believes his actions have ultimately been seen as the right choice, though he regrets that the chance to do some deeper adaptive work may have been lost.

Maintaining Empathy and Communication in Times of Distress

Before he became Prime Minister, Papandreou served as Foreign Minister during a time of great tension in Greek/Turkish relations. His predecessor having resigned, Papandreou immediately had to deal with a major crisis, with large amounts of distress and fear. However, instead of giving into the cruelty and loss of empathy Heifetz highlights as a common result of severe distress, Papandreou chose to open a dialogue with his counterpart, İsmail Cem, in an effort to lower tensions. Through their discussions, both men found someone they could trust and be honest with, a key factor in reframing and repairing their countries’ relationship.

Building Trust and Understanding Through “People’s Diplomacy”

Papandreou was keen to build on the progress he and Cem had made, and together, they began to discuss how to build trust and understanding in a way that could help solve both countries’ problems. One way they did this was to start including their citizens in foreign policy, an approach they termed “People’s Diplomacy,” which touched something in the people and quickly ‘caught fire’. This demonstrated the possibility of reframing the Greek/Turkish relationship from animosity to one of mutual benefit—as illustrated in the increase in trade between the countries from three million to three billion.

The Values of Leadership

Heifetz says that leadership is not neutral; there are values behind it. Papandreou agrees, explaining his belief that leadership should be motivated by the values you hold, particularly in times of distress. He states that leadership driven by strong, consistent values allows people to unite and deal with conflict in a way that isn’t violent, something he sees as a key issue for today’s world. For Papandreou, solving conflict through peaceful means, in a way that helps people feel dignity, is an important part of the adaptive challenge of making change, and that can best be achieved by being conscious of higher values when called to serve.

Listen to these two special episodes here:

Bridging Factions While Leading without Authority

On the eighth episode of the On the Balcony podcast, Michael continues to analyze and discuss Ron Heifetz’s book, Leadership Without Easy Answers.  This time he does so with the input of Julia Fabris McBride, actor, author, and President and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center. McBride is interested in leadership as it functions without authority and authority as it bridges opposing factions.  

Bridging Factions and Embracing Diversity

At KLC, Julia works daily to foster civic leadership and create a stronger and healthier Kansan community: one that embraces diversity while fostering understanding of others’ viewpoints.  It can be hard fulfilling an authority role though, when the people you lead all have differing versions of success.  

But there is great strength in diversity too.  Progress happens when we embrace diverse opinions and backgrounds, seek to understand one another, and make decisions that benefit the group, rather than just a select few.

“In fact, many people daily go beyond both their job description and the informal expectations they carry within their organization, and do what they are not authorized to do.”

Ronald Heifetz

Leadership Beyond Authority

In Julia’s experience, many people do work beyond the informal expectations and duties of the role, doing what they’re not authorized to do.  And these people are the ones that aren’t afraid to make the biggest waves– for better or for worse.  

Take a few of these examples: Gandhi, Margaret Sanger, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr - all people woh acted outside their scope of authority, because they simply weren’t given any. And because they led without being granted authority in the first place, they were able to ask the provocative questions and influence society to think differently.  As a result, they made waves in domains where oftentimes they weren’t even welcomed.  

The Risk Myth

It can be risky to practice leadership without the legitimacy of authority, but we often forget just how risky it is to operate with authority, too.  Wrong moves still make you vulnerable; you could lose your job faster than you got it or get kicked out of office.  

If we practice leadership successfully  though, all of those “risky” efforts pay off.  At the end of the day, people like Julia and Michael are strong believers in speaking your mind and asking hard questions.  So as we close out today’s blog post, I encourage you to do the same.   We need people on the front line that are willing to stretch beyond their comfort zones. We need people to stand up and practice leadership without authority.

What hard questions do you wish you would ask more? 

Leadership: It’s Not About Whether People Like You, It’s About How Much People Learn

A common trap we fall into as executives is to be overly preoccupied with whether others like us. This is only natural, particularly when popularity is an indicator of how likely it is you’ll keep your job! Just think of the close watch politicians keep on opinion polls! But even for those of us in more secure positions - don’t we all crave to be liked?

But leadership is not a popularity contest. Leadership often entails going beyond one's job description. The truth is that leadership often requires: 

• Confronting people with difficult realities and challenges they’d rather avoid. 

• Disappointing others: Acknowledging that you can’t take the challenge off their shoulders or fix it for them

• Questioning the status quo: Are the existing structures, processes, and roles as well as the prevailing norms still right?

• Helping people develop the new capacities and skills needed to adapt to a new reality

A mindset shift that many of my clients have found helpful is from “how can I make sure that people like me?” to “how can I help people learn?”. 

Here’s Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School)’s take on this: 

“The new leadership mindset needed is what] I call ‘organizing to learn’. [...] Organizing to learn involves a genuine humility about the limits of what you know. This mindset is driven by a sense of curiosity and commitment to accomplishing amazing things, but knowing that you can’t do it alone — that you need to create conditions whereby people can jump in and learn as they go.”

So how can you become a leader who prioritizes learning over popularity? How do you engage others in learning? And what inner work have you had to do to cultivate a learning mindset in yourself?

Here are three strategies that I often share with my clients. You’ll see that each strategy has two dimensions: The “outer work” of organizing others to learn - and the “inner work” of overcoming the need for popularity, and instead cultivating humility and curiosity. I’d love to hear what resonates with you!

Strategy 1: Identify who needs to learn what. Frame challenges as learning challenges.

When confronted with a challenge, we’re often quick to problem-solve and to change structures or processes in order to solve the problem. Yet such technical fixes often fall short. Many of the complex, adaptive challenges our teams and organizations face are adaptive and require learning. Framing challenges as learning challenges is an essential leadership skill. Ask: What learning (or unlearning) needs to take place for my team or organization to adapt and thrive? Who needs to learn what? Which behaviors, beliefs, mindsets and values are serving us - and which stand in our way? How can I frame our challenge as a learning challenge?

Start with yourself: What do I need to learn in order for my team to adapt? How am I contributing to the problem? How can I be a role model for learning - including by allowing myself to be vulnerable and sharing my learning processes openly with my team or organization?

Strategy 2: Raise the heat. Challenge and provoke to inspire learning.

Learning takes place when there is cognitive dissonance: We are confronted with a piece of information that does not fit with our existing code of how the world is supposed to behave. The child development theorist Jean Piaget coined the term “disequilibrium” for the state of distress required for learning. Disequilibrium is challenging - and it can cause fear and anxiety. It’s not pleasant, but necessary! Getting groups to learn requires regulating disequilibrium. Ronald Heifetz of Harvard uses the analogy of regulating a thermostat in your home: You raise the heat to move people out of the comfort zone and into a learning zone. At the same time, you want to prevent disequilibrium from spilling over into panic. Transferring this insight to your team or organization, the questions become: How high or low is the disequilibrium in my team - are they in the comfort, learning, or panic zone? Do I need to raise or lower the heat - and what might that look like?

Start with yourself: If you, like me, tend to avoid conflict, your inner work will entail building your stomach for conflict and disequilibrium. You don’t want to be the first one to panic when the heat rises! If, on the other hand, you tend to play the role of instigator or trouble maker, you may want to work on toning back your heat-raising interventions, reading the room carefully to ensure others’ remain engaged in learning.

Strategy 3: Hold and contain: Create the conditions that enable learning

Learning is only possible when we are encouraged to experiment, innovate, make mistakes, and fail. This is only possible when we feel safe to show up as beginners. Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety to describe team cultures that enable risk taking and learning. Ronald Heifetz borrows the term “holding environment” from child developmental psychologist Donald Winnicot - it’s the affirming and supportive space that enables children to learn.

Ask yourself and your team: How safe does it feel to openly disagree in this team? How frequently do we share and learn from mistakes? Invest in strengthening the holding environment of your team by modeling fallibility, encouraging ongoing learning (including from mistakes), and strengthening bonds of trust between team members.

Start with yourself: In order to cope with the stress - and yes, the likely dip in popularity - you’ll experience as you exercise leadership, you too need to be held! Find a mentor, have an executive coach, cultivate multiple roles (not just your work role!), and invest in the practices and sanctuaries that help you stay grounded and allow you to rejuvenate.

The Adaptive Challenge of Managing Growth

Throughout this season of On the Balcony, we’ve looked quite a bit at the distinction between leadership and authority, from the resources roles of authority can bring to the practice of leadership to what’s constraining about them. Being in charge can be a dance on a razor’s edge: on one side, the status quo and the risk of failure through complacency; on the other, too much change and the potential for resistance. This week’s guest, Jevan Soo Lenox, has spent the last decade of his career attempting to help organizations find their balance in this dance, utilizing the adaptive leadership framework to ensure both technical and adaptive work are included in their approach.

Jevan has held Chief People Officer roles at multiple exciting Bay Area growth companies, including Blue Bottle, Stitch Fix, and most recently, insitro, where he has brought the adaptive leadership framework to life in fast-paced hyper-growth environments. Today, he helps us bridge the lessons from chapter seven of Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers into today’s world, sharing his history and experience to provide powerful lessons for executives and people developers.

In his reading of chapter seven, Jevan was struck by the common thread of failure resulting from an avoidance of adaptive work. It’s so common for people in charge to carry the burden of all the work, both technical and adaptive, and as a result to overpromise what can be achieved. The result is often disastrous: forward momentum is lost and opportunities are missed.  Eventually people get frustrated with their executives and politicians and push them out. 

Within organizations, much of that work has to do with an atmosphere of change, risk, and high emotion and that razor-edge dance those in leadership roles must do to maintain a balanced environment.

These emotions include the loneliness and pressure experienced by those in authority  roles, who often feel the weight of responsibility and secrecy leaves them isolated. Jevan finds joy and meaning in helping CEOs and founders feel less alone in their work and think about bringing others in without shying away from their responsibilities. He does this by discouraging an over-emphasis  on technical expertise  and encouraging adaptive collaboration—after all, it’s a very different feeling failing together than failing alone. And this encourages the kind of deep empathy Jevan sees as a fundamental part of the macro level of adaptive work, allowing those in charge to push their organization out of its comfort zone without getting dragged down by others’ fear and anxiety.

Explaining the challenges of adaptive work in a way that really lands for people is a core part of negotiating the messy business of growth. It’s important to give people the space and grace to evolve their understanding and capabilities so they can do the work with you and be excited to share in it. A classic example is inexperienced managers at high-growth organizations, who are constantly on the edge of their incompetence and lack of experience. Jevan explains that the adaptive challenge writ large is how to lift this new generation of managers and other leaders to where they need to be. And the key is to model a balance between technical expertise and adaptive ability to ensure authority roles are filled by those who can understand the job and the employees doing it.

Leadership: It’s Not Your Role, It’s What You Do

Too often, we think of leadership as a position we hold: team lead, managing director, CEO. And we think we can’t lead until we’ve assumed that role. Or, we think of leadership as a personality trait that some people are born with – and we hold back on leading because we feel we lack the necessary charisma or gravitas. I’ve been there myself: For many years, I thought of myself as too introverted to be a great leader. These are ways of thinking about leadership that are self-limiting. 

A different way of thinking about leadership is that it’s something you do – it’s an activity. I was first introduced to this paradigm of leadership as a graduate student at the Harvard Kennedy School, in a class taught by Professor Ronald Heifetz. Heifetz’ defines leadership as the activity of mobilizing groups to make progress on their toughest challenges. Leadership requires naming those challenges and fostering the environment that stirs people into action and drives them to change. 

We need good leadership, and lots of it - from many places and people. Viewing leadership as an activity creates manifold opportunities for leadership: The intern, the activist, the new hire can lead with a question or a poignant observation that stirs up the status quo. People in charge can mobilize change by using their authority to create environments that allow people to give up privileges, renegotiate norms, build new capacities, and innovate.

Curious? You can learn more about leadership and what makes it different from authority here.

Leadership on the Razor's Edge

As we’ve seen throughout our discussion of Ronald Heifetz’s Leadership Without Easy Answers in the On The Balcony Podcast, authority is not always easy to maneuver. While it’s true that authority comes with an enormous set of resources for the practice of leadership, it also comes with constraints. This week’s guest is all too familiar with this reality.

Ian Palmquist, the Deputy Director at the Equality Federation and a Board President of the Adaptive Leadership Network advocates for the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals.  After years of fighting for inclusive legislation and the Anti Bullying Act, Palmquist possesses a great deal of experience with authority roles, especially in satiating one side’s appetite for change and the other side's fear of it. 

Heifetz refers to this dilemma as the razor’s edge, and authority figures are constantly at risk of cutting their feet.  It’s extremely difficult to manage disparate expectations and goals. 

That’s why, in Palmquist’s career it’s all the more important for him to maintain that precarious balance.  He does so by acquainting himself with the tools, resources, and constraints that accompany authority.  He remarks that he and the LBGTQ+ movement were at its height when they were willing to meet others where they were, go in with an open heart, and take them on a journey toward understanding and acceptance.  In that way, he could move closer to mobilizing  stakeholders and reach his goals.  

Not only must Palmquist reckon with party lines and opposing elected officials, he must also work to meet the expectations of those in his own community.  Navigating the fine line or the razor’s edge as an authority figure is not for the faint of heart.  For people like Ian though, it is crucial in the fight for equality. 

Listen to this powerful episode on Apple or Spotify.

What Leadership Really Is

As the world is experiencing profound transformations - how robust is your own operating system of what good leadership looks like?

Leading From Within

The word ‘leadership’ is more often than not associated with notions of prestige and strength. 

Forget the stress and pressure of managing a team and the airtight discipline required to run a well oiled machine, the work’s glitz and glam can distract hopeful managers from its true realities, and it isn’t easy.   

Radha Ruparell is the well known author of Brave Now (2021) and the Head of Global Leadership Accelerator  for Teach for All.  And she is the guest on the recent episode of On the Balcony. Tasked with developing collaborative leadership in education globally, Radha not only knows what good  leadership looks like, she also knows how to do the work herself. 

And while it’s great that we focus on an authority's status and the role’s deliverables, a great leadership cannot function without internal growth and some form of grounding.  Leading her organization and in the midst of publishing a book, Ruparell suffered from a severe case of COVID-19 that she almost didn’t survive.  

For the first time in her career and life, Radha had reached a breaking point.  She learned about the importance of asking for help.  After leading a team of people that relied on her and her alone, she needed to find someone else that could be that person for her in return.

In the moments when all hope seems lost and all anxieties feel insurmountable, we must look inward, ground ourselves, and harness our  self discipline to care for us as they would for others.  

In Ron Heifetz’s book, he mentions the holding environment, as a space to feel supported to do the difficult adaptive work.  But too often we focus on what that environment can do for others, rather than also thinking about what holding environment is needed for the person in charge.  We need anchors: places, people and practices that sustain us while we support others: whether it is yoga, meditation, walking, listening to music, gardening or calling an old high school friend. . 

Gone are the days when reaching out for mental and emotional support was a shameful taboo.   Having the emotional capacity to navigate uncertainty, frustration, and pain is no small feat, but if we come equipped to the table with an internal ability to deal with conflict, capacity for compassion, and self awareness, we make that struggle just a little bit easier. 

Listen to the Podcast here

What People Think Leadership Is vs What Leadership Actually Is

There are so many version of “leadership” definitions floating around. A lot of them are really problematic. 

As I’ve been re-engaging with Heifetz ‘Leadership without Easy Answers’ - I’m realizing how orienting his distinctions have been for me and my work. And the same is true for many of our clients. 

Here are the TOP 10 confusions about leadership:

People often think, or assume leadership is:

• something you're born with

• charisma

• influence

• power

• serving

• heroic

• a position or title 

• solving and fixing

• creates followership and buy-in

• having a vision

• getting people where you want them to go 

• is glamorous 

What leadership actually is…

• something that can be learned and developed

• comes in many forms

• means mobilizing others to confront difficult challenges

• disappointing people at a rate they can handle

• building new capacities

• a team effort

• a practice, a verb

• making progress

• possible from many positions of authority

• asking difficult questions 

• supporting learning

• is difficult 

We are excited to hear your reflections! 

Working with Authority: Overcoming the Binary between Admiration and Allergy

In Ronald Heifetz’s chapter three of Leadership Without Easy Answers, he delves into the concept of authority, and on this episode of On the Balcony, Michael Koehler is joined by Professor Kim Leary to talk about just that.

As a chief Harvard psychologist, a Senior VP for the Urban Institute, a Professor at three Harvard Schools, and an advisor to two White House administrations, she is well versed in the ways of leadership, authority, and those who use and abuse those positions.

Leadership Vs. Authority

Studying authority, both in theory and practice, Leary has learned just how different authority and leadership are. After reading this chapter, we’ve come to understand that authority is a role, whereas leadership is a practice.

Being in a position of authority, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean you are leading. However, as Leary points out, authority work is an important practice, providing direction, protection, order, coordination—work that is often referred to as management. 

Authority happens in relationships. And as Ronald Heifetz puts it: “We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.” Working in politics, Professor Leary is all too familiar with the empty promises made by those in positions of authority. Conversely, she’s also acquainted with authority as it intersects with leadership in the most positive ways.

We’ve shared a few more thoughts on Authority and Leadership here.

Working as a part of Biden’s White House, she remembers fondly the sensation of getting a goal achieved with her team. Professor Leary argues that good authority work isn’t supposed to dominate and limit the capacity of the team’s individuals; it’s supposed to unleash their potential, pull from different strengths and lived experiences, and boost morale.

The Authority Binary

In their class on Authority at Harvard Kennedy School, she and Ron Heifetz noticed how people often fall into the binary way of relating to authority: those who accept or even admire authority figures and those who reject and rebel against them. In their class, Professor Leary and Heifetz invited their students to explore further options to work with authority and her students’ measured reactions to authority on a gradient, and, like Heifetz, came to conclusions about different ways of relating to authority. 

This conversation grounds itself strongly in our current political climate. As candidates for public office vie for power by playing on the emotions of the general public, it’s easy to see how positions of authority are manipulated and abused; it’s what makes Professor Leary and Michael’s discussion on episode three of the On the Balcony podcast so relevant.