Michael Koehler: Welcome, to the final episode of Season One of On the Balcony. My name is Michael Koehler, and I'm your host.
Throughout this season, we read all 11 chapters of Ron Heifetz’s, Leadership Without Easy Answers, and heard from 11 amazing practitioners how these ideas have influenced their practice of leadership. Today, we'll talk with the author himself. Professor Ronald Heifetz is among the world's foremost authorities on the practice and teaching of leadership. He founded the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, where he has taught for nearly four decades. His work addresses two challenges; one, developing a conceptual foundation for the analysis and practice of leadership. And two, developing transformative methods for leadership, education, training, and consultation. In 2016, President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia highlighted Heifetz’s advice in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture.
My first encounter with Ron Heifetz was exactly a decade ago when I sat in his classroom, and I still remember the first moment he, as the professor, sat down in silence, in a class of 112 people - long, awkward silence. People getting uncomfortable, nervous, frustrated. This is one of his methods for people to experience the longing for authority to provide quick answers, guidance, solutions.
Man, I came all the way to Harvard to learn from this man, and all he does is sit down in silence. Well, it turned out, learning is adaptive work. And we don't just learn by listening to a lecturer but need to engage deeply through experience. So, I began making sense of my own discomfort with an authority figure not providing solutions, and instead explored my own relationship to authority as something that has been pretty differential a bunch of times. Besides the experiential pedagogy, Leadership Without Easy Answers was the conceptual anchor for this learning.
So, today, we'll look back at the evolution of this book and the framework, and we'll hear Heifetz’s reflections around the erosion and rebuilding of trust in our polarized world. We'll also explore some of the frontiers for the framework, and he'll share with us some insights from his newest course at Harvard with the title, "Leadership from the Inside Out: Self, Identity, and Freedom–with a Focus on Anti-Black Racism and Sexism," two of the most difficult adaptive challenges of our time.
All right, let's dive right in.
Welcome, Ron.
Ron Heifetz: It's a real pleasure. It's great to see you, Michael.
Michael Koehler: Ron, when you introduce the important leadership work in your book, in your introduction, you write, "It seems only fair that I introduce myself, and baggage, and the resources I carry." And then we learn about your roles as a psychiatrist, a physician, musician, professor, and that's a practice we've been doing with the guests throughout the seasons. You know, in each episode, guests were invited to share their roles, their role identities, the wisdom, the biases they've been bringing to their own work. And I'm curious as we're engaging today with you, if you compare Ron Heifetz 2022 to the Ron Heifetz of 1994 when that book was published, like, how would you describe your role identities today? Who are you?
Ron Heifetz: Well, I would say the biggest evolution in my evolutionary leaps or growth in my own life has been simply from raising children who were, four, and six years old at the time of publication. But the book was written during the years of their, from, you know, birth to publications. And to now, they're both married, they're in their 30s, one has a nearly one-year-old boy, and they're happily married, and they're doing really well in their lives. And so, I'm on the other side of an extraordinary part of life - more than a chapter of life, of fatherhood. And I've learned so much from being a father, that has then influenced how I think about the challenges of leadership in holding people through challenging times, challenging events, challenging moments.
And I think that all parents are constantly adapting to the needs of the moment and the breakdowns of the current moment that happen in a person's life - you know, a bad game where they didn't perform, or a bad test where they didn't perform, or a fight with a friend, or a breakup with a boyfriend, or a difficulty with a girl, or problems in love, or romance, or as they got to be teenagers, and then into college years, and the dog getting sick and dying. And so, as my wife, Catherine, would say, from her mother, ‘life is lifey’; which is one of her mother's favorite phrases. And life is lifey, you know, it just constantly throws at you new curves and new balls to try to hit down the field, and you miss a lot of times, and then you try to figure out how to do it better.
So, in some ways, you kind of think that raising children, given that it's probably the most ancient human task, has been distilled into a technical problem, where you can follow a recipe and come out with just a beautiful souffle every time. But children aren't like that. Life's not like that. Life is lifey, and each kid is unique, and requires its own unique sensing and responses, so that in some ways, parenting, has for me, been paradigmatic of an ongoing set of adaptive challenges in which developing a kind of stance of adaptability-- you know, sometimes we just hope that, "Okay, we're going to resolve this adaptive challenge, and then we can go back to sleep, or we can go back to peace, or we can go back to tranquility, or we can sort of return to a stable place." And definitely, you have those periods with children where, you know, things are just going along pretty well. You've got the routines down, they're doing fine, but then something is destabilizing over time.
For me, the chronic challenges in that marriage were enormous sources of pain and stress for me and for the kids, and obviously, for my ex-wife. And then, the decision to divorce before they went off to college, so that my decision was, "Better now while I can still hold them through the transition, as they were moving into their junior and senior year of high school, rather than wait till they were off in college--" a lot of people said, "Well, just wait till they're off in college." But then, who's going to hold them through the process? Who's going to manage the transition? Some Dormitory Resident Advisor, Resident Assistant.
So, I just think that having a stance of being ready for whatever ball is going to be hit towards you, you know, if you're a shortstop in a baseball game, and that kind of readiness for, "I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm ready to move left, I'm ready to move right, I'm ready to jump, I'm ready to fall on my chest to try to catch the ball." And that kind of ongoing adaptability to the unpredictable changes of reality was a good model for thinking about then the stances that are demanded by people practicing leadership in responding to the ongoing stream of adaptive challenges that organizations, companies, governments, and our societies as a whole are facing.
Michael Koehler: Yeah. I love that. I love that the parental role as both an opportunity, sort of the developmental task is constantly present, and the realities of the roles are changing, right? How your children are growing up, is different how you were growing up. And yet it is also-- I mean, as I've been re-engaging with your book, that book, as much is about authority as it is about leadership, and it's kind of the ancient authority role, as well that's staked in, and the holding work so present. Love that.
So, we're inviting also the father, Ron, into this conversation with that identity, and I'm so thrilled to kind of look back at this book, look a little bit at some of the questions that showed up throughout the season, but also, of course, we're super curious to hear, a little bit later in the conversation, about some of your current thinking applications, teaching. You've introduced a new class at Harvard, which we're like really excited to learn more about.
But I want to spend the first part of the conversation looking a little bit back at that book, that first book of yours, and sort of orient it in the study of leadership. The way how I think about this book is really, one of the core, if not the core contribution, is like introducing all of these beautiful distinctions. Like, orienting leadership around the work to be done, which is adaptive work, distinguishing leadership from authority, distinguishing formal authority from informal authority, and really sort of busting a couple of those myths that are out there, that have been held, and maybe are still being held by many people around kind of lonely, heroic, "I come and fix it" kind of charismatic leadership concepts, approaches.
So, I'm really curious to hear a little bit about sort of, what drew you back then to that really rigorous work on presenting, offering, these distinctions to the field of leadership studies? And then, as you look back at those 30 years, how has the field of leadership studies evolved? Like, how have they gotten traction? But also, you know, somehow I feel like we're also still wrestling over some of these concepts, and still people don't fully agree, and that notion that leadership is an activity, is maybe not as widely spread out as some of us would hope. So, how have you been sitting with that arc of evolution in that field?
Ron Heifetz: Maybe I can first approach it autobiographically, because when you ask, "What generated the zeal, or the interest, to try to clarify these distinctions, or create these ideas?" First of all, I didn't do it alone. Some of these distinctions were a product of my relationship with Riley Sinder, who was my Chemistry professor, ran the laboratory in Organic Chemistry. When I was a college student, he was a doctoral student, and we became very good friends, and then we became intellectual partners. So, the distinction between leadership and authority, actually, was originally his intuition. Then it took me 10 years of working on the distinction to figure out, "What were we saying? What did that intuition mean?"
But I would say the origins of the problem come out of my identity as a Jew. Because my mother having grown up in Nazi Germany, she was born in 1925, and Hitler came to power in March of '33, and she finally got out of Germany in January of '38. So, she was 12 years old when she left, it was an extraordinary blessing - got to America before the war started, and her own nuclear family was spared. But I grew up, of course, with songs and stories about the old country, and not primarily in Germany, because her family had moved to Germany right after World War I, in about 1920. But the old country in Eastern Europe, in what's now Ukraine, in the Lviv area, but at that time of her childhood, it was Poland, and at the time of my grandmother's childhood, it was the Austria-Hungarian Empire. So, we have that piece of history that is a strong piece of history, and I grew up after that history, I was born in 1951. So, the stories I grew up with, the songs I grew up with, were still very recent, and very raw in the memories of my parents.
But then, I came of age during the 1960s, and occupying buildings, demonstrating in the spring of my junior year in high school, 1968, I was volunteering for Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign in California, and was there the night he was assassinated, in June of 1968, at the Ambassador Hotel. And because the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were dominant themes, and because my parents had a very strong orientation to civil rights and justice, that history was extraordinarily alive for me. So, when I went off to Columbia University in New York in 1969, politics was in the air, and thinking systemically about the world was in the air.
The idea that there were systems afoot, that Hitler wasn't just an individual phenomenon anymore than Trump is an individual phenomenon. These are systemic phenomena, and one has to understand what constituency they're playing to, and what pains they're taking advantage of, and whose fears and concerns are they preying on as they build constituencies. And so, thinking systemically about problems was in the air in the late 1960s and early 1970s when I was in college and coming of age. So, an animating question for me, as in my late '20s when I began to think about these issues was, "What are the dangers of charismatic authority? How can people be seduced, and not led, but misled so that in the end, they regret as much as anybody else what's happened?"
More than 10 million Germans died in World War II, their country was split in half. The most extraordinary cities with historic architecture was destroyed. You know, people of the highest culture were rendered poor. So, you wake up in 1945, 1946 as a German person, and you ask yourself, "What happened? What did we do?" And then you begin to discover some of the atrocities that were sort of behind a veil that you had an inkling of but didn't quite know the proportions of and the nature of. So, the dangers of charismatic authority were an overriding concern for me.
And so, when Riley came up with that idea in one of our conversations, it dawned on me that maybe the practice of leadership is a value-laden word and that there's a reason why people place on their bumper sticker, "Vote for Sam for, leadership." Not for good leadership, not for creative leadership, not for moral leadership, but just leadership. They say, "Vote for Lucy, for leadership." And the implicit assumption is that leadership is something people want, people want leadership. And they assume that leadership means, their problems are going to be solved. You know, they look to you to solve problems.
So, one major emotional thread, you know, in my history, that has fueled a lot of passion around this is diagnostic process, sort of trying to understand, or the historical process of trying to understand how charismatic authority emerges, and what are the dangers of it, and then how could I begin to teach people to be immunized against the temptations of grandiosity, and the temptations of power, in order to practice leadership that actually would serve people and not simply serve your own personal interests.
Michael Koehler: It's fascinating for me that, you know, this is a time, certainly, in Germany where there was like a big anti-authoritarian movement as well, and kind of a lot of systems got shifted, and changed in the way how universities worked, and schools worked, and like sort of a lot of kind of collaborative bottom-up approaches, if you want, that emerged in the '60s and '70s. And yet it's fascinating to me, in a world where we also talk about, you know, agile, and holacracy, and you know, all of these terms, you know, your framework is still anchored pretty profoundly in good authority work as well. Right? The resources that you have from roles of authority are highly emphasized, and the constraints, of course, but like this idea of leadership can happen with authority, it can happen without authority. Like, fascinating that you didn't kind of go all the way and say like, "Authority is bad", but actually like, "Let's find out what good authority also looks like."
Ron Heifetz: Right. And I think that was a process for me too because I was deep in a culture that was anti-authority. And even within the Jewish community, you know, there's deep ambivalence towards authority because, historically, you survive by keeping your head down. And you couldn't trust the political authorities of the lands in which you were a minority. So, you, like a lot of colonized peoples, you only trusted the people within your family, or within your own neighborhood, but you didn't trust people who were across the pass into another valley.
So, the distrust was pretty natural to me. And growing up in the '60s, the distrust was pretty natural as we were, you know, occupying buildings at Columbia, or then, I spent a year studying the cello, studying music in Los Angeles and was at UCLA part-time at the time. And so, I was occupying buildings at UCLA too in the spring of 1972. And the critique of what we considered to be the distortions and corruptions of people in authority were, you know, passionate, impassioned. And I think there are many things that I would still agree with in regard to the nature of those critiques.
However, what I think I came to understand because I was thinking systemically, is that if this is a system, there must be something more going on than simply corrupt authority figures. You know, there's something going on with the people, and there's something going on with the culture of the people, the bonds of trust amongst the people, the affiliations amongst the people, that make them more susceptible to mis-leadership.
You know, I also began to train as a doctor. And before I got interested in these challenges of leadership, I went to medical school straight out of college, at the age of 22. And I certainly had an inclination to challenge authority. And I got in trouble at times at Harvard Medical School because the doctors didn't like the questions I was asking, you know, like, "Why aren't we telling the patient the truth?" Or, "When should we be paternalistic, or when should we not?" And you know, because at the time, you tended to not tell patients about having bad illnesses, you tended to be very parental. And I wasn't sure that was ethical. So, I was raising all these questions, but at the same time, as I began to wear the white jacket myself, and have patients look to me, I began to appreciate that there was something pretty sacred about the trust they were giving me. And holding that trust required thoughtfulness, that the moral dilemmas of having bad news to tell wasn't trivial. You know, at what pace? At what frame? How do you sense the patient? And those experiences came out of that, you know, those experiences as a young doctor where that dilemma was very real.
And all of a sudden, I began to see-- I mean later when I had the distinction between authority and leadership and I began to try to inhabit, "Well, what's the nature of this authority thing?" And instead of seeing it as this brick to toss overboard of history, I began to see it as an integral part of social relationships. And the more I looked around the world, talking with people in organizations, starting to have children myself, having practiced medicine a bit, I began to see that you can't just do away with authority systems. Certainly, one of the critical moments in my psychiatry training was beginning to think about, "What's the role of parenting as an authority figure, and what are some of the dysfunctions of parents?" Because they didn't have good models of authority in their own lives, or were overwhelmed by the stresses of raising the child for a variety of reasons, and therefore, weren't able to provide a trustworthy source of direction, and protection, and order in the life of that child, and then to continue to evolve how those practices of authority should change as the child develops.
So, I think it's a real problem, a real blind spot, in current thinking. The people who came up with the-- Agile comes primarily out of the technology industry, and I've fortunately had the opportunity to work with people since the early years of Google, and Microsoft, on how they think about the challenges of having an organization designed for innovation.
And the tech industry has been real pioneers in coming up with new ways to do that. But a lot of the lessons that are captured, for example, in Agile, tend to not talk about the virtues and significance of people in positions of authority. And then, how does one balance as an authority figure? The balancing of order and disorder in a variable way, depending on the particular kind of innovation you're trying to achieve versus the efficiencies of production that you're trying to achieve, and the challenges that the environment is throwing at you. You know, they could be exchange rate challenges, or new technologies, or new competitors, or new growth opportunities that you want to pursue.
So, we can't afford to have an allergic reaction to authority systems just because they've been abusive to many of us, you know, historically. And to many people, much less so in my own life, but there are many people in my classes who, if you ask them to raise their hand, if they have experienced violations of trust by authority, or abuses of trust by authority, a lot of people will raise their hand. A lot of people have experienced it directly in their own lives because of the mistakes that parents, or uncles, or siblings, have made in physically, or sexually abusing their own members of family, or priests, or other authority figures, you know, coaches, or teachers.
So, the more it becomes permissible for people to talk about the abuses they've experienced, the more we can begin to understand the scar tissue that accumulates when these fundamental trusts are violated. And I say fundamental because I think it's genetic. I think a child is born into the world designed to trust. You pick up a child and the child just melts in your arms. Now, that's not true if you try to pick up a lizard, or an animal that's designed to live alone. But if you pick up an animal that's designed to live in community, like people are, and like a lot of animals are, they'll just naturally trust you. You know, a baby horse will just trust you. A baby chimpanzee will just trust you. A baby kitten will just trust you. You know, they're designed to live in groups, and we're designed to live that way.
So, the trust is actually the default setting. And a child has to learn to distrust, either because they're taught by a parent to be afraid of this, or afraid of those people, or because the authorities in their life begin to abuse that trust and the child begins to accumulate their own scar tissue.
Michael Koehler: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit more about this whole theme of erosion of trust, mistrust, abuses of trust in authority figures. I was struck when I re-engaged with those middle chapters where we look at Lyndon B. Johnson and Nixon, and kind of the deceit that has been taking place there. And I think there is a piece there where you say, you know, the institutional damage that happened in that time in the '60s and '70s, to those institutions, to governments and the resulting lack of trust has been sort of carried forward into the times when the book was written, in the '90s. And then, when I read it today, I was like, "Well, where are we now in the world vis-a-vis trust in institutions?" It looks like the trust has eroded even more. So, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts around like why these authority structures are so prone to violating the trust relationships, particularly maybe in the political space.
Ron Heifetz: It is generally difficult for people to disappoint other people. We all are designed to seek validation, and affirmation, and even affection, respect. People who go into politics run for office campaigning to gain people's respect, admiration, trust, validation. They say, "This is what I'm going to champion on your behalf," in the hope that that's what people are looking for. Because they're selling something, and in the marketplace of politics, constituents determine what politicians sell because politicians are trying to gain these goods from their constituents, these goods of affirmation, and validation, and ultimately, trust in the form of a vote.
So, by the time you win office, you have worked really, really hard; first, to identify what is it that people are looking for, and then, to try to turn yourself into what is it people are looking for at the risk of corrupting a lot of what you might have believed about yourself, or believed about the world five years before, or even three years before. So, it's not uncommon that we see politicians change their tune, not because they've learned about the world and fortunately keep evolving their points of view, but simply because the constituency has changed its point of view, and so, the politician changes their point of view in order to, again, gain the affirmation, and ultimately, then the authorization of that constituency. Voting is a process of authorization. You know, if you gain enough votes, you gain the authorization.
So, it's really, really hard to go back home to your own district and disappoint people, and to say, "Let me tell you what I've learned from being in the State House, or in the mayor's office, or in the city council, or let me tell you what I've found from being in the Congress, you know, in the United States or in any country." To go home to your own constituents and say, "I've got bad news to say," or," Let me tell you how I've changed my mind," or, "I told you I'd champion this, but actually, what I've learned is that's not going to be good for you in the long term. So, you know, I told you that I was going to champion for you, your jobs, and therefore try to keep your coal mine open, or try to keep your particular business open, or your tobacco farm open, but what we've learned is that it causes cancer. What we've learned is that it's causing X, Y, and Z. And so, on behalf of the future, and on behalf of the children and the grandchildren, we're going to have to, in this generation suffer some immediate losses on behalf of other gains." Now, that's a hard message to get across. You know, because you're having to somehow engage in a very artful form of disappointing people at a rate they can stand, in a way that they can understand, that makes the pains of change acceptable to them.
Now, I believe, I have enormous faith in people's willingness to make sacrifices. People are willing to send their children off the war and give up the most precious thing they have on behalf of purposes that they believe in. So, I do think it's possible to get people to make sacrifices or to pay short-term costs for longer-term gains. But it's a very hard job, and most politicians shy away from it, and instead, pander to their constituents rather than meet their constituents and engage them. And it's made worse by the industry of political handlers and the media, because if a politician does have the courage to go out and have a series of forums, you know, town hall meetings, for example, to explain periodically, the evolution of his or her own thinking as a product of becoming more deeply immersed in the issues, and wanting then to educate their own constituents. Some of the constituents are going to get angry, and they're going to yell at you. They will throw the proverbial tomato at you.
Now, politicians don't like to have publicity about them going back home to their constituents and getting yelled at, because that becomes then its own story, and the journalists will then write about that story, and then that accumulates like a snowball, more momentum of negativity around that politician. They're really frightened about that. So, ironically, and I think dysfunctionally, but understandably, political handlers advise their politicians, "Don't go out there. People are angry with you, you don't want to get yelled at." And it takes courageous politicians, and very skilled politicians to go back out into the field, engaging with their people in the kinds of conversations that will help the people understand that the way they're thinking about things needs to be modified, not completely dumped, you know, maybe 90% of the way they think about things is just right, but some of the way they think about things has to go. And being able to do that-- now, we've seen some courageous politicians who do that. But it's hard, you know, you can get assassinated literally for that.
One of the great presidents who modeled this, I think, for many who've come after it was Franklin Roosevelt, who took advantage of the new technology called radio and gave talks to the nation. And people sat around their radio to hear the president talk to them. It was a brand-new thing. And he tried to explain to people, and if you read those fireside chats, or even better, if you read his press conferences, he had a lot of press conferences because he talked to the media and then hoped that the media would then transmit the message, you know, distribute it out to the millions of people in the country. So, he had lots of press conferences.
And during the press conferences, he really explained to people so that they would understand what he was trying to do, how he was trying to respond to the Depression, to the unemployment, and the nature of the innovative policies. And then explaining to people about the rise of threat in Europe, you know, before the war and then explaining to people when the war finally hit. So, one of the challenges for those of us in leadership development is to help politicians figure out how to both lead and stay alive.
And that's why we wrote that second book. Marty is a politician, Marty Linsky. And in part, we were trying to help people figure out-- this isn't heroic suicide, we're not asking you to engage, Mr. Politician or Madame Politician, in suicide. So, we appreciate that this is a hard needle to thread in figuring out how to disappoint people at a rate they can stand. But we really think that's the heart of leadership in a changing world where a dumbed-down citizenry is not going to have much adaptability to a changing world as we're seeing with climate change in the United States. You know, we're falling behind the curve.
Michael Koehler: So, who does this well? We know, from the book, there is no such thing as a great leader. There's like the moments and sometimes you figure it out, and sometimes you fail. But, when you look around in today's world, like, where do you see people in senior roles of authority really being good at doing adaptive work, disappointing people, framing the challenges in a way that engage people, and, you know, bring the ball down the field?
Ron Heifetz: The pandemic provided a good set of cases, a horrible set, but also a good set of cases where we could compare because the whole wide world was faced with, in a sense, a very similar challenge - a particular virus. But if you just compare the death rates in different countries, you can begin to then track back and ask, "Why is that?" And I think, I would say it's directly attributable to two things; the first, the quotient of trust in that society. Societies where there was more trust in authority, and more trust in institutions of authority, it was much easier to coordinate the behavior of masses of people in order to stay safe.
And in cultures where there was a low quotient of trust, then you had much higher death rates, the United States being the prime example where people didn't trust what the government had to say, and the government wasn't very trustworthy either. You know, they were getting mixed messages. The CDC was saying one thing, Tony Fauci was saying one thing, and then the President was saying another thing. But all of that into a culture, into a system that was already ripe for distrust. Distrust was already endemic in the United States by 2020. You know, indeed, the election of President Trump, I think, was a product of that distrust, that people just wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the system because they so little trusted the system.
But then you compare it to, Jacinda Ardern, in New Zealand and her responses to major crises - a volcano going, erupting, a massacre in a muslim prayer center in Christ Church, and then the pandemic. You know, and her responses, each of those were enormously adapted to the moment. She really stepped into it. She stepped towards the dilemma and then spoke to people in a way that called forth their resourcefulness, made demands of the people, said, "This is what we're going to need to do." You know, didn't presume that she had all the answers, and this was a technical problem, and just go back to sleep, and lean on me, and I'm going to fix it for you.
She treated it like the adaptive challenge that it was, and I don't think it's an accident that she's a woman either, because I think there's something in the socialization of women that make them more patient with the developmental tasks in which you're trying to develop people's capacity, rather than take the problem off the shoulders and fix it for them. The expert move of, "I've got the solution for you," is deeply embedded in the upbringing of boys and men. As a notion of that's what it means to be a good authority figure is that you're the doctor of last resort - you provide the cure. But I think women are socialized a little bit differently, and I think that's why Merkel stepped up to the plate differently than some other European heads of state, and Arden, and some others as well.
Michael Koehler: Yeah. Interesting.
Ron Heifetz: Now, it wasn't restricted to gender. You had some people providing leadership who are men, and have been in the pandemic, not just at the national level, but certainly, at the regional, at the local businesses, families. You know, you saw people in positions of authority cascade down to the micro level of people who were in charge of their own family. You know, trying to figure out what's the adaptation we need to make, and figuring out how to hold their family through the extraordinary stresses of kids at home, and people getting sick, people dying, who you can't even say goodbye to, you know, it was just enormous strains. But we have seen an extraordinary number of lessons to be captured, from people, high and low in positions of authority who practiced leadership during the pandemic in contrast to the misleadership that we also saw.
Michael Koehler: I'm curious, as we are getting in touch with the mistrust, maybe also over, you know, generations and institutions, and authority figures, both through actions people do, but also through what they may represent, the privileges they may represent, and the historic injustices they may represent. The work of restoring trust becomes more and more important. And I know you've been engaging in that thinking, also in a class in your collaboration with Kim Leary. Like, what can you tell us about the practice of restoring trust?
Ron Heifetz: I think it's an extremely important frontier for us to explore and develop new ways to perform. I would say that in these days where distrust is endemic, anybody's authority is at risk. And people tend to be brittle. That is, they can vacillate from pole to pole. At one pole, you know, they're trusting and hopeful, but then all of a sudden you make a mistake and they swing all the way back to the other pole of distrust, and contempt, and protest. And the middle options have been lost. It's hard for people to hold onto authorities as human beings who make mistakes, who sometimes, you know, violate trust, and then other times are completely trustworthy, and where then the call is to repair, not to cancel.
So, we need to develop, first of all, in people who are taking up positions of authority in business, in government, non-profits, a mindset of ongoing repair, because they have to assume that there are people in a mixed, heterogeneous group, some of whose litmus test of trust will go red at the slightest thing. And therefore, they have to be scanning the environment as a normal habit to locate where distrust is activated, and then to move into repair. So, that's very different. And I know, for me as a white man, and then, a member of the faculty at Harvard, and as a doctor, I tend to assume that people are going to trust me.
You know, I walk into a classroom, and particularly, after I published, Leadership Without Easy Answers, and was no longer a 30-year-old teaching, but a 40-year-old, and a 50-year-old, I would walk into a room and expect people to trust me. I didn't expect that when I was 33 and starting to teach, because I was younger than a lot of my students, and I knew they were testing me, and I'd have to meet the test. But as I became more established, you know, I expected to be trusted.
And it was a huge lesson for me to discover, "Wait a second, they'll give you five minutes, or they may even give you five weeks." But the moment you make a mistake, for some people, that trust is going to plummet, and then they will form their own faction, and they'll strengthen their coalition, and they'll talk behind the scenes, and it can really erode your capacity to foster learning. So, it was a hard won lesson for me to realize that, and I think in part, the lesson of a privileged person, to realize that trust was brittle, that a lot of people had deep scar tissue, and that I needed, as a routine, to be engaging in repair, and seeking out the nature of the breach of trust if it was something I needed to repair through apology of some sort, listening-- I've developed a model called, 'The Non-Defensive Defense' that then Kim and I worked on together, and it's still rudimentary, but you know, it's a basically eight-step process to be able to receive anger with grace and critique, you know, with grace, and then to respond in a way that is non-defensive, that owns the piece of the puzzle that you need to make amends for, but also doesn't overly apologize beyond what's true. You know, and still lays claim too that you have a legitimate role to play. You're not going to disappear, you're not going to be canceled, but yes, you made this mistake, however, you still think you're worthy of their vote. So, I think that the different ways one repairs trust has to obviously be tailored to the situation, to the individual issue, the culture of the way that repair can be performed. But we're starting to come up with at least the basic outlines of a path to guide people in that process.
Michael Koehler: I would love to talk systemic racism, sexism, patriarchy.
These topics were really highlighted over the past few years with several instances - George Floyd, MeToo, several others. And I know that that's an edge that you've been engaging in in a new course. And when we re-read Leadership Without Easy Answers, like, the first paragraph starts with the LA Riots from the early '90s, and the civil rights, like, the leadership moves around the civil rights movement are so prominent in this book. So, Ron, I'm so curious to pick your brain around how you're thinking about this massive adaptive challenge has evolved, and particularly hear a little bit around leadership moves, practices, that all of us can do in our families, our communities, our organizations. I see almost all of my clients are working that issue; whether they're leading a team, or a whole organization, or with an interracial relationship. So, what are you learning?
Ron Heifetz: The inquiry, for me, is organized around the theme of leadership, which means it's organized around the idea that there is an activist. There is a person who's trying to make things better. So, I'm not looking at it as a historian, or a sociologist trying to identify the larger patterns. I'm trying to figure out, "How should an individual who wants to be an activist, either from a position of authority, or from the streets, or from in the middle of some place, how might they think about these problems?" So, the first question that I want people to ask is, "What is the nature of the ask that you are making of people?" Because you can't mobilize people to do adaptive work if you don't know what you're asking them to do.
And many times, the people who are most passionate about changing things, the most passionate activists represent the communities themselves that have been oppressed, and therefore, have the most passion for justice, for righting these wrongs and achieving justice. However, it also makes them sometimes not very good at developing their own empathic imagination for understanding the world of the oppressor, and therefore being able to understand what are you asking of these people. And without knowing the nature of what you're asking of people, it's much less likely that you're going to be effective in creating sustainable change in their heart and mind.
In the absence of really knowing what we're asking of men and white people, for example, in the case of sexism, or racism, we're left with very few tools to generate social change. Generally, we rely on protest and pressure. The pressure may come from the legal system, because you can get the legal system to lay down new rules, which then create a boundary condition that generates pressure like the walls of a pressure cooker - we've got a new law, we've got a new rule, or we demonstrate in the street, and we create pressure on politicians that then creates pressure for new legislation.
Now, all of these tactics of protest which I write about a lot in Leadership Without Easy Answers, are extraordinarily important as one avenue for achieving change. However, what we've seen in the last 50 years, is that relying on that primarily has still generated an enormous pool of people who have resisted taking, internalizing, the need for those changes, or the implications in their lives. So, I think we need to come up with much more sophisticated ramifications, multiple strategies, for working these issues - both the most micro level within our families, within our neighborhoods, within our schools, within our classrooms, within our friendship communities, as well as more at the macro level of organizational systems, and political systems.
At every different level, from micro to macro, we need to be more inventive in how we make the ask, and then challenge people to consider that there are competing values, even within their own value set that need to be rectified, and that there are internal contradictions in some of those values that need to be rectified. That you say you stand for equality of opportunity and freedom but look how we're living. And that's what King tried to do in those demonstrations, as I described in that book, to illustrate for people, to give them evidence that would be piped into their living rooms.
The nature of the brutalities that were latent and hidden experienced every day by people on the streets in the black community, but for most people, it was not on their radar screen. So, we need to know the nature of the ask, and that means that if you're going to get white people to do white people's work, and you're going to get men to do the work that men need to do, both communities to clean up their acts in countless different ways, it's not the same act, you know, it's not one-size-fits-all. It's a different act. You know, there are countless forms of where patriarchy operates in a way that diminishes respect for women. And there are countless ways in which racism is manifest - anti-black racism, as well as racism towards other ethnicities, and the ask is not the same in each of those environments. So, one needs to build then, I think in activists, which is the nature of my course, this Fall and last Fall, the ability to be curious, and to even imagine into the world of people who are obnoxious to you, who are the last people you want to sit down with.
So, that's what I'm trying to do. You know, I'm trying to build people's ability to talk to people, who in the target audience of who you're trying to change and engage and to engage them then with the kind of curiosity and empathy that can begin to help those people sift through the cultural DNA that you want to help them preserve and honor from their tradition, as well as the cultural DNA that they need to discard, and then new ways of thinking. But it's really hard when you have so much pain in your belly from, not only historical wounds but wounds that are activated every day as your own people are getting killed or raped, to go beyond the binary way of listening, and to try to understand that when you're asking white people to sift through what DNA they preserve, but what DNA they discard, if you're asking them to dump all of it, they're going to resist.
I mean, resistance is a product of losses, and if you don't help them understand that there's a lot of virtue, and value, and tradition in their communities that you understand that is precious to them, and you're not criticizing that, but this is the part you're criticizing. Now, we have seen some people in the civil rights movement, or in the women's movement, achieve that kind of framing, but it's very hard for people to do. So, again, to just go full circle, it begins with understanding, what are you asking of the people whose hearts and minds and traditions you're trying to change?" What loyalties are you asking them to renegotiate with their own parents, and grandparents, and ancestors, who they have to finally say to themselves, "Wow. You know, grandfather taught me so many good things, but he also taught me a lot of crap. And in fact, some of the things that he believed were evil, they were really bad.” Indeed, some of the things my father has done is really bad. When I think about, you know, the affairs he's had, and his sexual behavior, and the way he talks about women, it's really bad. But I love my father, there's a lot of good that he is. So, he's a complex creature. How do you help people hold the complexity of the worlds they come from without resorting to a kind of a cheap binarism of rejection?
Michael Koehler: We've talked a lot about the activist. Many of them, as you said, come from the marginalized, oppressed communities. Many folks, of course, contain multitudes you know, 'oppressor' and 'oppressed' identities. So, you know, just curious to hear, when you work with folks that are more in the ally space - like, you know, white folks, men that want to practice leadership in their communities. Like, what options do you see for those folks around practicing leadership, and what are the edges?
Ron Heifetz: I think ultimately, the work of combating sexism and racism is not the work of women, and it's not the work of minority people. It's the work of white people and the work of men. So, men have to lead men, and white folks need to lead white folks, because the bonds of trust that already exist, the bonds of affiliation that already exist, man to man, and white person to white person, have greater resilience and ability than to absorb the conflicts that will emerge when the tough issues get addressed. So, what do white folks need to know in working with other white folks?
Well, first of all, as in all of the work that we've done in that book and subsequently, you have to be willing to disappoint the people who you care about, and who care about you. And that means that in that most micro way, a man needs to begin to be able to say, ‘No’, to the text messages that are sexist that he gets from his men group. Now, that's hard because you risk being ostracized from your friendship group, and you risk being ostracized from your colleagues at work. And many times, these text groups will exist both amongst colleagues at work, as well as within friendship groups, and saying, ‘No’, and figuring out how to say, ‘No’, is necessary. And so, a man needs to figure out how to begin to say, ‘No’, to his own friends, his own colleagues, his own family, and to say, "I don't think it's appropriate anymore for us to talk that way. And I think it's hurtful. I think we're hurting people. Just because it's private amongst us doesn't mean it isn't going to hurt people, because actually, when we do this, we create a permissive context for men to actually go out and hurt people, hurt women, particularly, or hurt gay people." You know, if it's a group of straight guys making jokes about gay people.
So, whatever the prejudicial statements are. And similarly, you know, white folks need to be better at countering the ways in which we traffic in racist ideas, racist assumptions about the world, racist interpretations about what's happening in society, for example, racist notions about crime that more than 100 years ago, as a product of very racist work done in the academy at Columbia University, and statisticians began to create a false association between black people and crime that became enculturated. So, countering these racist assumptions needs to be done at the micro level in the same way that the only way to fight the pandemic was at the micro level on a widespread basis.
It requires widespread, distributed leadership across the society from micro to macro systems in which people are willing to challenge their own people. And at the more macro level, you know, politicians needing to challenge their own people. We saw, you know, a moment of courage in that form when John McCain was running for president against Barack Obama, and in the middle of one of his campaign stops, he was engaged in a town hall conversation with prospective voters who were supporters of him, who began to talk about Obama as, you know, not an American, or not a good person, and McCain immediately jumped to Obama's defense. At that moment, he completely switched channels. Instead of attacking the guy’s' policies, what he stood for, he began to say, "No, no, no. This is a good man. And he's a patriot, and he's an American." You know, and I'm sure he sacrificed some of his constituents by challenging some of his own people.
So, we have to help people figure out the pacing, the sequencing, the framing, the construction of the alliances in the holding environment. You know, all the tools that are necessary to be able to challenge your own people, again, at a rate they can stand, be at the issue of racism within the white community, or sexism within the men's community.
Michael Koehler: Ron, I'm going to wrap us up with one final question, looking into the future. You've been teaching for almost 40 years, and this book is 30 years old. Many, many students who have gone through your classroom, have read your books, and we're curious - you know, what does the future hold for you, and hold for the framework? What is next?
Ron Heifetz: Well, it's enormously meaningful to me that people, that you and others are building from these ideas, taking them to new places, synthesizing them with other ideas from other people, and pushing the frontier in lots of ways. For somebody who is in the business of generating practical ideas, that's music to my ears. You know, when people are building from these ideas and taking them farther than I took them. So, that's what I hope will happen. And there are a couple of things that I hope to be doing that encourage that process; I want to create a combination of an online course that would be sistered to the Residential Executive Program that we give at the Kennedy School for Leadership Educators. And they have a year-long process that will have an online course beforehand, a residential piece that'll talk about teaching methods, and then, a follow-up piece that the Adaptive Leadership Network would foster, of ongoing support so that people can keep practicing and experimenting with how to teach leadership wherever they happen to be working. So, I hope that will expand the community of people exploring and experimenting with these ideas and building from them.
And then, I still have writing to do - I want to write up the Leadership from the Inside Out framework, what does it mean to renegotiate a loyalty, to lay a past to rest, to deal with traumatic history, and to then have the ability to step back from all of your own multiple identities, locate which one is activated, figure out if that's causing you to make a diagnostic failure in not seeking out the perspective of somebody in the environment who may be critical, but who's obnoxious to you, so that you could then have the freedom, can build the freedom to do the diagnostic work that one needs to do. So, I would like to write that up, and the two people who helped me design the course, Rahel Dette and [Stuti Shukla? 60:54], primarily, [Stuti?], but Rahel as well. We're working on a book to pull those ideas together.
And then, I'm also working on a piece with an economist in Poland who started a Center for Leadership, Cezary Wójcik, a more academic piece to try to help inform the academic community, because I think the academic community is still enormously passionate about leadership, doing an enormous amount of research, and most of it is disoriented because it still anchors the concept of leadership around authority, and executive functioning, or personal characteristics, but not the problem to be solved. It's not anchored around the work to be done. So, it focuses on a lot of the intermediary processes of influence, and persuasion, and proper managerial efforts, but doesn't really analyze what it takes to move the ball forward on these challenges that require cultural innovation and evolution.
That's what I hope to be doing, and I don't know how much longer I'll be teaching retail, you know, full-time courses. I'm still learning a lot, and find it meaningful, but I need to figure out what's the best use of me at this particular period of my life in giving leadership consultants, and educators and thinkers, the tools that I think might be useful, and a little bit less of the kind of the retail training and teaching work myself.
Michael Koehler: Ron, thank you so much for these insights, for all the inspiration, the development, the learning you brought to us through the teaching - the writing. We can't wait to read more. And I was just in touch with how timeless some of these old writings are, and how much interpretation and insights we can learn from them these days. So, thank you for that.
Ron Heifetz: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Michael. A real pleasure to be with you.
Michael Koehler: This is the end of Season One, and we'll be taking a break.
If you haven't listened to any of the other episodes, I encourage you to go back. Each of our practitioners has a wonderful leadership story to tell. From Mitzi Johnson's gun legislation to Ian Palmquist's LGBTQ rights. From Prime Minister Papandreou's bridge-building with Turkey to Ashley Stewart's boundary-crossing around Race Equity, or Jevan Soo Lenox's insights on managing growth. Rosi Greenberg's reflections on Sitting in Silence. Julia Fabris McBride's Collaborative and Community Leadership, Kim Leary's authority work, Lauren Lyon's explorations of Transitions and Teams, and Radha Ruparell and Susanna Krüger's insights on their personal work.
Also, I am curious to hear your reflections on Season One and your ideas for Season Two. Please share them via email. You can reach me at: onthebalcony@konu.org. That's my email - onthebalcony@konu.org.
I'll wrap up our show today with one final piece of text. It's the last portion of Leadership Without Easy Answers, the book that has inspired us throughout the whole season. Here it comes.
Heifetz writes: "Leadership takes place every day. It is neither the trades of the few, a rare event, or a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. In our world, in our politics, and businesses, we face adaptive challenges all the time. Every time we face a conflict among competing values or encounter a gap between our shared values and the way we live, we face the need to learn new ways. When a public official is asked to square conflicting aspirations, he and his constituents face the need to question deeply held assumptions. When an executive sees a solution to a problem, technical in many respects, except that it requires changes in the attitudes and habits of subordinates, she faces an educative task. When a subordinate close to the front line sees a gap between the objective he is told to implement and the facts he sees in light of the organization's purpose, he faces the risks and opportunity of leading without authority.
Leadership seen in this light requires a learning strategy. A leader has to engage people in facing the challenge, adjusting their values, changing perspectives, and developing new habits of behavior. To an authoritative person who prides himself on his ability to tackle hard problems, this may come as a rude awakening, but it should also ease the burden of having to know the answers and bear the uncertainty. To the person who waits to receive either the vision to lead or the coach's call, this may also seem as a mixture of good and bad news. The adaptive demands of our societies require leadership that takes responsibility without waiting for revelation or request. One may lead, perhaps, with no more than a question in hand."
On the Balcony is brought to you by KONU - Growing and Provoking Leadership – and hosted by me, Michael Koehler.
We’re produced by Podigy: Editing – Riley Byrne, Daniel Link. Cover art by Kenneth Amoyo and Rosie Greenberg. Our music is called ‘Change in Blue’ by Hannah Gill and the Hours.
Thank you for listening, On the Balcony.