Professor Ronald Heifetz
Leadership and Adaptability
Professor Ronald Heifetz - Leadership and Adaptability
- Good evening, everybody. A very, very warm welcome to Professor Ronald Haifetz. Thank you very much for joining us this evening on Lockdown University. Very, very special to have you with us. Professor Ronald Haifetz is among the world’s foremost authorities on the practise and teaching of leadership. He speaks extensively and an advisor’s head of government, business, and nonprofit organisations across the globe. Haifetz founded the Centre of Public Leadership of Harvard Kennedy School, where he has taught for nearly four decade. Haifetz paid a pioneering role in establishing leadership as an area of study and education in the United States and at Harvard. His research raises two challenges, developing a conceptual foundation analysis and practise of leadership, and developing transformative methods for leadership, education, training, and consultation. Thank you very much for being with us tonight. I’m going to hand you over to Carly Maisel and two of you will be in conversation. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Wendy. So Ron, this is a personal privilege for me, not only because this week is all about being in honour of the late Rabbi Sack, who I was very close with and had the privilege of knowing and spending a lot of time with over a decade. But also, because when I studied at Harvard Business School, obviously, your leadership style and your texts, and materials were a big part of what we looked at. So I really get to have an hour of enjoyment, but I’m going to make sure that we cover things other people will find interesting too. So, before we dig deep on leadership, I thought perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your relationship with Rabbi Sacks and what you admired about him as a leader and his kind of contribution to that space.
Oh, I miss him so much and I just miss him so much. I began to know Rabbi Sacks in, I think it was probably around 2003, 2002, 2004. He reached out to me. He wrote me a lovely, a handwritten note by an old-fashioned post because he had just published the book, “The Dignity of Difference.” And I think he experienced that that book was quite controversial with not so much outside the Jewish community, but within the Jewish community. Because in that book, he developed a theological argument that God’s intent was to create diversity in the world rather than a single theology and a single sort of universal religion. In his words, the God of Abraham might be the God of all people, but the truth or the wisdom of Abraham may not be the truth or wisdom for all people. And coming after 911, I think he felt compelled to say that the energy behind the Crusades, the energy behind religions trying to capture market share and dominate, or begin to believe that they had a- A singular truth was wrong. That indeed the notion that there’s a single truth was more a Greek importation into Christian and thought than its roots in Judaism. So I think, reached out to me because getting- finding himself emits this controversy. He was a voracious reader.
He didn’t sleep too much and he happened to do a lot of, he would just kind of search the web, Amazon and Google, and books, for books that might be interesting to him. And he came across my recently published book called “Leadership On The Line, Staying Alive Through The Dangers of Change.” And he read it and he found that it really spoke to his dilemma in an interesting way. And so he reached out to me. And shortly after that, he invited me for tea the next time I was speaking in London. And I went to his home and met Elaine, and we had a lovely tea together and spoke. And then I invited him here to Harvard to speak on a couple of occasions, and he invited me to London to speak, and we collaborated a bit on his book on leadership as a theme, running through his yearly commentaries on the Torah, on the five books of Moses. And I wrote the forward for that book, which was a great privilege and a lot of fun as well. So he and I became thought partners around certain issues. And I think loved and appreciated each other quite a lot. So I have not read all of Rabbi Sack’s books, but I’ve read several of them. And as I think, Tony Blair and- and Prince Charles have said, he had just a unique gift for articulation, for finding the words to convey wisdom. And I really enjoyed greatly going through his manuscript on leadership in detail and then commenting on it, giving him feedback on it in preparation for writing my forward. There’s nothing like getting into someone’s language than actually having to write it down yourself in one’s own note-taking and then comment on this turn of phrase or that turn of phrase, and what are the nuances, and how might it be said differently and what is captured in it.
So I have enormous reverence for his work, particularly for his ecumenical work. I think what was unique about Rabbi Sacks is the degree to which he could speak, not only within the Jewish community, but speak relevantly to all communities. And I think he was enormously, deeply respected by not only the Anglican community within the United Kingdom, but also the Catholic community by various more than one Pope. And then also within the Buddhist community, he spent time at the Dalai Lama and spoke within that community, and I think within the Muslim community. He was deeply troubled by the competition between the Muslim and Christian world, and really wanted, and some, as I would say, he wanted to lay the Crusades to rest. He wanted people to start enjoying each other’s differences, to take pleasure in each other’s differences, just in the same way that we take pleasure in going to a Thai restaurant or a Chinese restaurant, or Mexican restaurant, or an Indian restaurant, or different kinds of European restaurants. He wanted us to begin to appreciate the particular angle into wisdom and the particular angle into truth that different traditions had discovered over time, so that a Jew can make a Muslim, a better Muslim, and a Muslim can make a Jew, a better Jew instead of trying to persuade each other that we’ve got the ultimate truth. And I think he was deeply, deeply committed to that ecumenical vision of a world that can delight in difference rather than compete over their differences.
And in terms of the actual, the role of leadership, in the several decades that you knew Rabbi Sacks and since his initial outreach, and a very touch that you bonded over tea. How much do you think his leadership style changed and adapted as he took on new roles and kind of developed his role as Chief Rabbi and onwards? Did you see a change and do you think that’s an important part of leadership?
Well, I think that’s a really great question. I don’t think I observed him close up well enough in his daily practise to be able to evaluate that in any trustworthy or reliable way. What I saw from the beginning, and which I also saw through the 20 years that I knew him, was a series of capabilities that are quite precious in the practise of leadership, particularly from people in positions of authority. There are a lot of people in positions of authority who don’t practise leadership. And there are a lot of people who practise leadership without being in positions of authority. Authority and leadership are often considered synonymous, but they’re not synonymous. There are a lot of people who practise leadership from the streets or from the middle of organisations. And there are a lot of people at the very top of organisations or communities or politics who avoid leadership like plague. So he had a very special position of authority within the British community and within the Jewish community in Britain, and in informal authority in the wider Jewish world as a product of that formal position. And I think practised that position with enormous grace.
I think he was quite aware, and we see this from his biblical commentaries about leadership. He was enormously aware of the limitations of his formal authority. Indeed, he realised that his formal authority did not count for that much. There were not very many strings or levers that he could pull like a pilot and a cockpit, and be sure that the plane was going to turn this way or that way. His formal leverage was quite limited. It wasn’t absent. He had the powers to promote certain people, to allocate resources here and there. He had some formal powers with which to work. But I think he realised early on that most of the power that he had to do good was based on his ability to persuade people, to inspire people, to educate people, to illuminate people. And in a sense that I think when you look at his commentaries on the Tanakh, you see his ability to analyse the variability of leadership, the mistakes and the elegant moves of Moshe, of Moses, and of other key biblical characters in that those first books. And then of course, later in prophetic history and rabbinic history, dwelling much more on the critical role of educating, of illuminating, of awakening, the discovery in people, of framing the issues that could enable people to work an issue with greater inclusivity of a plurality of important views, rather than trying to use command to force a particular conception. So he really exhibited beautifully in himself, in ability to learn. And I think that ability to learn was derived directly out of the virtues that we discovered as Jewish people since ancient days, and which also gave us an enormous adaptability and flexibility.
And I also think in his own practises of leadership, he demonstrated that ability to learn. He also spoke a lot about the importance of being able to listen rather than speak. And he highlighted places in the Bible where the critical capacity of various biblical figures at key moments in time was their ability to listen and track and apprehend where people were at. And I think, he did that enormously. Constantly, he is trying to stay closely in touch with people throughout the diversity of his own Jewish community from reform to people who were even more orthodox than he was orthodox. And also the diversity of populations around the world outside the Jewish community altogether. He was able to hold the full complexity of the world and to hold all of it in his arms with a kind of a loving, curious interest and that ability then to listen with curiosity around the countryside was a critical feature in his ability to then speak to people in ways that might resonate with them, because he had spent enough time listening to them and finding out what kind of words, what kind of values, what kinds of framing of issues might be helpful, might move the ball down the field. I also think, he had a third critical characteristic, which you also can see in his analysis of Moshe, which is a stomach for ambiguity, a stomach for uncertainty. Moshe didn’t really know how long it was going to take. I mean, as we know, he gets to the Promised Land within about 15 months, as best as we can determine, by the seasons as they’re denoted. And then he sends scouts, and the scouts come back and say, to my interpretation, we’re not ready. We’re grasshoppers in our own eyes. So they’re going to see us as grasshoppers and those soldiers who look like giants to us and to whom we look like grasshoppers. Again, because we’re grasshoppers in our own eyes, we’re going to die.
So take us back to Egypt. And I think at that moment in time, Moses falls on his face in realisation that the job’s not done. That getting to the Promised land, which he thought was going to be the hardest part, getting the Israelites to trust him, to take them there through the desert, was not actually the hardest part. The hardest part was going to come next. How do you transform a society of people who are acculturated to a grasshopper mentality and slavery? How do you grow them and develop them into a self-governing community that can have faith in a God that you cannot see, and a law that’s not derived from a king or a Pharaoh. And that political evolution, which is beautifully described by one of my late colleagues, Aaron Wildavsky, who was a son of a rabbi and a professor at Berkeley. He describes in a book called “Moses, The Nursing Father.” Rabbi Sacks beautifully describes that process of Moses’s own evolution in discovering that the only way he’s going to bring the community into the Promised land is to develop their own capacity for self-government and for a equality of faith. And third, a self-confidence that they were not going to get within a year and a half of leaving Egypt. And so I think that he had that level of patience. That Moses ended up discovering that was going to be required. I think Rabbi Sacks had endless patience with the sufferings of the world at the same time that he couldn’t sleep trying to do something to get people to wake up and stop injuring each other needlessly.
So, I want to touch on something you said in the middle there around, I guess, somewhat flippantly, but sadly very true around the lack of kind of leadership in the world today, and people who have the authority to lead and yet, perhaps aren’t. So Tony Blair kicked us off yesterday in this week of Rabbi Sacks themed sessions. And he talked a little about political leadership and how people engage. And in the UK this week, the report on the government’s response to COVID is out. And it’s not a cheerful read. And COVID has put leaders around the world in a very challenging position. How would you talk about the kind of strengths that you’ve seen and the weaknesses that you’ve seen during that time? And perhaps, what leaders can learn?
Wonderful question. And you’re very right to say that the pandemic of the last year and a half has been a terrible, tragic schoolhouse for understanding the properties of leadership and distinguishing it from misleadership. Misleading people is not the same as leading people. And in a sense, a very good proxy for the quality of a political culture. And the quality of our political leadership is the death rate. And we see that we have very, very different death rates around the world. And I think those death rates are directly attributable to these two factors, the quality of trust in our institutions, which is related then to the quality of our political cultures or the degradation over time, and the erosion over time of trust within our different political cultures. And second, the quality of leadership from people in high political office. We’ve seen a lot of people in high political of office in high positions of authority fail to lead altogether. Indeed to- We’ve seen the mislead people starting with my own country, United States, in which the death rate in my country is enormously high, because we’ve had people in political authority who fail to practise leadership that has failed to get people to step up to the plate, face into the very harsh reality that the only way to fight this virus was through a distributed responsibility in which everyone in the society, all the way down to the most micro level of individual families, individual schoolhouses, individual small businesses, and individual small governments. Everybody was going to have practise leadership in mobilising adaptations and adjustments to this and invent, and be innovative in the face of this pandemic.
There was not going to be any answer from on high until we had a vaccine. And in the absence, and so the death rate in the United States is hugely higher than in New Zealand or in many other countries. So we’ve seen, for example, New Zealand as a good case, of really taking advantage of their island status and a political culture that does, that has been able to maintain trust in its institutions. And that gave the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, a great deal more leverage to then call the shots and have people coordinate a protective response that kept the death rate very, very low. But at the same time as she’s now demonstrated through three crises, a massacre in a mosque on the south island, a volcanic eruption, and now the pandemic, we’ve seen her able to step up to the plague and speak to people with enormous heart, so that people felt that she understood what they were going through. That she understood the ask that she was making of people. And then she used that trust to call people to account for the adjustments they would need to make in each of their own lives and livelihoods. That was not the case in my country. It’s not the case in many other countries like Brazil, where you have charlatans at the head of government who maintain popularity by feeding people fake answers and easy remedies.
The title of my first book was called “Leadership Without Easy Answers.” And there’s a huge market for easy answers. And the pandemic illustrates how strong a market it is for people who seek easy answers, even at the risk of death. So I do think the pandemic is a real illustration to step back and give you a little bit more of a conceptual model. There’s a real big difference between technical problems for which we have known solutions and where the job of people and authority who have authoritative expertise is to generate efficiency in operations to implement solutions, to take this known problem and fashion a solution. Kind of like a surgeon takes a complex problem, coordinates the operating room, coordinates the emergency room, and performs the surgery. But there are a lot of problems that we face that I would call adaptive challenges that only have partly technical components for which we can provide authoritative command, but which require people to develop new capacity. And COVID is a-
[Participant] Gallery. Silly.
of a challenge. Facing humanity on a global scale that has part technical dimensions, the doctors can say, wear a mask, social distancing, or now take a vaccine, but it also has a huge adaptive component. If people don’t develop new capacity, change some of their ways of doing things and certainly change their mindsets. We can’t achieve a collective solution. And so the pandemic really illustrates that the core domain for leadership is not authoritative command and authoritative answer giving. It’s the leadership that generates the right questions that will then mobilise people to face into a harsh reality and be inventive and innovative, drawing from the best of their tradition, but also innovating as needed to face into the challenge and thrive amidst it in a changing world.
So one of the big things that people talk about in terms of leadership, is showing vulnerability. And COVID is one of those times where nobody had the Oxford. And actually, even if they wanted to pretend they did, the goal post moved, we got mutations, vaccines were slow to roll out, most of Africa is still unvaccinated. There wasn’t anyone who could authoritatively stand up. Even in New Zealand, they were good on the lockdowns, they were slow on the vaccine rollout. How important do you think being vulnerable and honest with your flock, for want of a better word? Is in terms of leadership, especially in these kinds of crises?
Well, that’s a great question. One has to pace the rate of disappointing people at a rate that they can absorb and tolerate. If you disappoint people all at once, you’ll lose their trust and you’ll lose your authority. So one has to disappoint people at a rate that they can stand. And so, self-disclosure or the disclosure of one’s vulnerability or one’s uncertainty depends on the level of trust that you have in the bank. And it depends on the political culture you’re in and the degree to which people will trust you for telling them the truth, rather than trust you for misleading them and telling them an easy answer. And unfortunately, people tend to be prone to looking to authority figures, hoping that the authority figure will turn an adaptive challenge into a technical problem and provide an easy answer. So one has to slowly educate people to realise there are a lot of problems for which we can provide certainty, those technical challenges. But there are a lot of problems that involve uncertainty, where we’re going to have to discover what we need to do over time. And the time period will have uncertainty, for example, a financial crisis. And you’re not sure how long it’s going to take to dig your way out of that economic crisis or the pandemic would be another example. Now ultimately, you’d want to be able to have a trustworthy relationship with your people in a position of authority.
Because ultimately, one’s authority is pivots around the trust that you have in their eyes. So you want them to, over time reset their expectations so that they trust you for being straight with them rather than trust you for giving them easy answers. But sometimes, it has to be a gradual process of getting them to realise that they should trust you for honesty, including your own uncertainty, rather than trust you for certainty. And unfortunately, in a lot of political cultures, what looks like quote leadership to people is authoritative certainty. So you end up generating a marketplace for authoritative certainty, and then people compete by positioning themselves as if they have all the answers. And in a political competition then people who look like they have all the authoritative know-how and they know the way forward will often win high office. And then you’re kind of stuck because that person gets elected, having over promised, and now they have to somehow back off that cliff when they realise they can’t really deliver those results. So they’ve got to slowly dissuade people and reacclimate people. Now over time, it would be better if we could mature our political cultures. So that citizens begin to realise that they want their politicians, they ought to want their politicians to be honest with them, which includes disclosing the uncertainties and being able to say, I’m not sure how we’re going to move forward or how long it’s going to take, but I’m going to be with you through this and we’re not sleeping and we’re going to keep working it, and I want you to keep working it, and we’re going to stay in touch, and together we can do this. You want people in authority to provide hope and confidence in people’s resourcefulness, but without pandering to their desire for quick and easy answers. And that’s an art form, how much you disappoint people at what rate, with what frame, over what period of time.
And when you layer that with the emergence, since you started engaging in the leadership space first with kind of 24/7 news and then the digital and social media space. How much do you think that has affected the leaders of old that people may respect, regardless of your view on politics, a lot of people may say that Winston Churchill was an admirable leader, but if you’d have put him in today’s day and age with social media and 24/7 news and everything else, would he still be viewed the same way? How much do you think the digital landscape has affected what it takes to be a good leader and how the public and the population respond?
Well, it’s a great question. It’s had a profound impact. I’m not an expert on the effective media in politics, so I don’t feel very confident in giving you a very rich answer. I don’t know if Churchill would’ve gotten elected today as he did in those very ugly years of the late 1930s.
I can ask the question again.
But people had- What I do think we can learn from Churchill is that he didn’t deceive people that it was going to require blood, toil, tears, and sweat. In other words, he said to people, this really is going to be ugly and this really is going to be hard. He prepared people for the costs. I wish that your prime minister and my former president had prepared people for what it was really going to take to meet the virus, instead of dilly-dallying and waiting, and increasing the death rate. But Churchill didn’t do that. He faced into the reality and he immediately began to prepare people for the suffering that they were going to have to go through. They were not surprised when it got ugly. And therefore, his credibility wasn’t reduced when it got ugly, because he had told them, this is how it’s going to be. He prepared them that the war was going to hit their own homes. It was not only going to be fought on European soil. So this was a very special kind of courage to face into the reality and challenge people. Now on the other hand, at the end of the war, he wanted to hold onto the British empire.
And I don’t think he was very good at preparing people nor himself at facing into the reality that the Empire days were over. Britain didn’t have the capacity and nor did it actually have any longer the moral argument to persuade itself or to persuade the world that holding onto empire was a just way of life. And so the British people kicked him out. I don’t think he was reading that reality very well. And so I don’t think that he was ready to lead the British people into the next phase of their own political development.
So, Tony Blair yesterday quoted his 21 year old son and basically saying that, he’s not sure Tony Blair would’ve made it today was kind of the equivalent. And then he was talking about the difference nowadays between facts and feeling. You can dig a little deeper and say it’s facts and fake news, and feelings. But how much is taking into consideration, people’s feelings a role in leadership today and perhaps that it way it wasn’t in the past?
I think it’s always played a fundamental role in even when feelings are spoken in indirect and coded form. Because values themselves only exist in the domain of feelings. The brain, if you were to sever that part of the brain that connects a person to their feelings, which has been done through accident on a few occasions, and then those people who studied. We find that the person is perfectly capable of analysing the difference between a cup of tea and a human being. But they can’t tell which is more valuable, which is hard to imagine. They know there’s a difference, but they cannot tell the difference in terms of value. And that’s because the way the brain works is, it sees an object and it tags its value with an emotional valence. So that objects in our universe are coded for value emotionally. And that’s so when a person talks about the values at stake, honour, liberty, justice, when people speak in high political rhetoric, they’re talking emotional language and it’s so emotional that some people will want to just stand up, out of the emotional uplift or that they experience at that moment.
So other people will cry, other people will applaud. So there is a wide domain of languaging, of emotional realities in order to speak and resonate with people. And those different grammars of emotional content, of course, are specific to different cultures, and even different subcultures within the politics of a nation. So that a person who’s going to game, who’s going to win the hearts and minds of a neighbourhood in one area of Liverpool, will be very different than in a different area of Liverpool. And that will be different in an area of two different areas of London. And certainly, there’s a gender component to it as well. And there’s differences in social economic status in class in terms of cultures of emotional speech and highly value laden speech that doesn’t directly talk about feelings, but nevertheless, is coded for its emotional content. And I think in the area of leadership, one is always talking about what values are at stake for which we’re willing to make trade-offs in our lives, for which we’re willing to ask these three fundamental questions when we’re facing an adaptive challenge. What cultural DNA do we want to conserve from our tradition, from our ancestry, from our elders? What cultural DNA are we willing to discard? And what innovation will enable us to take the very best of our history and tradition into the future?
Those three questions. What cultural DNA to keep, what to discard, and what new to innovate are very difficult questions. Because they involve sifting through what are we going to keep and what are we going to discard? And that’s often a very conflictive process in which people have to accept the need for losses. So the only reason why people will sustain a significant loss, is on behalf of what they can conserve in their values and in their tradition, and in their current competencies. So if you’re trying to get people to accept the need for losses, for example, you’re going to have to keep your kids home from school. You’re going to have to figure out how to make a livelihood even when people can’t pay the rent or when you can’t pay the rent, how are you going to keep on going? You’re going to have to make significant changes in your life, innovations in your life, given those losses. But why would you make those losses? You’d suffer those losses on behalf of the values that you’re going to be able to conserve, the things you really care and love, like your children and their long-term welfare. So one has to be able to speak in terms of these orienting values to create a context or a frame in which you can then ask people and challenge people to suffer blood, toil, tears, and sweat, which are different names for the experiences of loss in one’s life. People are willing to suffer losses, but only if they see the reason why. And the reason why is always located in values that need to be conserved because they come out of our traditions.
So leadership can feel like a kind of lofty word, especially when we talk about it in terms of politicians or kind of great world leaders. But most of us at some point in our lives, could be called on to lead.
Yes.
In our own communities, in our own way. And what do you think are the key kind of values or criteria that people who are looking to kind of lead well should be mindful of?
I mean, I think that this is much of what Rabbi Sacks would write about. Not only when he explicitly talked about leadership, but all the time. I think from my understanding of his particular heart and genius, he wanted people to discover and realise their own capacity, their own capacity to raise questions about what constituted a good and moral life at home, in business, in their community, in their political actions. Not only with neighbours close in, but neighbours far away across in other communities. How to help people discover their own capacity to provide leadership close at hand wherever they lived. And I think one of the places that he and I, so closely agreed is that leadership is a practise. It’s not a set of personal characteristics. It’s not simply the capacity to have a good toolkit of influence or charisma or good speaking ability. It’s the commitment to get a certain kind of work done. The work done of, I think for him, the work of making the world a better place. Tikkun olam in various ways.
So in order to achieve that, I think he was profoundly aware that you needed leadership from everyday leadership, from all across our communities. And indeed that many people could be practising leadership at the same time, that leadership is not the restricted province of those people with particular gifts, nor is it the particular province of people who gain high positions of political or organisational authority. It’s a practise that we can all be engaged in. Because everywhere we live, there is a set of adaptive challenges, challenges that force us to ask these three questions. What’s essential to conserve? What’s expendable? And what innovation will enable us to bring the best of our values into the future? Wherever we live, we have leadership opportunities within reach. Sometimes, we have the tools of authority and influence, and we have particular skills. Other times, we don’t. But nevertheless, we do have the opportunity. And I think so much of what he was about was awakening in people the discovery that we are not grasshoppers, that we are a community of leaders in his words. Not only the blessing at Sinai, but the challenge of 70 CE. That with the destruction of our homeland, the adaptability of the Jewish community depended on people practising leadership locally separated from each other, spread out to the four corners of the world, starting with their own families in which the father in those days, now the mother too, would replace the priest and provide the Yevarechecha, the priestly blessing over the family on the Sabbath, to all the different ways in which we needed to practise leadership on a distributed basis. If we were going to make it as a people. Once again in each generation, standing at Sinai and asking ourselves these three fundamental questions. Just like Yohanan ben Zakkai asked, when he started his schoolhouse after the destruction of a temple. What are we going to hold onto?
But what do we have to let go? ‘Cause it’s no longer serviceable. How should we reinterpret text for our day and age? How will we make this text come alive, given the challenges we face? And then what innovations and how we think and operate? Again, will enable us to preserve what we so cherish and value into the future. You see, I think he understood a fundamental rule of adaptive change that highly transformative change is highly conservative. Even our biological DNA is 99% the same as a chimpanzee. God did not do zero based budgeting. God didn’t start all over again and say, all right. I still haven’t brought a creature into the world with whom I can partner. I’m going to just start all over again. God kept tinkering. So similarly, highly transformative change in our cultures are also highly conservative. They hold on to what’s precious and essential. We don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but we do have to discard some ways of thinking. And I think so much of what he himself embodied was the reworking of wisdom, the refashioning of old stories, the reframing of old narrative for our day and age, for the ongoing renewal and reapplication of Jewish wisdom to everyday life.
So when Rabbi Sacks talked about “Leadership On The Line,” he said it was, one of the most honest books on leadership that he’d read. And that was really, because it talked about the fact that leadership is very hard work. And you often find yourself in a position as a leader where you kind of wondered why you bothered and hope that you don’t necessarily make the same mistake again. And if you look at some of the quick criticisms around like the last US presidential election, where certain candidates put themselves forwards or people were saying, now that I live in the US. Like how did we end up with this as our kind of leadership? Did the population bring the leadership or did the leadership respond to kind of where we were as a society?
Yes, yes. Excellent question.
So I guess, my question is like, do you think we’re at a point where the leaders are making the society and we are manifesting what we need and we deserve. And really, it’s got to a point where people question themselves if they really want to lead, or this is a normal cycle, and in every time there is a challenge and those who want to and should lead step forwards?
It is a relationship. First of all, you’re equating leadership with authority. There are a lot of people stepping forward in their families, in their neighbourhoods, in their schools, in their businesses. They’re not recognised. We’re not journalists, we’re not writing stories about them, but they are mobilising people within their reach to achieve a successful adaptation to the challenges of their life. Most immediately, the pandemic. Now there is a market, the politics is a marketplace. And if people are yearning for easy answers, that’s what they’re going to elect. They’re going to elect politicians with easy answers. Brexit, from my point of view, is an easy answer. We live in an interdependent world. You’re not going to solve the problems of Britain’s interdependence in the world by exiting from Brexit. You’re just going to create a new set of problems. But it was sold as this kind of panacea for the sort of archaic restoration of Britain by riding ourselves of this many immigrants who can just move here and get a job. So the challenge, however, is what does it mean to be British?
What does it mean to be British when you have so many Pakistani British, when you have Nigerian British, when you have Britains from all over the former Commonwealth. One of the side effects of Britain having an empire, is it brought in a lot of its former empire into its nation. And now it has to define what does it mean to be British? How can you be British and not be Anglican? That’s an old question, but it’s not very well resolved if you’re Catholic and so forth. So that’s a question that remains alive. It doesn’t much matter if you have a lot of immigrants from Poland or a lot of immigrants from Lithuania or a lot of immigrants from Romania in your country. You still have to work the problem of defining what’s really essential and precious in British values, in traditions, in the heritage. But what’s also expendable in our cultural DNA and what innovations and richness can be brought from the diversity of all the populations that now live here that can help us be a better Britain than we’ve ever been in the past. How do we build an architecture for diversity that’s constant with our most essential values? So those questions are really hard questions and they generate a marketplace for charlatans with easy answers. And it takes a particular artistry to engage people in those questions without reaching for easy answers. And therefore, leadership’s a dangerous enterprise. It’s dangerous because you’re challenging people to face losses. If leadership were all about giving people good news, it would be an easy job. But leadership often means asking people, again these three tough questions. The first one’s not so tough, what do we want to hold onto? But the second one is very tough. What are we willing to give up? What cultural DNA is no longer serviceable? And sometimes those losses are direct in terms of material losses.
Sometimes those losses are in a second category called competence. We got to develop new competencies. Like, wow, there are all these women now in the workforce. But I’m not used to having a lot of women in the workforce. I can’t tell my usual jokes. I can’t hang out with my guy friends in the same way. I’ve never reported to a woman in authority. I got to develop a whole new set of competencies, if we’re going to have women in the workforce for example. And that’s a loss. But on the other hand, if we want to create a world that’s more according to our values of equality and opportunity, I’m going to have to learn those new competencies. And that’s a loss, because it means I’m going to go through a period of incompetence. And that’s a pretty uncomfortable place to be in a zone of incompetence for a significant period of time where I learned how to be comfortable in this new world. And then the third form of losses which in leadership, we have to help people absorb, is disloyalty. You know, wait a second, that’s not what my grandfather told me. It means to be British. That’s not what my ancestors taught me, is the right way of thinking. So now I’ve got to rethink all they taught me, people who loved me, people in my community. And when they start texting me certain messages, for example, about women, I’ve got to now say, well, am I going to text along with them to belong to my guy’s group? Or am I going to begin to challenge them? And if I challenge them, I risk being accused of disloyalty and losing my friendship group or my professional group. So how does one lead in the face of straining those bonds of loyalty? How does one lead in challenging people to move through a period of incompetence? In a sense, one of the tasks of leadership is to bless the incompetence, to make it permissible, indeed to encourage people to learn in real time, even if it means learning new ways where they feel awkward or refashioning loyalties to loved ones, friends, colleagues, or ancestors.
Where you say, I can honour 95% of your cultural DNA, but this five percent’s got to go out the window. 'Cause you know what? It’s not good anymore. It maybe was never good, but it’s certainly not good in our day. And that process is a very emotionally difficult and challenging process. It takes time. You can’t fix it and turn it over overnight. It takes time for people to learn new ways. Just like it took another 38 years in Sinai. Because it took time for people to learn how to relate with one another, not as grasshoppers, but as people with whom you could build a collective community of self-government. That takes time. So in leadership, one needs to know how to navigate the dangers of being accused of betrayal, of being pushed, of being people reacting to the losses that you represent to them. How to pace and sequence those losses and challenges, how to frame the challenges, how to build allies within certain communities so that you’re not all alone, making these statements, but so that people feel like they’re being held in a wider community, challenging them to work these dilemmas. And I think that’s the kinds of conversations that Rabbi Sacks and I had, after he read that book in 2002 or 2003. And I think, he was a master of it.
So if you had to highlight as we come to the end of our hour, what you as an expert in leadership learn from Rabbi Sacks personally, what would you kind of touch on as your key takeaway?
I think he really appreciated, perhaps even more than I have, the ratio of speaking to the values to be conserved versus the challenge that you’re putting on the table. He spent a lot of time talking about the values to be conserved in order to provide a context for the challenge he was then providing. And I always found it personally rewarding to hear him talk about the richness in the Jewish tradition, the wisdom in the Jewish tradition, the gifts of the Jewish tradition for peoples around the world without becoming arrogant himself, without saying this was the one and only wisdom. But nevertheless, speaking with deep insight and beautiful articulation of the values and wisdom of our tradition to be derived from 3,500 years of history and story, and prophetic and Rabbinic literature. So that was important to see it in action. I could have the concept that highly transformative change, people in leadership need to speak not only to the change, but also to the knock change. But he did it. And he was doing it every day. And that was always a lesson for me in how to operationalize some of the abstract concepts that I have been working with over the years.
Thank you.
He’s a real practitioner of the arts.
And for one of our audience who’s, and a few actually who’ve asked this question, I’m going to make my last one slightly different which is, if you wouldn’t mind spending a minute talking about your time as a student under a great cellist, and perhaps if you learn any lessons in the leadership during that time.
I did, indeed. In my first book called “Leadership Without Easy Answers.” In the forward, in my introduction to that book, I share five different lessons from studying with Gregor Piatigorsky in regard to leadership. I can’t recall all of them right now off the top of my head. But some of them include you, storytelling is a profoundly important craft in generating learning because it is perhaps our most ancient form of social interaction. Dating back to prehistoric times when we lived in small hunter gatherer communities, Piatigorsky taught cello through storytelling. There would be seven cellists in a room for 10 hours a week, five hours a day, twice a week. And he would stop you in the middle of a phrase of Brahms. And he’d launched off into a story because he was trying to teach artistry and interpretation, not technique. And he used storytelling as a method. The second, so metaphor and storytelling as a profound resource. Rabbi Sacks also illustrates this. Yeah, let-
Can encourage people to read the book.
Yes. And look forwards in order to learn the rest.
Let stop there. Thank you.
As a student of yours, like at a distance since we at the business school didn’t make our way onto the Kennedy School very often. Thank you very much. And for everything that I’ve learned from you and for spending the last hour reflecting with us. I’m going to ask Joanna, the Chief Executive of Rabbi Sack’s Office for a very long time, and now the Chief Executive of his legacy trust to thank you.
Hi, Joanna, so sweet to see you.
Hi. It’s wonderful to see you. And what an inspiring conversation. Thank you so much. I’d like to thank you on behalf of Wendy, the Lockdown University, myself and the Rabbi Sacks Legacy Trust for this evening. Rabbi Sacks reciprocated your love and appreciation. He cherished and valued your wisdom. As he wrote, as you’ve alluded to in the introduction to his book, “Lessons And Leadership.” He says, I came across a book entitled “Leadership on the Line.” It was a subtitle that caught my eye, staying alive through the dangers of leading. This sounded radically unlike any book on the subject I’d encountered before. The others seemed to say that leadership means seeing the path ahead and inspiring others to follow. None had used the words like danger. None had hinted that you might need help staying alive. I ordered the book, read it and realised immediately that I was reading the insights of people who understood the problems and pressures of leadership better than anyone else I had encountered. Not only did they make sense of what I was feeling at the time, but they also helped me understand Torah and the Hebrew Bible as a whole. I’m indebted to Professor Ronald Haifetz, not only for his lovely preface to this book, but for all he taught me over the years about leadership, its challenges, and possibilities. It’s a privilege to call him and his wife, Catherine, my friends. Thank you for inspiring us this evening.
Thank you, Joanne. Please give my love to Elaine. Thank you so much.
I will do Thank you.
Thank you very much, Joanna. And looking forward to seeing the rest of you tomorrow when Ed Husain will reflect on Rabbi Sack’s relationship with the Muslim world and his importance there, and for the rest of the week. Thank you all.