Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

More information about the Geneva Centre for Security Policy is available on their website at https://www.gcsp.ch.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Books we’re reading for fun or personal development right now include:

• Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson; it’s available in hardback at https://amzn.to/460LnmQ, on Kindle at https://amzn.to/3RVXhZs, and as an audiobook at https://amzn.to/3xPjBgn.
• The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Paperback = https://amzn.to/3VEl7cU, Kindle = https://amzn.to/45JGm1L, and audiobook = https://amzn.to/3RPhC2y
• Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, the African Way by Mungi Ngomane. Hardback (https://amzn.to/48Doh6j) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/48YCRF4)
• Nerve: Lessons on Leadership from Two Women Who Went First by Martha Piper & Indira Samarasekera. Paperback (https://amzn.to/3tOtzg4) and audiobook (https://amzn.to/41OYdT5)

NOTE: As an Amazon partner, we may make a small commission from books you buy through these links.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Guest(s) Bio:

Ambassador Thomas Greminger is the Director of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP).  He formerly served as the Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE).  Ambassador Greminger holds a PhD in history from the University of Zurich. He is Lieutenant Colonel GS (company and battalion commander of the Swiss Armed Forces. He has authored numerous publications on military history, conflict management, peacekeeping, development, and human rights.

Peter Cunningham is Head of Leadership at GCSP, and co-founder of the Geneva Leadership Alliance, a network advancing the understanding and practice of leadership for the advancing of peace and security worldwide. Peter constantly seeks new, diverse, and innovative ways to bridge the study of leadership with the practice of leading, especially at the international level — working across cultural, geographical, political and organisational divides.

Transcript
(auto-generated)

Unknown Speaker 0:07
welcome to innovating leadership co creating our future. Today, we’re going to be talking about facing a global leadership crisis. Insights from the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and this is part of the international leadership Association conference series, I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, I’m the founder and CEO of the innovative leadership institute. Our show today is a two part series, the first half being Ambassador Thomas grumminger, director of the Geneva Center for Security Policy. Ambassador grimminger, please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself. I’m a Swiss career diplomat focusing exclusively on issues related to peace, security, human rights and development. Can you tell us a little bit more about what the Geneva Center for Security Policy does? The Geneva Center for Security Policy is an independent foundation governed by 53 countries, among them, by the way, the United States, our main founder is the CIS government. But we are also supported by quite a number of states, again, including the United States and by private foundations. Now what we do three things. We provide executive education to mid career professionals, be they diplomats, militaries, but more, more, also representatives of the private sector, of international organizations or non governmental organization. We offered space for inclusive dialog, and we provide policy advice in a number of security relevant areas, leadership, crisis management, cyber security, emerging disruptive technologies, gender insecurity, arms control, to name a few. So in a nutshell, we bring people together from many diverse places, professions and points of view. We create safe spaces for dialog, for increased mutual understanding and also for shared learning. The idea of inclusive dialog. Will you give an example of what does it mean to have inclusive dialog, because I imagine different listeners interpret those words differently. Yes, we try to support processes. P day of regional nature peace processes. We have, for instance, what we call a track two dialog among experts in support of the official peace process on Syria, we do something similar to Korean Peninsula. We have a dialog platform that tries to bring together both experts and government representatives to focus on challenges of European security. One focus of our dialogs is on geopolitical challenges, be they being Russia and the West, between China and us, but then we will also focus on concrete peace processes and also negotiations for international governance. Here in Geneva, there a dialog among experts, or any formal dialog space you know would make sense, because it would help to overcome impasses, to bring up creative answers to issues that are blocked on the official level. And so that is basically the idea, to create informal spaces where you can, in a confidential setting, mostly come up with answers to issues that are currently stopped in informal official negotiations, and so needed now to have spaces to have informal dialog to counterbalance the military focus that we see in some areas of the world. Absolutely, yeah, I think, of course, in security, you need deterrence. I mean the anonymized, there is no doubt about that NATO had already laid out in its Harmel doctrine. In 1967

Unknown Speaker 4:18
you need not only deterrence, but you should also focus on a pillar of detente, dialog. And I think that is what is most needed today. There has been little focus over the last decade, I would argue, on dialog. Your website says we’re facing a global leadership crisis. Today, there is an urgent need for radically expanded understanding of what leadership means and who can lead. Can you expand a little bit on why the center believes that we’re facing a leadership crisis? I just heard you talk about the balance between dialog and deterrence. How does that connect with lead?

Unknown Speaker 5:00
Saying, I would like to make 2.1

Unknown Speaker 5:02
is, I think, on the one hand, we acknowledge that practically all major security challenges at the 21st Century can only be successfully tackled by international cooperation. This is true for cyber security, for combating terrorism and violent extremism for combating trafficking in human beings, trucks and arms. But this is certainly also true for tackling the challenges of climate change, migration flows, the negative consequences of rapid technological change. Think, for instance, of artificial intelligence at the same time, we witness dominant approaches being very unilateral. We see a lot of populism. We see transactionalism, reluctance to accept cooperative solutions to these transnational challenges. So this will be my first point. I think we need leaders that are ready to tackle this paradox and lead to greater cooperation, even though this may often be more time consuming, more complicated if you want to agree on common rules on how to tackle a problem with a large number of potentially very diverse stakeholders. At times can be painful, but I think it’s necessary if you want to successfully address global security risks. The second point that I would like to make is we are today, a bit, I’m afraid, like in the Cold War, in an extremely polarized world with hardly any trust between major stakeholders. Just think of the tensions between Russia and the West, between China and the United States. And here, I would argue that, in a way, we need to get back to the basics. That is, people, politicians, states need again, to talk to one another, talk to listen, show a degree of empathy, trying to understand that the other side may have a different history, may have a different culture, different perceptions and interests and wants to be treated with dignity, with respect, and I think it’s extremely important that sides parties are given the space to talk about their grievances and concerns, admit mistakes, correct false impressions. This is a type of leaders that we need, leaders that are open minded, prepared for setbacks, that have the courage to bring people from opposite sides to the table, and that allow opposite opinions to be voiced in order then to perhaps be able to bridge divisions with the increase in populism. Those are the characteristics that people are voting out rather than voting in that willingness to be open and consider alternate points of view. In a world where we’re now actively talking about climate change, we’re actively talking about cyber security and talking more about sex trafficking and things like that, these are global issues, and yet it feels like the polarization is increasing. How do you navigate that need? For one thing, and our voters in many countries are in fact, giving us leaders who don’t demonstrate the qualities you’re looking for. This situation has created this paradox that you have on the one side, this obvious need for more cooperation, but then on the other, or the weakness in many of our countries is very populist, tendency to go for the easy solution, the shortcut this denial of accepting the complexity of many modern challenges. One way out of this is we need a new set of leaders that are ready to acknowledge, you know, these complexities, that are ready to tell their constituencies. Look, it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s not that easy, and we have to bring all relevant stakeholders in, listen to them, try to understand them, and then, together with these different stakeholders, figure out rules, ways to tackle a specific challenge. This takes courage. For me, this is the type of leader that we are looking for. It seems like a mindset of things like humility, you said, being willing to be wrong to experiment, to try things because of the complexity we’re navigating. Of course, our first efforts aren’t going to be perfect. That is absolutely correct, and that is very fundamental. At any given point we will not have perfect knowledge.

Unknown Speaker 10:00
Much, but at the same time, we are obliged to act. So we need to act, often incrementally. But then, of course, it’s important to learn this is also true when it comes to stakeholders. When you talked about security a century ago, you basically talked about politicians and militaries. Today, security implies a much broader set of stakeholders. If you want to tackle cybersecurity, you have to bring in the tech industry, you have to bring in academia if you want to be successful. So it’s also a much broader set of stakeholders that you have to bring in into your problem solving, and that multi stakeholder solution generation, I assume, is just more complex, the more people involved in any conversation and the more different perspectives, the longer it takes and the harder it is to get them all aligned. Yeah, that, of course, is also something one needs to be courageous enough to accept that. And again, this is why I say, Please manage expectations. There is not going to be a quick fix, particularly for these issues where you kind of have to reconcile very fundamental principles of security. You won’t see by Monday evening a solution to that be ready for a process the US and Russian talks, can you say just a little bit more about what that was, since we had Summit here in Geneva between the Presidents Biden and Putin, there was a Dawa process launched focusing on strategic security issues, maybe nuclear, hypersonic, Non Proliferation. But yesterday, for the first time, there were also issues on the agenda that were related to the status of countries being, let’s say, NATO and the Russian Federation that is, countries like Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Moldova, all those states that you know are geographically situated between Russia and the West. Of course, there you face a dilemma between two fundamental security principles to which all states, the US, the Russian iteration, everybody has subscribed to, and that is, on the one hand, the principle that every state is free to choose its own security arrangements freely, its alliances freely. But then, on the other hand, you have a principle of the indivisibility of security that implies that no state has a right to increase its security on the expense of another. Now, if you buy these two principles, two countries that lie in between, like, for instance, Ukraine, you can quickly imagine you know how challenging it is to reconcile these two principles. But here again, I think it starts with acknowledging that you have these two legitimate principles that need to be reconciled. And once you acknowledge that, I think you stand a chance to come up with a solution that turned out to be a win win for both sides. You’ve mentioned the term empathy, and yet again, I’m thinking of the personas that these leaders put forward to their own voting block. Is that of strength, and I have solutions. The persona that needs to walk into a dialog like this. Seems like it must be different, that we are here to jointly grapple with challenges not I’m here to tell you what to do because I can’t imagine that would go well with people in these kinds of high positions. How does empathy play into even preparing these leaders for these dialogs? Empathy indeed is key. This is why we insist so much on it, I think it is first of all key for building trust, and without trust, you will never win outcomes in any conflict, settlement, negotiation. So if your interlocutor gets the sense that you try to understand him or her, you have already accomplished a very important step for a constructive conversation. So it’s empathy is a key to building trust, but then it’s obviously also absolutely key to figure out Win Win outcomes, be it in a conflict settlement process, be it in any negotiation. If you want to achieve a win win outcome, you need to have a fair understanding of what your negotiation partner interests are. And again, coming back to the strategic stability dialog and the two principles that I referred to, once you acknowledge that these principles and obviously each side advocates one.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
Of the principles. Once you acknowledge that both principles are legitimate, I think you have laid the ground then to start the process of reconciling them. Do you find when these folks get in the room, they’re actually more amenable to open dialog than it would appear in the news clips we’re seeing? I’m looking to be hopeful that it’s, it’s not all positioning, but that they go in with open hearts and willingness to move forward. You know, a negotiator, particularly a negotiator that operates on a space that is very public, and this is obviously the case with these strategic ability talks, I think, on the one hand, he has to serve messages to the public, also to a whole audience, and particularly at the outset of any negotiations. You, of course, convey maximalist positions. You take a tough line. And I would say, for me, this is an indication you know that negotiations are taken seriously. But it doesn’t really mean you know that then once the confidentiality of the negotiation room is established, that you know the same tone would prevail. So I think you have clearly to differentiate between the public discourse and the confidential negotiation discourse. But of course, it’s for you and me that are outside of the negotiation room. Often difficult to sense what is really then the mood in the negotiation room itself. You often need to be

Unknown Speaker 16:41
able to read a bit in between the lines. That’s also what I hear try to do when I listen to the media conferences of both heads of delegations last night. Because afterwards, you know, the media asked me, How do you assess the outcome? Then I think you need a lot of in between the lines reading. And this is very much also about how was the mood in the negotiation? How much does mood impact the outcome? A good mood, a constructive mood, is a prerequisite for a successful outcome. But obviously it’s not enough. If instructions are such that you cannot reach common ground in a negotiation. The best intentions of negotiators, the best of moods in a negotiation room, did not produce an outcome to read the argument around, if you have instructions that would allow a constructive outcome, but somehow the chemistry between the negotiators is such that the negotiation climate is not enabling. You know, you may then indeed fail, because somehow the human dimension does not work out. We all hit points where our chemistry with someone is suboptimal. How do you help people move through a point where they just don’t like the person on the other side of the table, or fundamentally think that their positions are inferior. None of us get to necessarily just work with people we like and agree with. How do you help that process along? One approach is, again, is empathy, trying to understand, why is your interlocutor behaving as he or she is? And, you know, trying to figure out, you know, what drives his or her behavior, and this might then help you to better deal with it. But then I think a professional negotiator will also have to be able to put up with a situation where he doesn’t particularly like his counterpart.

Unknown Speaker 18:47
That’s that’s part of a professional diplomat that he can, you know, deal with with such a situation. Obviously, it’s much easier if it’s the other way around.

Unknown Speaker 18:58
And then often, of course, what you can do is drive through, let’s say, social events. You know, having, for instance, a dinner before you venture into negotiations where you wouldn’t talk substance matter that often, you know, that creates a more enabling environment than for the serious stuff. So with you, I talk about mountain biking, yeah, for instance, but you could also take me to a good Geneva restaurant that would also work with me.

Unknown Speaker 19:32
How has covid impacted the work that you’re doing? Because it is one of the many global challenges we’re facing. Initially heavily, because at the core of what we do is bringing people together, make them meet. That’s basically at the core of all of our activities, executive education, promoting dialog a bit less, perhaps in providing policy advice, we tell.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
It, I think, quite well with the challenge of delivering Executive Education virtually, also because I think we were well prepared. We had the tools, the methodologies, but also the necessary software. And so we did, I must say, very well in terms of, you know, being as interactive virtually as we will be in an in person setting. We get top ratings for our online delivered courses. We have even managed to expand outreach. For instance, we have now a much better participation from countries in conflict, people that would not have been capable of traveling to Geneva. They can now attend our courses online. So in that sense, outreach has improved, and it may be a challenge to maintain that when they move back to the new normal

Unknown Speaker 20:56
in promoting dialog, I must say, is much more challenging. And I also saw this, as said to the general of the OEC, there practically all of our dialog processes froze, and it impacted negatively, also on the conflict I would argue, if you have a well established conflict resolution format, a well established dialog process, you can maintain it over a certain time, virtually. My generation of interlocutors, however, does not trust the confidentiality of virtual exchanges. This is why I say you can maintain it, but there are lots of constraints to it. And by the way, we saw this in dealing with Huber conflict there, the negotiation process was pursued by the Minsk co chairs virtually, but it did not maintain the positive momentum that had been created and that quickly got lost. So I think when it comes to promoting dialog, there are very clear constraints in delivering virtually at that last time, at least delivering policy advice. I think it depends a bit. If you have an established relation with a client, trusted relation, then you can also deliver virtually, but build a new relation only online. I think that’s difficult, if not impossible. So it sounds like in the training delivery, there were certainly some opportunities to integrate people who haven’t been engaged Absolutely. And here we will have the challenge not to lose that once we get back to normal. What would you like our listeners to take away from the conversation so that we can be better leaders in our own right and better voters in our countries. Have the courage to talk to each other, try to understand, try to figure out why he or she thinks decently, acts decently. Try to identify areas of common interest, despite of these emergencies, and offer cooperation in those areas where you sense that there is an overlap in interest. That would be my advice. Thank you. That’s brilliant advice for all of us, the ability to navigate whether it’s a local school board or a state or a country, that ability to find common ground is advice for everyone listening. How would people learn more about gcsp? Well, we have most institutions. We have a web page that is often criticized, of course, because it’s not as good as it is supposed to be, and we are constantly working on it. But I think it would allow you know a first idea of what we do. Would also tell you you know what we offer in terms of executive education. Should you happen to be in Geneva visit us at the Maison de la peyta, House of peace. That’s where we are, and it’s quite a spectacular building. It’s a landmark in here in Geneva, if you have specific ideas interests, of course, call on us and let’s talk. Thank you so much. And the website is

Unknown Speaker 24:24
www.gcsp.ch,

Unknown Speaker 24:29
Ambassador grimminger, thank you. Well, you’re most welcome. Maureen, thank you so much for your interest. I really appreciated our conversation.

Unknown Speaker 24:39
We hope you enjoyed those insights from Ambassador grimminger. Now let’s hear the perspective of his colleague, Peter Cunningham.

Unknown Speaker 24:52
Peter Cunningham is the head of leadership at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, and we’re going to be talking about what the.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
Center is so Peter, thank you for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit about how public, private and multilateral organizations are different? Yeah, there is more shared experience globally right now, I think, than than ever before, and still plenty of difference too. Some experiences are more shared or less shared in different parts, but, but there are some things I think, that we all have in common at the moment. Just to give a little bit of context, so gcsp is really an inclusive platform, and always has been, since the mid 90s, when our mandate was to bring together the hard and soft elements of security policy, in other words, military and diplomacy come together to discuss security issues, and that then was innovative. That wasn’t something that was necessarily happening. It’s about education, it’s about dialog, it’s about policy analysis and policy advice. And as the issues around peace and security have become more exponential, have become more broader, have moved away from just states to state issues to issues that affect everybody but climate, water and health, security and cyber and technology. And if you think about armament and disarmament, think about migration, these are societal issues, not just security issues. So we found that we needed to bring in a lot more voices, a lot more actors, to be able to have meaningful discussions about finding solutions or identifying ways to navigate these challenges that have been around for long times and but are also taking new forms. One of the biggest challenges, certainly in my exposure to this work, is we speak different languages professionally, and one of the hardest things to do in bringing people together, if you may, have a shared issue to address, but from a very different perspective, is that we just don’t talk the same language, and we have to find ways to form a common language, because otherwise we get stuck in the language barrier as it were, rather than the space where we can work and do meaningful things together. And that just doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time. So when you say common language, what comes to mind for me is shared mental models, because I may use the same words as you do and yet have very different meaning. So we may think we’re in agreement and we’re not, or we may think we’re in disagreement and we’re not. So it’s more than using Google Translate. I am assuming it’s more of a mind mapping? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. I think an example would be in the work on leadership. We do here, we would always start with the question, you know, what does leadership mean to those of us in the room, or those of us involved in this particular piece of work? We start there because it means sometimes very similar things, sometimes very different things. People bring different baggage on that topic. People have different ideas about where they are themselves on that topic. It’s really important to start with eliciting some of those questions and finding a shared sort of focus and a shared way of talking about the work that we’re trying to do together. And that seems like it would be rather time consuming. I’m thinking of American orientation. We come in and we want to hit the ground running. If we have to take time to level set, we find that not useful. And yet, the lack of level setting causes a lot of redo. You know, I think a lot of this is about human relationship, connection. The more you invest in that, the more you can do together. That probably applies to all walks of life. I can say, for example, in the world of diplomacy right now, one of the biggest challenges is that good diplomacy was always about relationships, and based on those relationships of trust and respect, how can we find ways to address areas of common interests, even if there are areas where the interest is Absolutely not common in my work, I know if I trust you, I’m willing to work through just about anything. If I don’t trust you, Grace is much

Unknown Speaker 28:50
harder to grant. Indeed, yes, yes. Trust Bank account that we have with each other. There’s a question that, what I use myself? I find it useful. I try to use myself.

Unknown Speaker 29:01
We get this more right sometimes than others, don’t we in life, but, you know, is what I’m about to do, or is the conversation I’m about to have? Likely to increase the trust between you and me, or decrease and try and think about that before I have it, because it can be a useful self check. Sometimes, because sometimes, even when our intentions are really good. You know, we can get in the way of ourselves, and there are always other things going on. So, you know, if you can ask that question, if we can all ask that question to ourselves a little bit more, you know, is what I’m about to do here, going to increase trust with the people I’d like to have trust with, or going to lead to a decrease that, in itself, I think can, half of the time, help navigate and improve that trust. And also I’ve been thinking what that’s about, what’s behind, what drives that. And there’s something about care. To what extent do I care about what you care about, and to what extent do you care about what I care about? And I think that you know, if you unpack trust a little more, there’s probably something in.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
At because if I carry a certain level of care and concern for what you’re trying to do, then probably more likely going to work with you, engage with you, collaborate you in ways that support that, rather than get in the way. I think that’s such an important component thinking in just a purely business context, often we go in with this is the deliverable I’ve got to create, and don’t take time to build trust, build relationship. And absent a relationship, I don’t know what you care about, and I don’t know why. And I’m thinking of one of my clients who can come across as a little harsh. What I’ve learned about him is he came to the United States. When his country went into war, he lost everything. Came over with a suitcase, his children, his spouse and nothing, nothing else, and had to navigate with no resources, finding a job, finding housing, finding basic needs. So what he cares about is creating economic security for his family and everyone within the company. Absent that knowledge, he can seem a little cranky, but when you know how deeply he cares, relating to him is very easy. That’s a wonderful example of what we see here in many cases, when we convene people at tcsp, we’re convening people who work on really complex issues. Those people are very diverse in background, in life experience, in levels of personal security and safety they’ve had in their lives, levels of conflict. They’ve been exposed to what they see as their purpose and mission being in terms of coming here, and it’s really important to spend the time, to make the time to connect on those levels. Interestingly, one of the challenges we’ve had in this shift to virtual and going online, by nature of navigating this pandemic, I really believe that we don’t yet know the half of what we can do in less time together, because it takes time to get to know each Huber, but I’m not sure it takes as much time as we sometimes think it might. And you know, we’ve certainly been experimenting a lot with well, what does this mean? How do we get to those levels of connection and trust? And so we can share what is meaningful, both from a substantive point of view and from a personal point of view. And you know, set amount of creativity can you very quickly get people to share and become a little bit vulnerable, to go further together? And I think we’re all learning ways of doing that, but starting there sometimes, rather than building up to going there, very simple things. Like, you know, we used to have courses, and in the end of the course, you’d have a dinner together. Wonderful way to kind of celebrate and connect. And you know, what about spending quality time together before you even start the journey? One of the things I’m thinking about when I launch groups would be asking people to share the answer to what was the most significant event in your life that shapes who you are and how you relate. And if I understood this one event, I would understand much more about you at the beginning of relationships. We get very superficial answers to that, but I think we can accelerate, in part, by modeling. What is that event? The modeling point, I think, is really important here. You know, we need to practice what we’d like to see more of in the world when the business of education, of development, of facilitating dialog, like we do here, you know, we have to stand up and we have to go there ourselves. And that’s not always comfortable, not always easy, but I think it’s really, really important if we’re going to ask others to go there. For me personally, a word that matters a lot right now is partnership. Talking a lot about leadership, and we also talk sometimes about followership. I think there is something we need to put up there at the same level right now important is partnership. So many issues that we need to address, personally and professionally in the world today can only be addressed if we can find ways of partnering and bringing the best of what we do together, and that is such a hard thing to do in practice. It’s easier to partner with someone I’ve known forever and who I really respect. I also have to partner with people who share different points of view, because that’s where the big problems exist. Absolutely, there is so much to be learned, I think, from the peace and security in the multilateral context in that sense, because, again, if you think about diplomats and diplomacy, if you want to be effective as a diplomat, as an ambassador, you have to be able to engage in that space that is great, where you have to connect and build relationships with people that fundamentally See the world differently than you do who have views that are contrary, absolutely not just different. They are fundamentally 180 degrees opposed to my values. Our director, Ambassador, Thomas grimminger, talks about empathy a lot, actually, in that work, he talks, from many years of experience, the need for being able to seek out understanding of someone.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
That you may have a very difficult time spending time with. There’s this ability to be able to separate the work from the people. Someone recently told me this really interesting example, how they were in a position of fairly senior authority in their organization, a particular individual in a political role had actually been tasked with destroying that person’s organization. That was their role, that was their work, to dismantle and take apart the organization. This person who was telling me the story, and they’re now best friends. What was the context of the dismantling? It was an ideological difference in terms of what that organisation’s mandate was, and what that particular party wanted to focus on and invest in, I just found that so interesting that work enemies became close, personal friends, that you can separate the two and recognize that it is different. And I don’t think that everybody can just do that. I think that’s hard, and I have a lot of respect for those who can. And I think that this is something from a leadership perspective that we want to explore further and see how we can develop the capacity all of us to lean in and engage with people who have a different I mean, if you look at the world today, polarized is the term that I think that comes to mind, isn’t

Unknown Speaker 36:20
it? Is, again, my lens is often the US, because that’s where I spend most of my time. And if we look at the political landscape and how it was 20 years ago, people of both parties socialized often and collaborated, so the word together now it seems like that is much less common, and we’ve now tried to demonize people with different views, and yet most of the population is probably somewhere in the middle. So the polarization really undercuts the average person’s ability to interact with their colleagues. Now they go to work and the ability to collaborate in a non political environment is diminished because of this emphasis on political party. I’m actually quite hopeful that if we take the vaccine, covid vaccine, for example, we’re all going back to work and connecting more with people, many of us being confronted with different views on this. I actually think that maybe this is a good thing that we’re all developing, just through exposure, more ability to engage with people who have different views on things that are quite important to us. And I think that vaccine is a wonderful example. And I’m actually fairly hopeful that that exposure and that practice will stand us in good stead on some of the other issues that you’re talking about. This being quite polarizing, if you think about the country I come from Brexit that actually maybe this shared experience is going to stand as in good stead, rather than lead to more polarization. But that’s certainly my hopeful part of me thinking, but I do think that’s what we’ll see people have become conditioned and more more exposed and therefore more practiced at talking and connecting with people who share quite deep seated differences in terms of the question of How would gcsp and certainly in the leadership work? The first part of that, for me is recognizing that leadership is something that happens in a context. So I work with colleagues who specialize in areas like peace operations and peace building, like cyber security, migration, climate security, climate change, on disarmament and in each of these spaces, the working cultures, the substantive expertise, the issues, the people and the organization involved are different and obviously sometimes overlaying. It’s always been important for me to bring leadership together with the expertise of that particular field or area of focus and really co discover and then co create what it is we can contribute when it comes to leadership in that space. How are the issues being talked about? What are the mindsets? What are the mental models? To your point earlier, if we talk about crisis management, for example, we’ve done some great work together with our colleagues in crisis management and with that expertise. What does leadership mean in that space? So it really is a journey that is collaborative. You need the expertise of the issues, and then you need to be able to think about, well, what are the practices? What are the leadership practices that we would like to bring to that space? Because we think that is what’s needed right now. There’s certainly, first of all, a collaborative approach to that. And then there is an educational element. There is a an evidence based approach to what we do. It’s really important in this space that we bring evidence based approaches to bear. And I need to draw on insight about leadership from many different parts of the world. We’re working in really, really diverse groups. And in fact, what we try to do here is to really go into you know, what does leadership mean? When groups are diverse, we have high levels of personal professional diversity, then we need to bring evidence based thinking from different parts of the world into the room and explore that together. I understand the different context. So if you’re focusing on cyber security, that.

Unknown Speaker 40:00
Technical expertise is very different than if you’re focusing on disarmament, if you strip away that piece and look primarily at leadership, are you finding generally shared traits across many of the contexts? Yes and no. The shared context that we recognize here is that the majority of the people that come through with gcsp in our network need to be able to work with diverse actors. The work they do is highly complex and the conditions are challenging. And that may mean that the challenging due to the environment, talking about a conflict environment, for example, or challenging due to lack of funding and resources, this is something that maybe everybody recognizes or challenging, because those involved are challenged to collaborate. So as those three factors are always, I would say, shared, almost always shared between anyone who comes to gcsp to learn or to get involved in dialog. So there are some practices and some, I guess, ways of thinking that are relevant in that context. I mean, a wonderful example is this idea of feedback. For example, right? We recognize the value of being able to have feedback and feed forward type conversations, but in many organizations in other parts of the world, that the way we think about feedback, here in Europe or in the US, it’s just not possible to have those conversations yet. We would all recognize the value on a human level, to be able to talk about how we can do things better together. What we then need to navigate is the difference of organizational culture that many of our participants go back to, as to how you might put that into practice, or where you might put that into practice, so they can do it here in your context. And if I were to go to a country that wasn’t open to transparency and admitting I don’t know something, then that together would be very different there than it is at gcsp. I think the challenge for most of our participants is they obviously work in a particular you know, we all work somewhere in the world. We’re on a country, and we all work in an organization or a network that requires us to work in a certain way. Then we need to come together, and then it’s about what works there. Because, you know, in an international context, an international setting, I might be a colonel in the military, there might be certain ways of working that I have to navigate, but then I’m put in the position of being involved in their peace operations, you know, UN peace operation setting. And it’s in that context that suddenly what works at home sometimes does work there, and vice versa, but not everything does, because we’re now in a mix with civilians, with people from the military, from the police, different levels, with lots of local civil society actors who may have a different view as you think conflict actors. So what I do in that space, and that’s the kind of mindset we want to really focus on here, which is recognizing and giving people options to practice leadership, depending on the type of environment they find themselves in. You mentioned earlier what the participants care about, I think also the maturity So leadership in the focus areas I’ve described is often I think about exactly that. So, you know, you’ll have people come here have incredible levels of insight into complexity. They operate at a level where they are immersed in it, recognize it. And then you may have people who have not had that exposure, and the environment they may be working in is tough enough that they may have not had that kind of exposure to complexity and or complexity thinking, systems thinking we talk about a lot about these days. The issue is when they come together. For me, that’s where it’s at. It doesn’t matter who’s in the room. It’s about recognizing those differences and saying, well, well, those two people somehow are going to have to do meaningful work together. Now is that some external leadership person to recognize that? Is that in themselves to recognize that? I mean, it could be any of those scenarios, but one way or another, you need to be able to recognize the where we are on that spectrum and connect with each other as you’re speaking. I think of macro complexity and micro complexity because they don’t want to suggest that the person who’s dealing with physical security of real human beings is less complex, but they’re complex in a smaller situation where the policymaker is thinking macro complexity. In most of those cases, there is a significant value for an external who can observe both and help facilitate. Back to your word of together, it would be about looking at both of those. I think there are often in groups, them together and work there is somewhere in a position of authority, and they need to have a responsibility of that. But it can’t just be that, you know, we see, for example, where there are high levels of rotation in large non profit agencies, UN agencies around the world. And when leaders country heads come and go, it isn’t the best leader that assures the best outcomes. It’s usually their leadership team in that country, the heads will come and go, but the more capacity there is to recognize the.

Unknown Speaker 45:00
What it means to navigate those differences and to judge that we’re veering off course here, we need to do something different. The more capacity there is in the group to do that, the more likely they are to stay on course. So that speaks to building not only leaders, but cultures and systems without question. Yeah, often in the leadership conversation, we focus on inner awareness, and how do I develop the individual, which I think is crucial, indeed, yeah, and we sometimes don’t link, how does that leader or those leaders build the culture and systems? A lot of the work, I find is often helping people to ask more questions. Just that sounds a bit oversimplified, but the more questions you ask, the more likely you are to stumble across what you need to know.

Unknown Speaker 45:44
And I find that when the heats turn up, when we get really busy, when it matters. And it often matters in this space, it’s so easy to fall back on what you think you know or where you think you can go, and to stop asking questions. So if there’s anything that I would sort of essentialize here, it’s just to recognize how often you ask questions versus talking about what you know and what’s the quality, what’s the nature of those questions. If you start there on an individual level, you’ll learn a lot, and the context can sometimes take care of itself, just by nature of the practice of recognizing what questions you could and should be asking, which brings us full circle to the beginning of the conversation. Togetherness questions as the foundation for trust building. I get to know you only when I ask wise words, all drawn from your wisdom. There are so many things that have to be addressed collaboratively as well as individually. One of the big patterns I’ve seen here in this space is the international community coming up with the technical solution, which is fantastic on paper and incredibly thought out and real and relevant and makes complete sense, but is entirely unimplementable If it doesn’t come from the people involved in the issue themselves. Another piece of work that I really valued is the work from Ron Heifetz from Harvard Kennedy School, which is around this notion of adaptive challenges and technical problems. And I think that holds a lot of relevance today,

Unknown Speaker 47:15
something to explore as we continue to grow our portfolio and think about how to engage people in learning conversations about leadership and sometimes without the word leadership. Thank you. How wonderful to be in person again and get to have a conversation. Thanks. Thanks for having.

Unknown Speaker 47:32
Me a quick postscript, our partnership with the International Leadership Association made today’s interview possible. We hope you found our special guests insights valuable. I’m Maureen Metcalf, thanks so much for joining us and for doing your part to be a better leader. Foreign.