Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Resources:

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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. Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

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

• 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)
• Jilly Truit murder mysteries by Beverley McLachlin:
  • Full Disclosure – https://amzn.to/46TxW6Q (paperback) https://amzn.to/46VDL3Q (audiobook)
  • Denial – https://amzn.to/46YCbhs (paperback) https://amzn.to/3GJc0AA (audiobook)
• Women and Leadership: Journey Toward Equity by Sherylle J. Tan & Lisa DeFrank-Cole

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:

Cynthia Cherrey is President and CEO of the International Leadership Association (ILA),. Previously, she served as Vice President and Lecturer in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Cynthia publishes in the areas of leadership, organizational development, and higher education including co-authoring Systemic Leadership: Enriching the Meaning of our Work, co-editing ILA’s Building Leadership Bridges book series; her most recent publication is Women and Leadership around the World (co-editor). She is a Fellow at the World Business Academy and a recipient of a J.W. Fulbright Scholarship. Cynthia’s interests and research explore new ways to live, work, and lead in a knowledge driven, interdependent, global society. She consults and speaks to for-profit and non-profit organizations around the world on leadership and organizational change.

Professor Mike Hardy, CMG OBE FRSA, is Founding Director of the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, UK. After a distinguished career, he returned to the academic world in 2011 as Professor of Intercultural Relations at Coventry University. Mike is active with UNESCO and the UN Alliance of Civilizations; he is currently lead advisor to the World Forum for Intercultural Dialogue in Baku, the World Peace Forum in Indonesia, and directs the RISING Global Peace Forum at Coventry. Professor Hardy was awarded the OBE in 2001 for his peace-building work in the Middle East, and appointed a Companion of Honour of St Michael and St George in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for his work in Intercultural Dialogue. Mike is a trustee of The Faith and Belief Forum, the leading interfaith charity in the UK.

Transcript
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Maureen 0:00
Maureen, hello and welcome to a special edition of innovating leadership co creating our future. I’m your host. Maureen Metcalf, founder and CEO of the innovative leadership institute. Today’s topic is the international leadership Association being a living model for reimagining leadership together. So we’re recording this live at the International Leadership Association conference in Geneva, and I am with Mike Hardy, the board chair, and Cynthia cherry, the CEO and president of the organization. So we’re not going to just talk about theory. We’re going to talk about the practice of the two of you leading an incredibly talented group of folks.

Speaker 1 0:47
You know, we’re sitting here in Geneva, right? We’re looking out at these beautiful buildings, old and new, together in this amazing city, what Mike and I have gone through in experiencing the last few years of how we move this organization forward and grow isn’t anything different than others have had to do for other organizations, but what we have is the extra, I think, responsibility. Mike, of the fact that we lead a leadership association that has leadership scholars, practitioners and those who teach and coach leadership from over 100 countries around the world, really holding us to a higher standard of how we do our work.

Speaker 2 1:35
This is very much a sleeping giant. It’s a giant because the membership reaches far and wide. It is of a caliber, second to no other organization in this field, in terms of its scholarship, its practice, and the policymakers that were attracted and that gives us, I think, sin and I huge responsibility. This is the 23rd time that the ILA has convened a global conference. There’s all sorts of reasons why we imagined Geneva would be a good place. But you know, the 23rd step on a staircase is not always the most difficult step, but it’s a significant one, and we’re growing. Our reach is growing, and the impact we have is growing, and by gosh, it needs to. And the whole theme of this conference is whether or not the community who believe passionately in leadership and who want to support and strengthen existing and future leaders, whether we’re up for it, whether we’re fit for purpose, now, we think we are, and we want to convince others that that’s the case, and so too do our two or 3000 members from the 100 countries. They know that we’re ready for that, and it’s the way in which we engage with those outside our family that’s going to make the difference.

Maureen 2:48
As you talk about reimagining leadership, it needs to change. And if our academics aren’t changing how they look at research, then they will propel old models, rather than themselves reimagining because if our academics aren’t re imagining, we continue to perpetuate harm. The Right Honorable Kim Campbell said that bad leadership is not a victimless crime.

Speaker 1 3:12
Yeah, but let’s think about that, because I think it works both ways. We have leadership scholars who are doing brilliant work and very forward thinking work around complexity, complex adaptive systems, around distributive leadership. And we have those that are doing the traditional models. We also have practitioners who are what I would call stuck in their neural mind ruts of doing the same thing the same way. And we have others who are being very innovative and creative. The beauty of what we do is we bring together those who are thinking and writing and researching leadership with those who are practicing. And James McGregor burns, one of the founders, is a person who always said, good theory needs to be informed by good practice, and practice has to be informed by good theory. And so we really work hard at making sure that the ILA, all of our body of knowledge, our trusted resources, are rigorous and relevant. They have to go hand in hand,

Maureen 4:17
as you say, very forward looking, I think about people like Ron Heifetz and his adaptive leadership model. It’s always been good. Now it’s crucial Yes.

Speaker 1 4:27
And I would say, look at Mary will binds work around on complexity, around complexity theory and how we think about this. Or Richard bolden’s work around dispersed, distributed leadership, or those theorists who are doing some amazing work right now around sustainability and leadership.

Speaker 2 4:47
So no, there aren’t any academics that I know that don’t want to be relevant. This is not the case. It’s not the case that we have the ivory towers that many talk about, and there are very few practitioners who’d make a buck. If they were other than relevant. So relevance isn’t a challenge for us. What’s the challenge for us is effectiveness and impact. So however exciting your ideas are, if, as sin said, and McGregor burns, of course, was our founding father of this idea, unless it’s borne out in practice, unless it’s supported and reinforced by being into implementation mode, then maybe the ideas aren’t useful. And I think what we have with the ILA, because we have this eclectic mix, this combination, this really diverse community, because we have them together, we can share, we can bounce, we can contrast. What we also have is an organization which I’m proud has very little hierarchy. We don’t have the experts and the near experts and the learners. We have a community of equals who feel equal, who feel sin. And I met today a group of young scholars who’d come with one of our sponsors, Arizona State University, young students who felt fully confident to be engaged at the table, not behind the table. And this is really important. We’re not interested in ideas that have no impact and no applicability, but we don’t find many. Actually, it’s whether we can showcase, whether we can provide a trusted space for people to share and to learn and to refine and to reimagine.

Speaker 1 6:22
But don’t you think, Mike, there’s also this sense of sometimes we don’t know what the impact is, so sometimes it’s short term and long term. And so embracing ideas and respecting ideas and how they come together is really so important in our work, and it reminds me of we talked about the right honorable Kim Campbell earlier, at one time, she said, You know what the ILA does is it has the cachet to convene the conveners. We heard so much at this conference around the importance of bringing people together for dialog and bringing the right people together at the table in a trusted space to do this work. So somebody has to do the hard work of bringing people together. And that may sound easy, it is not, and I think that’s part of what we do. And I think of the work, Mike, that you got us started on around the Global Leadership Initiative, right, that was bringing together the scholars with those who are the brightest thinkers and doers in this leadership field.

Speaker 2 7:27
It comes back, I suppose, to a point we were making about re imagination and about thinking afresh, doesn’t it? Are we fit for purpose as a community? There’s no doubt that sin and I looked forward a few years ago at the big contributions we could make as a catalyst of thinking, not as a provider of solutions, but as a place where people could debate and challenge and derive new approaches, the two or three areas I’m sure we’ll want to talk about, but global leadership was one of them. We live at an extraordinarily difficult time for humankind. We’ve spent a long time, if you look back at scholars and at practice, at making organizations more effective, at looking at the micro impact of better leadership, even looking at the leadership of nation states. But now the real challenge facing humankind is at a level that no single nation state, no single organization, however big a corporation, a tech giant or bank, can’t actually contribute sensibly or responsibly. That’s the leverage you referred to from this city of Geneva, where there are more multinational organizations than anywhere else it’s they’re focused on how working collaboratively across nations beyond borders, can meet some of the challenges. So we looked at scholarship. Can it keep up with that? Can it actually develop a rapport with the practice that’s needed? And we looked at the scholarship around global leadership, and we started a project about 18 months ago. Right Honorable Kim Campbell and John Lord alderdice agreed to join, as did George Papandreou and some really good scholars. And we sat and brainstormed about whether or not the scholarship on global leadership was keeping up with the needs for global leadership. And we’re in full swing. And we brought it to Geneva to push it along a little further.

Speaker 1 9:18
And this is where the ILA where context matters. So we’re in this beautiful city of Geneva, which has the most multilateral so we invited those senior leaders to come to the table with senior scholars, to have the conversation around the challenges, the obstacles and the opportunities coming forward on global leadership,

Maureen 9:41
having participated in the conversations, I’ve watched people make the connection to say I’m seeking out a measurement instrument to validate this or invalidate this. How do you see it? And it really has been a place for I love the term grappling, because we may come with a hypothesis, but I see. Open Minds to share and fill out theories and disprove as well as prove in a very constructive way, people are changing as we watch them.

Speaker 1 10:11
So you make me think of Jean Lipman bloomin when she describes the ILA, she says that the ILA, we don’t just share ideas. We share big ideas,

Maureen 10:22
and we contribute, and we build on and I keep coming back to disprove. One of the important things about good research is I put forth my theory and invite people to poke holes in it. Where is my thinking week? So that I can make it more

Speaker 2 10:38
robust in the process. In our first round table meeting here at Geneva. We convened a group of senior academic scholars in their own rights were, I think, probably at the leading edge of scholarship in leadership. And we brought a group of leaders, seven or eight leaders from the public sector, from the multilateral sector, from the private sector. And we set up a process in which we said to the scholars, you’re going to be in listening mode, and we said to the leaders, we call them leaders because of their status and their role, positional leaders. They’re positional leaders. Yeah, set out, you know, what do you think are the key challenges, the key obstacles, what gets in the way of you being effective? Because there’s no doubt about their intent and their passion for making change positive change. And it was great, and I’ll give you two examples. The first was about ethics. Ethical Leadership at a global level is critical. You don’t storm through problems and challenges without regard to rights, without regard to due process and the precious nature of nation states and their borders and all that, and the multilateral organizational leaders, that’s their life blood, that’s their bread and butter. They know how to do this. And they asked the scholars, how do we deal with ethics? Because we can look at your books on ethical leadership or inclusive leadership. But how does it really happen when you’re confronted with a problem where actually the ethical route may be come an obstacle route, rather than a productive solution route. And you know, the right honorable Campbell raised this, didn’t she said, I’m a politician, I’m a political leader, or I was, I think I have to think more carefully about your scholarship on ethics, not because I don’t agree with ethical behavior,

Maureen 12:22
of course, and she’s highly principled, absolutely,

Speaker 2 12:24
but because I also agree with sometimes the higher objective and on a second issue, I thought John Lord, authordice was excellent in asking scholars to differentiate in their heads between political leaders and business leaders. It builds from the first point and from leaders of charities and World Health Organization, the International Red Cross, they have different challenges. They have different things that get in the way, and they have new opportunities for leadership decision making in the future. So it was a very, very lively discussion, and it was a very good example of how we can mobilize the convening power that we have to generate new thinking, and I hope we will.

Maureen 13:05
My conversations with both of them talked about more arc of history and where are we now? Who are we loyal to as our lineage, and how does our loyalty to our past get in the way of our loyalty to our future and the right honorable Kim Campbell mentioned, what is it to be a good ancestor? So Will people spit on our graves when they walk by us, depending on how we dealt with climate, how we’ve navigated peacefully, dealing with the haves and have nots in vaccinations, and are we promoting a sense of well being globally, or are those borders and boundaries something that we see as sacrosanct? Or do we take the perspective of someone who’s recently gone up in one of Elon Musk’s spaceships and see the world as a globe? And that climate is global, viruses are global, and I heard both Lord John alderdice and Kim Campbell, taking the perspective of humankind, not my country versus your country.

Speaker 2 14:07
And Ambassador greming goes a very strong partner from the Geneva Center for Security Policy, partner of ILA here in Geneva, and he joined us. And I thought he was very, very interesting, because he comes from a multinational organization background. He challenged us about borders. He said, you know, how are national borders going to help at all? And yet, most of our framing, most of our frame of reference in leadership scholarship in the past has been around within the context of nation states. Why wouldn’t it be and we need new thinking and new internationalism. He was saying, you know, how do borders help with the crisis of migration? How do borders help at all with climate change and how do borders help at all with the pandemic and covid 19? And he was very, very articulate around these and challenging. He didn’t have all the answers, but he wanted us to have a debate and a dialog between. Between those out there at the front end with those in the back room having the space and time to have ideas, to mobilize ideas,

Speaker 1 15:08
as you mentioned, marine having these keynote plenaries that had a view, one around the business perspective, another around the research moving forward in this interdependent world of ours, and the very first one that we had was around multilateral institutions and how important that is at this point. So having the Secretary General from the United Nations here talking about one of the largest multilateral organizations that had this concept after World War Two, going back to Kim’s historical perspective, and how do you now rethink or reimagine the United Nations as a multilateral institution moving forward, or the inter parliamentary Union, and the importance of the Ipu on what it is doing in this work? And Martin cheng gong will talk about the importance of parliaments and gender equality.

Speaker 2 16:07
Just to add, Martin was remarkable in reminding us that as a parliamentarian, as that form of leadership, you focus on accountability. And he raised his sex you know, the accountability of stakeholders there, as Ambassador grimminger called it the tyranny of the election. Yes, yes, and how you can mobilize that. And here’s an African leader of the inter parliamentary union who’s reminding leadership community that accountability is a critical issue, and it is in all forms of organization, but of course, it’s very rarefied in parliamentary ones.

Speaker 1 16:41
I did not know the Ipu was the oldest multilateral institution, and shame on me, right? But that comes from you’re a Brit. So you know it is while those of us from the States, you know 197 bosses. I know he it’s an amazing and how he does this, but they talk about the accountability, and this comes back to the leadership that he has put forward in the Ipu. One of their standards is around gender equality. And so how do you deliver in the small ways and the big ways? He says, I cannot serve on a panel like this unless it has diversity, gender diversity, first and foremost, and other forms of diversity following that,

Speaker 2 17:24
that is powerful. You know, that’s a standard that he seeks. Of all the parliaments that he represents, he was quite remarkable and very generous with his time, and very outspoken about the challenges and he’s having to reimagine the role that his organization plays in a world where democracy is under challenge. If you’re the Secretary General of the inter parliamentary union, at a time when democracy is on the way, this is a big challenge. He was looking for help and support and ideas as much as we were looking at him for his wisdom and for his position.

Maureen 18:00
I love the partnership. I love inviting researchers to provide evidence to support where we go forward. It is a

Speaker 1 18:08
give and take. We’re talking about globalization. We also know that it’s local and global, and Mike does a nice job of describing it as a community of leadership. But we have to, in moving forward, think about the interdependency of all levels.

Maureen 18:26
One of the things that came through very clear in one of the plenaries was, yes, we absolutely have global policy, and it’s foundational. And we had someone rescuing food in communities. It ranged from, what do I do in the 20 mile radius around my house, as well as what is happening for people who are global leaders. And both are critical, exactly.

Speaker 1 18:49
And I know you’re going to talk to Pauline Cowell, but her organization on she equity in terms of funding women entrepreneurs and talk about impact.

Maureen 19:00
She was a refugee. What did she require to be successful, and what did communities require? So part of it was in her, but part of it was the community surrounding her, providing the support, providing jobs, providing an environment that allowed her to thrive, rather than seeing her as someone different and scary, and I actually work with a client who is prototyping a model to hire refugees. So part of the way they’re dealing with labor shortage is bringing refugees into the fold and providing community support and meaningful work so that they don’t come into a community where they’re seen as a burden on the social system.

Speaker 2 19:45
You’re using Maureen of a very real 21st Century issue, the absorption, the accommodation of refugees. But here’s the thing, the models of global leadership that we were able to discuss by being here together, by providing. Looking the dialog that we’ve described, came up with some tiny little changes that could happen. Things happen big when they start small. This was a message from Pauline. You know, the two things stopping her African women entrepreneurs from leading themselves to better places for themselves and their families two things, voice, which they didn’t have. They’re not noisy enough, they’re not listened to, and capital, which the standard financial systems don’t seem to point in their direction. And she said at the end, I thought it was brilliant. She told her story, she gave her narrative. Then she said, I want more voice for my women, and send us your capital, because you know that they’re going to use it. And that was just a tiny example, but, but a very powerful

Unknown Speaker 20:47
one. That’s a scalability. It’s a great example, right?

Maureen 20:49
Well, and she also talked about creating an ecosystem, yes, so it’s not send cash to women and they may or may not succeed, absolutely not. We’ve put the wrapping around them so that they will absolutely thrive, and that 90% of that money goes back into the community, creating more jobs, educating their young people. And I don’t remember the statistic, but what percentage of the world’s population is coming from Africa? Like 5050, 51%

Speaker 2 21:16
I think I don’t like guessing, but it’s big. I mean, it’s significant Marine.

Speaker 1 21:20
One of the other things you just brought up is another growing theory around leadership, or concept around leadership, and leadership as an ecosystem, right? And thinking and that, I think, has been driven from where we are going as a global society.

Maureen 21:35
The other thing that’s coming online is circular economy, yes, and that was where Leah talked about taking something that would be waste, unused food from a supermarket or from a conference like this, rescuing it and dispersing it at a housing project now providing food security so these people who were food insecure can focus their Energy on getting to work raising their children. So really, that circularity of instead of linear, if it’s not used, it’s disposed of. But how do we bring it back into the economy? And what’s the leadership required to think differently about a circular system rather than end to end, the

Speaker 1 22:18
ILA has this philosophy around sustainability, there’s no question we can be doing more. But under the leadership of Bridget Chisholm, our conference services director, since she has been here, we have made a commitment, and we only go to places where any food that is not used gets distributed to a place where it can be used in terms of the type of materials that are used, even from the bags to program books, yeah, 100% bamboo. So there’s a real commitment, and we know we can do more, but there is a commitment there to put into place, operationalize what we believe

Maureen 22:56
in well, and that was part of why I wanted to talk about not only who the speakers were, but what is the ILA and how are you embodying that future that we want to create and CO create?

Speaker 1 23:07
You know, it’s been interesting because I was interviewed from a World Congress magazine around our HyFlex model, because it’s peaking interest. Mike knows this because he’s also received the same it’s an example of how through crisis comes greater innovation and creativity. But it was also addressing what is it that our members need, and what is it that we can do for our members and beyond our members, right? Because the ILA reach is over 16,000 individuals around the world. We have a 3000 really actively engaged membership. But as we looked at it, we knew our members coming through this covid epidemic, that there were those that were hungry to get back together socially. We knew that there were those who wanted to get back together, but even though they wanted to, couldn’t. And we also knew there were those that just couldn’t for multiple reasons, just in terms of location, or if they’re in a country that still doesn’t allow them to leave the country. So we had to give choice, and the choice was around being in person and online, and more importantly, it was about being live and in the moment, on site and online. There are no pre records, because we dialog with each other, not in the sense of a talk to one person.

Speaker 2 24:29
And I think we’ve learned very quickly and implemented on the basis of what we’ve learned from this particular pandemic, which most of us have very strong emotions and feelings about working from home, being online continuously, and one of the things we learned was that hybrid doesn’t work for the culture and values that matter to us. Hybrid means some people are in the room and some people are not, and we’ve seen that creates a hierarchy, and the high flex model captures that by saying. Know we’re in the moment in the room and we’re in the moment for the next three days online, and we’re able to do both, and we’re able, as a result, to attract more in over 1200 participants, people who are engaged by the values and principles that matter to us, in dialog, in the moment without hierarchy, in a space that’s trusted and that allows for the flourishing of ideas and imagination. So we’re really proud of this, and lots of other people are interested in how we’ve got this far.

Maureen 25:32
Three members of my team have tickets to attend the remote portion who’ve never come to the ILA before, and it was interesting to see how they organized. Are we going to go to different sessions and talk about what we’ve learned? Are we all going to come to the same session and interact about it? So they’re creating their own hybrid of it’s not just being in the room. It’s then taking what I learned in the room or what was recorded. So Carla may attend something that Dan doesn’t, and he can come back and listen to the recording and they can still talk. It’s creating its own life that I think wasn’t possible before.

Speaker 1 26:07
Technology has a lot of wonderful aspects to it, but it’s a vehicle for doing and what we’re looking at is what are the ways that we can embrace technology that embraces humanity and dialog, right in the sense. So for us, the high flex model was a way of doing that. When you’re on site, you can have three people, the three of us saying, should we as a unit, go to one session, or should we go to all three and then kind of share information? So we hope that the sharing occurs on multiple levels. And one of the challenges we have in this HyFlex model is we are transitioning to the online both are live and in the moment. And interestingly, I was surprised at the number of individuals who are presenting here in Geneva and then are flying to wherever their home is to present online, while others are going to start from their home base online, and there are others who are in Geneva and will stay on all three. But the interesting piece of it is that we may all be in a different place, but we’re all in the same trusted space.

Maureen 27:16
I think that’s so important. I’m going to be midnight 30 speaking at something right before I fly home,

Speaker 2 27:21
you know, so I’ll be at home online for one of the plenaries, and only in my shirt and tie. There’s a serious additional point then, and I’d like us to come to one of the second major areas that we’ve pushed along this 23rd conference, and that’s the power of purpose work. But we are a purposeful organization, Maureen, that really matters to sin and I hugely, and that means that we’re able to look forward at wellbeing and that where we want and standards we want to create that lead. We talk about a better world in our and it sounds a bit wishy washy, but it’s not. It’s a very clear statement our work and our energy and our passions appointed a place where people are in a better place. You know, we have a responsibility for our carbon footprint, so that alone is another aside about the high flex model. The high flex model isn’t just in the moment of the pandemic. It’s a model which we will now develop and exploit to reduce the negative impact of our moving around the world and convening. But we don’t want to lose the convening, but we need to do it in a responsible way that looks towards our purpose, and the purpose is about the contribution we make to well being and to some of the global challenges we face. This is important.

Maureen 28:45
It does raise the stakes for if I’m going to consume resources, I have to be here and make it a high impact event. It’s not a whimsical experience for me

Speaker 2 28:56
as board chair. People come up to it and say, Mike, is it going well? Are you pleased with it? And so forth, and I always, course, reverse it and is, what is it for you? But I tell you my assessment at this early stage is that the serious energy that I’ve observed, the quality and content of sessions, I think, reflect the fact that people have taken even more seriously the fact that they’re here, and the fact that they’ve made significant effort to get here, not just financial, but the operational requirements of moving in an age of covid 19. So the fact that people get here, they want to make very good use of being here. My impression is that every moment has been even more powerful than in previous conferences, and it’s not contrasting one conference with another. This is a movement forward, and I want us to capture this for the next time as well.

Speaker 1 29:50
I think we’re also in a place where we are hungry for the interaction in a responsible way, but hungry for. That, you know we joke about in this environment, you see people on Zoom, and now you see people in person, but in person you see them with their masks on. There are all these different ways that we are now experiencing each other, but none of it takes away from the being in the moment together.

Maureen 30:19
I’m introverted, so I’m happy to be online sometimes, and it cuts down the travel time, so I have a lot more hours of productive work versus the driving and flying and stuff. And I chose to be here because there is something about being physically present with people that you do feel an impact of presence, and that was important to me.

Speaker 1 30:42
And you know, Marie, you and I have talked about this in the past, but in cross cultural leadership, right? And if we truly are modeling our work, then we need to immerse ourselves in other cultures and zoom is wonderful in many ways. Don’t get me wrong. It is wonderful, but there is nothing to take the place of the fact that you bump into somebody you don’t know, or you are experiencing a place where you do not know the language, and you are immersing yourself in that culture. There is something about that that is so important understanding another context and culture and being in that culture and that context, that in itself, is important for us to do in leadership roles, so we do not get caught in what we call social parallax. I only see the world from where I stand. We’ve got to see the world from multiple places.

Speaker 2 31:38
So my it’s a convergence of leadership, and it’s happened at this conference in terms of being emphasized the importance of dialog and the importance of open dialog. And that’s my interest, my academic interest, and has been for many years. The convergence now with the needs for leadership development is coincidental, but it’s really, really helpful, seeing as I’m sort of moving into leadership generally. But the dialog literature is very clear, and you’ve already made the point. There are conditions which we understand from research, in which dialog is more effective or less effective, and those conditions are around the hierarchy. We talked about the values, the openness, the trusted space. You can have dialog in a difficult place and it has very little impact. You can have dialog where the power relationships are wrong. So dialog is a really important part of leadership. And we know from our scholars, the Heifetz model of adaptive leadership is all about continuous adaptation, and that happens through communication and dialog, but the qualities that are required, the conditions are required for effective dialog, are the reason we have to move into new places, into trusted places, and together,

Maureen 32:50
I engaged in a dialog process. I’m a big fan of David Bohm and that research and observed in myself where I would go into a session and have a very clear point of view, and I would walk out not even remembering what my point of view was other than I had written it down and it had changed, and it was such a gentle process of continuing to go around a circle and examine and re examine an issue, and watching a group build a cohesive point of view from very differing perspectives in a relatively short period of time. Now it wasn’t a 20 minute meeting, but it was an efficient process for creating shared meaning.

Speaker 2 33:30
One of the lessons that we learned and the discussions we had in the global leadership roundtable here at the Geneva conference was really provoked by John Lord alderdice, who said, you know, we have to start becoming more comfortable in dialog with people we don’t like, and in dialog with people with whom we disagree fundamentally. And that the global challenges that we were talking in that round table about cannot be addressed if we’re unable to master that. So this is a quality of good leadership at a global level. I’m not sure is hugely represented in the literature. There is some reference to it, but preparing a leadership process that is comfortable with difference, comfortable with disagreement, comfortable with dialog that’s really, really hard and challenging. This is a new base we have to create and fill.

Maureen 34:26
One of the things he talked about in our interview was I have to listen for what you need in a conversation, I have to listen through your ears a variation of walk in your shoes, and this arc of time where he was talking about Israelis and Palestinians and Catholics and Protestants, and he equated it, because of his work as a psychotherapist, to family drama. So I look at the family history of my mom and my dad and what caused some of that drama, if I can unravel and at least take the perspective. Perspective of what’s the construct that frames your worldview and what’s the construct that frames someone else’s worldview? Am I true to my heritage, the construct of my Protestant background or Catholic background, or am I true to my children and my grandchildren? Because if I hold too much to that conflict between our heritages, my children are going to inherit that conflict.

Speaker 1 35:23
You know, it’s the seven generations, right? The Native American. I was thinking Mike and John talked about this. But the other piece that came up a theme over and over, was empathy, the walk in the other shoes. And surprising, because that’s a term that I remember studying considerably in my background, but it is taking on new meaning.

Maureen 35:43
I attended a session that was led by the former Commandant of the Marine Corps right after he had retired, and he was talking to a group of physicians and physician leaders and drawing the parallels between deployed military people and physicians in the midst of covid So you’re both in a very challenging situation. The number one skill, he said was required was empathy that we have to demonstrate empathy for our service people who are away from home and in harm’s way. Similarly, our physicians and nurses and healthcare workers in harm’s way every day, in very difficult situations, absent empathy, they’re not going to be able to do this work.

Speaker 2 36:29
We had Jagan from the International Red Cross, one of our leaders, who sat generously with his time and ideas, but he reminded us, empathy is really important, but not if it doesn’t deliver, because at the end of the day, he’s confronting challenges of really sharp, emotional Oh, in the International Red Cross, and you need empathetic delivery. So it’s not just empathy sin and that’s difficult enough. It’s empathy which actually is combined with a commitment to deliver

Unknown Speaker 37:01
empathetic action. Yes, very nicely done.

Maureen 37:03
I talk about empathy and wisdom, and the wisdom is I know when to say, No, it’s not coddling. It’s enabling, enabling in the healthy way, not in the unhealthy way.

Speaker 2 37:13
So I wanted to come back to power of purpose, because, because low I’m fascinated by the issues of global challenges. We have a continued discussion within the ILA sponsoring the work that’s now going on at Cambridge, particularly about corporates and the challenge facing corporations with regard to long term future of our well being. You know, in a world where Secretary General is identified, might not be with us for more than 60 more years, how are the private sector driven by the needs of their stakeholders and shareholders? How are they reimagining leadership in that context? This was very, very encouraging at this conference, another two or three sessions, which looked at what we call now the power of purpose and purposeful leadership applied mainly to the corporate sector, but now beginning to be reapplied in the corporate political and not for profit sectors, and a real powerful energy going on here and how we’re going to change and re imagine leadership of private capital, reimagine leadership in labor markets, reimagining leadership in innovation. This was another big plus, I think here.

Speaker 1 38:20
Thank you, Mike for bringing that up, because the ILA has partnered with Cambridge University. We’ve done, you know, what is purpose? How do we define purpose? And now, how do we measure purpose, and what really is the power of purpose moving forward? I think those are the four areas that we have been continuing to learn and dialog and write about and our partnership with

Maureen 38:42
Cambridge, you mentioned capital and that we’re not just measuring return and investment of financial capital, but social capital and the shared the commons.

Speaker 2 38:52
The corporate sector is reimagining leadership. We’re helping and provoking and providing space for them to discuss it. But the difference between financial accounting and impact accounting was particularly referenced, wasn’t it, by our private sector panel. It means that you’re held to account for the impact that you have, rather than just the numbers you generate on on your balance sheet. And that’s just not before time A and so

Speaker 1 39:18
part of our role in this is as we think about the shift that is happening in terms of how we measure purpose, right? Because we know that you measure what you value, and how that measurement is shifting the performance indicators, which is part of what marine you were talking about, is one of the plenaries and the business plenary, and a number of the other ILA members who have been doing work in this area. And then part of it is, how do we look at the corporation moving forward? How is that corporation and the terminology around well being? And I love that there’s this shift of thinking. Yes, it’s important in terms of financial returns. But even more important. Is the sense of social capital and well being.

Speaker 2 40:03
There’s lots to do. You know the ILA, as we said right at the start, more and we’re not about creating the solutions. We’re not about being the authority. We’re about an association of a community, as I call it, of people passionate about getting better at this. And so the power of purpose came to the ILA, sponsored by the partnership with Cambridge, but it came by concerned corporates who wanted to share the challenges they were facing and wanted some scholarship around what alternative models there were. And we can’t overthrow the capitalist system, is what they said, and nobody’s asking them to, but we can refine and reimagine the way we operate within it. And that’s in essence. And I mean, one of the challenges that sin and I will face over the next period is my concern about making sure that the ILA is purposeful in the real sense, and is a role model as a purpose organization, purpose driven, I think we are, but I’m going to make sure we are by asking the right questions,

Speaker 1 41:02
we have to model right. We have to be forward thinking and forward doing because of who we are and what we stand for and what our mission is. You know, one of the things, as you were talking Mike, it reminded me, I mean the power of purpose and what we do is always is through the lens of leadership, right? So we are doing these other programs in the trusted spaces, online and also on site and the resources, if it’s in healthcare, if it’s in sustainability, right? There are all these areas, but it’s not just thinking about healthcare, and it’s not just thinking about climate change and sustainability. There’s a lot of great research out there, and there are a lot of great professional organizations out there doing good work and pushing the right agendas. Our role is to look at it through the lens of leadership, and I think we can never, ever forget that in terms of the work that we do, one of the other programs that we have been working on very hard is around, how do we create the right guiding standards for programs? There are more leadership programs being developed in the corporate world and in the academic world because of the importance, but how do we make sure that we have the right standards in place, and so Mike and I appointed a global Task Force, because we want to make sure that the general leadership principles were global in nature, and that the standards around context and pedagogy and accountability evaluation were all applicable across all cultures.

Speaker 2 42:43
We’re not setting standards by which we will judge people as to the effect of their leadership. We’re setting standards to support people, to make sure that they’re comprehensive when they design things, and that it’s a quick way of sharing good practice, of course.

Speaker 1 42:57
And it’s not about the individual, it’s about the academic program or the corporate program, of how do you either set it up, what are the criteria you should use, or how do you assist what our colleagues would say continuous learning or continuous improvement around it, and so having those guiding standards will be helpful.

Maureen 43:18
I run a small company, and I partner with a university to credentialize our program, because I want to ensure that the training we offer is of academic standards of a master’s level program, not just we call ourselves an institute, so we can deliver any kind of crazy stuff. And I think for people who are consumers of leadership training, it’s crucial, because there’s all kinds of stuff out there. Some of it is absolutely brilliant, and some of it is not. And our purchasers of leadership training aren’t necessarily equipped to evaluate the quality that’s not necessarily their expertise or their job.

Speaker 1 43:58
Well, I say there’s a lot of Schleck out there. That’s part of the problem with with this field. And I go back to something that we stand for, and that’s rigor and relevance, and it has to be rigorous, by rigorous standards and relevant today, and we

Speaker 2 44:13
have membership with organizations that can accredit and can validate the ILA doesn’t do that, and it would weaken the power that we have to convene if we started accrediting and giving people badges. Can I mention one other area which really emphasizes sin’s point about the lens of leadership, one of the fastest growing communities within the ILA is that of leadership for peace. It’s great for me, of course, because as somebody interested in peace studies and with my center at Coventry, but actually, it’s happened organically. It’s happened because the world is a challenging place in which peacefulness is sometimes hard to find, but we haven’t got a community of peace next and peace builders and peacemakers and people in. Are sitting conflict resolution so forth. We’ve got a community that’s interested in how leadership needs to reimagine itself to be more effective. Nearly 450 members of the ILA, out of the 3000 are signed up to this community that, in itself, is a really encouraging statement, but their commitment within the ILA is to find out how leadership, experience and processes can improve an age old task that’s of how to bring conflict to end and how to get post conflict communities living peacefully, and how to keep the peace when you’ve already got it. And there are things we can do. We can apply the scholarship of the Harvard team or or the Jepson team to this very specific area, and we can see the changes. So one of the sessions at Geneva here, because we are here, where we are, and with our partner, the Geneva Center for Security Policy, was a discussion of how the leadership of peace keeping teams in places of conflict needs to change to be more effective in a time when peacekeeping has become really problematic and challenging, because it hasn’t thought about how effectively it’s led. It’s usually left to the military, or it’s left to do gooders or NGOs or charities. It hasn’t been systematically examined and drawn on leadership scholarship, and it is now, and that’s a really good, good example, I think, of the power of looking at issues that matter to people through the lens of leadership.

Maureen 46:31
I want to punctuate that point. I’ve worked with clients across a range of fields. I worked with a former department chair of a hospital, and he was kind of sentenced to work with me because he had done something inappropriate, and he basically said, I didn’t know he was in his 60s. I didn’t know there was leadership training, but he had a leadership role. How many people are in roles of leadership and their mindset is wherever they grew up with or whoever they’ve watched on TV. They haven’t taken the study of leadership on as really their role. If they’re a physician leader, they’re not only a physician, they’re a leader. If they’re a peacekeeping leader, they’re not only a peacekeeper, they’re a leader. And it seems that what you’re doing in the ILA, what we’re doing, because I’m here too, is really helping people integrate the field of their work with the role of leader and build the expertise as leaders in that field, not as people in the field who happen to accidentally have the job of leader.

Speaker 1 47:37
Can I just take another little twist at that? I think the lens of leadership is important, and so in the sense of, when you were just talking Maureen, you’re spot on in terms of, how do individuals and organizations right and groups and communities think about their roles, but then how do they think about it in terms of leadership, That sense of leader roles, follower roles, and the context that they find themselves embedded in. So thinking about that holistically, I think, helps people see beyond themselves, right? So this there is leadership of self, but leadership of other, going back to what we talked about earlier around empathy and going from the other perspective, how do you look at leadership and all of those different variables that are so important?

Maureen 48:28
I want to use an analogy here. Leadership is a depreciating skill and asset, just like my technology. So we don’t think about I swap out my cell phone every couple years because it breaks. But the mindset of our leaders, if they are not updated, are equal to using a 10 year old cell phone. They’re less effective. You’re talking about multiple stakeholder points of view and well being and empathy. Those are terms that weren’t used 10 years ago, not in the way they are now. So if we as leaders aren’t continuing to update how we think about and deliver and be we’re doing harm.

Speaker 2 49:09
So that’s right, and there is no one way to be a good leader. That’s that’s what you’re saying. Where is so right, and it’s the power of context and the importance of context. Sin was saying, there’s so much of our of our membership now is interested in exploring the world of complexity theory, because it’s suddenly become real. People realize that the context in which leadership has to operate, which leadership has to contribute to is now a complex place, you know, and complexity is somewhere, as I was saying in one of the sessions I was in between stability, which we know, and chaos, which we fear, and actually we’re at neither end of that spectrum at all. We’re in this big, fuzzy, complex intermediate part and those skills, if we had a textbook that told you how to lead in a stable world. World, it would be very straightforward to write, very straightforward to learn. We’d get our masters and we’d go and do it. But that’s not our world, nor is the world of chaos in which you would look for the emergence of populist leaders who take advantage of the complete mess that’s in existence. But we’re actually in an organized world that’s highly complex and highly interdependent, where you solve one problem, you create another, and so forth and so on.

Speaker 1 50:27
I think Ralph Stacy’s book stable instability is a wonderful book, because it talks about those two extremes, and how do you really take the sense of the unknowable and work with the unknowable and make it known as much as you can, right? But there is that sense of, how do you go between the real stable to the chaos? Because it’s right in that fulcrum point that is so important today, and that’s where we

Unknown Speaker 50:52
live, and that’s what we’re going to live exactly.

Speaker 2 50:55
It’s got to create a comfort level among our global leaders and leadership processes that don’t get lost in the complexity, that don’t get worried and anxious so that they’re ineffective, that say this is complex, we know it is. Therefore we’re going to be humble, we’re going to be listening, we’re going to be learning. We’re going to be in high fitness terms, adapting.

Speaker 1 51:17
We all have to be learning. It’s really being comfortable with the uncomfortable, in the sense of we’re never going to be certain, because uncertainty is what we live with every day. That’s what we need to be comfortable with. Is the uncertainty and the ambiguity,

Maureen 51:33
and how we build that and through which community are we building it? And this is a brilliant community to know that we have one another to reach out to when we’re uncomfortable, to help think through. What is the evidence I need at this moment? What is the research that I don’t know to help me deliver to help my precious clients thrive and the families they support and the people who count on them?

Speaker 1 51:57
What’s the evidence based research that we know is there? What are the best practices? What have we also, going back to what you said earlier, is a sense what didn’t work that’s as important. What do we need to let go of? Because letting go is sometimes the hardest thing to do. I think

Maureen 52:13
there’s a country song about that. Thank you for a brilliant conversation. I know that you’re both switching from in person to hybrid, and this is a busy time.

Speaker 1 52:26
And thank you, Maureen, for taking one of the things that we do, which is to disseminate the knowledge that occurs and happens at these conferences, and helping us to disseminate it in a number of different ways through your podcast series. Thank you. Thank you. You.