Maureen: [00:00:00] Today, I’m delighted that our show will feature Cynthia Cherrey, she’s the President and CEO of the International Leadership Association, a global network of leadership scholars, educators, and practitioners.

Cynthia: Well, thank you, Maureen, and actually, it’s a pleasure to be here. I grew up in rural Minnesota. I’m a first generation college student, and I think I learned about leadership.

Being that first generation, you really have to learn how to do things on your own. You don’t have that background of support, so you’re always exploring and experimenting, and it’s by trial and error.

Maureen: We need to think globally. We’ve heard that phrase, think globally, work locally.

Cynthia: What’s

Maureen: driving the requirement for becoming a global society?

What are the roadmaps? competencies different countries looking at? How do we want to interact on a global stage?

Cynthia: That’s a very huge question. Let me see if I can address it in a couple of ways. I shared with you that I grew up in Minnesota, which is really the region of lakes. And I have to use this metaphor [00:01:00] of, it used to be when you would stand on the edge of a lake, you could see a storm come across the lake.

It was slow, you could see the clouds build up, you could see the rain coming, you could prepare, you could get dressed for it. Now, I’d say the metaphor, we live in this period of rapid change where the calm before that storm, that time to prepare is less and less, and the periods of turbulence are more and more.

We are in one of those fulcrum points in history, I think I shared, where in history where everything that was is tripping over everything that is. And Peter Goldmark says it, I think, in an even better way. He says we live in a period of ultimata. A lot of that is due to our becoming a global society, right?

And becoming global is really driven by this Increasing economic interaction among countries by this growing number of economic and political treaties, partnerships and alliances, we saw that very early on, and now you see more and more of those types of [00:02:00] partnerships and alliances taking place, and by the innovations in communication and technology that are occurring that really allow people from all over the world to interact personally and electronically.

And to do that almost instantaneously, which then results in the spread of both accurate information and inaccurate information. So as societies are more and more influenced by all these political, social, economic, and technological transactions across borders, Change is influenced not only internal to an organization or to a country, but by individuals interacting across organizations, across institutions, and across countries.

And that has created the first ever semblance of a global civilization, or what people really now are calling a modern civilization, and others are calling a global culture, because it connects diverse cultures within and across all continents. So we are in a different [00:03:00] time frame, if you will, in the world today.

Maureen: , I don’t know that you can go anywhere in the world and not see a Coca Cola or tennis shoes with American brands on them, or American cars. It seems that it is ever present.

Cynthia: It is. And actually when we started to see the major shift was II. That’s when we saw the beginnings of the need for this new governance structures for a global economy.

If you think about it. NATO was probably one of the first really large across all institutional and countries way of connecting folks. And it was done initially in a defensive mode, right? The threat of Soviet expansion. But. As you look at NATO and the history behind it, it now has also an emphasis on European political integration and also economic progress.

In the nineties, it was [00:04:00] used and expanded by bringing in other countries for the stabilization of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. And now it’s used in terms of more thinking about it as extending peace in a way. Another example of what we have. Today is the European Union, and for the fact of all of the European countries coming together, but now what we have also is this time between what I would call paradigms of civilization, where there’s this contrast between this accelerated evolution of folks having to collaborate and cooperate and work together and yet they’re You know, every solution presents more problems, and what you find are also individuals who want to go back to the familiar and even return to the past.

And Brexit may be an example of that. But what we really need is this fundamental change towards co creating ways of living [00:05:00] together in an ever increasing, interdependent society. Society I remember there was a talk Obama gave in a talk around the global economy and he said restricting trade or giving into protectionism in the 21st century economy will not work.

So as much as we sometimes want to go back, we can’t go back, right? There is no going back on a global economy. It’s impacting us in ways we know and in ways we don’t know.

Maureen: One of the things I remember reading in a strategy book was the way to be Most safe going forward is economic interdependence, that many countries will act in their own economic interest. So if we’re a strong trading partner, the probability of a negative outcome from a invasion perspective or violence perspective is, we are safer.

I think

Cynthia: that’s right. I also am not [00:06:00] a historian. But I think that is, actually if you look at the EU, that’s one of the other benefits that has happened, but, as we look at this, I think it’s a difficult concept to grasp. Being a global economy, being a global society is difficult for us, right?

It’s not an easy concept.

Maureen: So you talked about competencies for global leadership, and I know you have done extensive research. Many leaders are working either with trading partners internationally, clients internationally, and for larger companies, certainly many of them are headquartered internationally.

Even as a small company, I have global clients and I’m teaching in Europe, I had someone over from the UK this week, . So it seems more Prevalent. What things should leaders be thinking about with regard to behavioral skills in working globally? [00:07:00]

Cynthia: I think the first thing we need to look at is what we mean by thinking globally.

I think too many of us believe that means projecting our own beliefs and values and cultural norms and applying those to other parts of the world, right? It’s our perception that Our norms and our behaviors and beliefs are not only the only way, but sometimes I think we just forget there are other ways.

Maureen: So for

Cynthia: example, here’s a company that was going global, and they had come up with a new energy drink, and they were promoting this drink in another part of the world. And there were three frames to the marketing, to the advertising. The first frame had the person lying down. On the ground, no energy. The second frame has the person taking the drink, which gives them energy.

The third one has them [00:08:00] jumping up in the air full of energy. And what. What happened is it wasn’t taking on, and they weren’t understanding why, and part of it was a small thing of not understanding that instead of reading left to right, it’s culturally reading right to left. So you had the person who was jumping up in the air, then took the energy drink, and the outcome was they’re lying flat on the ground.

It had the opposite effect, and it’s just a small thing of understanding the culture Okay, so as we think about being global, it’s more than geography, right? It’s also about the cultural aspects, the people, and the values and the norms and the unwritten rules that we need to be aware of. It’s about a global mindset, having.

Somebody would call worldview intelligence. How do we really listen and learn? How do we really live, work, and lead in an interdependent society where success is determined [00:09:00] by our connectedness? How we understand each other and how we work collectively together because we need to find the solutions that support our shared sustainability.

it requires us to work across nations and cultures and religions as well as societal sectors and social class.

Maureen: Perfect. Thank you. Let’s come back to that because it’s such a rich statement. And really bears thinking about how do we implement.

Cynthia: This really gets to the basis of what I’m hoping we will explore Maureen, together, which is really how we think about things and how we learn about each other. We could probably together come up with a couple of examples of what’s taking place today in the world.

There are so many examples of political leaders where there is this sense of wanting to go back. I think it’s one of the things that we need to be careful of and being very [00:10:00] conscious of. I think there’s this other point of where we get caught. A great example, I don’t know if you saw in the New York Times this last week, but talked about in the 1950s how in they were writing out citations for women who were wearing bikinis on beaches.

Now in France, there’s the overreaction to women who are wearing the birkinis. It’s just covering too much, but it goes to a deeper fear of values and indifference. And also the fear of having terrorism, right? So if you think of what’s happening with violence in the world, there’s an understanding as to why we have this greater fear, but it also means we have to get across those types of misunderstandings and unknowns.

Maureen: It does seem like such a sticky issue, and I’ve been in conversation with some family members recently specifically about the balance between Preserving [00:11:00] safety and preserving commerce. And it does seem like a delicate balance. And yet, to your point earlier, we have no idea what would happen to our economic success and structure and jobs if we were to rein in trade and cut it off.

Exactly, and I think

Cynthia: What’s interesting today is that in this new global society that’s emerging, it really does require us to think globally and also to think about leadership from a global context. And you’ve done work in this area where we have to, given the changes that are happening it’s really time for us to reevaluate our understanding of what we mean by leadership and how we really.

Think about it differently.

Maureen: Thank you for saying that. The Foundation of the Leader 2050 chapter was looking at the mindset of the leader in [00:12:00] 35 years. And just thinking of our conversation now and several I’ve had recently, the idea that we are facing much more complex challenges, so the one of security, specifically.

 We have to engage multiple stakeholders who are looking at things from perspectives that we often either don’t understand or don’t like to create a robust solution that, again, wouldn’t be the one that we would prefer, but it balances these multiple stakeholders that just are present in our world right now, whether or not we like them.

We have to attend to them.

Cynthia: That is so on target and and it’s complicated. Alright, I’m thinking of our having to model what we talk about in terms of being an international association as well. I’m thinking of the ILA. Our conference this year is in Atlanta. Next year it’s in Brussels. And [00:13:00] after the terrorism attack We had conversations around, do we move forward with Brussels?

As we had that conversation, there were a couple of interesting perspectives that came out of it. One was, I was in Europe, in Berlin and a number of other European countries, and I was asking them what they thought. And they said, Cynthia, quite frankly, we feel less secure coming to the States because of your violence.

And we do in terms of going to Brussels and sharing that with some of our U. S. colleagues. I said, Huh, I never thought about that, right? Because we’ve become a little more immune to that. But it was a totally different perspective that helped us. And the other was, As an international association, no matter where we go, we are always going to have to be aware of safety, but we also have to look at, it’s important for us to be in different parts of the world, and it’s important for us to be in Brussels at this time, right?

[00:14:00] So it’s a, it was an example of the different perceptions, perspective basically of where you stand in the world, and the importance of taking a stand.

Maureen: It’s a beautiful example, thank you, because I, one of the things I want to do, it’s easy to read the list of competencies .

It’s yet another to say, and this is how we did it, right? These are the perspectives, this is the real world challenge we’re facing, and we know that there are a lot of people that won’t be comfortable with the decision we took and the direction we’re going to take, and yet it is continually now a series of balancing acts.

Cynthia: Exactly.

Maureen: How do we help people develop these?

Cynthia: You and I have talked about the importance of having diverse perspectives around the table. Not for the sake of diversity alone, but because you need people who come with different experiences and different perspectives, because there is no one solution or one silver bullet anymore in [00:15:00]terms of having that one right answer.

It’s now a matter of really looking at how we collectively think and then come up with a solution. Really, in many ways, not one solution, but choosing many small actions, really, because if you have this complex system, it depends on many parts, but they function so intricately together that you must have to find multiple ways to influence the system at the same time, rather than that one big magic bullet.

For example, in working in higher education and in student affairs work for many, many years. Individuals always. They were always this, what’s the silver bullet for alcohol use and abuse on a college campus? Well, there isn’t one silver bullet, so you have to try these multiple smaller actions to influence the bigger system.

Maureen: For me, that’s one of the biggest points is this, and I use this language of [00:16:00]experimentation, not that we have no idea where we’re doing or what we’re doing or where we’re going, but I don’t know exactly the right combination. I know if I’m making stew, relatively I’m putting in meats and vegetables, but I don’t know in what proportions, given our current situation, so pulling from the Agile software development methodology the idea that I bring together the right constituents, we do small experiments, nothing that’s going to cause us to blow up, and we learn with every experiment, so in small Increments, we’re refining and updating, We’re piloting something and then refining and then piloting something else and refining. And it becomes the core competency.

Cynthia: I think that’s actually lovely, and I think that is one of the competencies, right?

I would add to that around flexibility, which is Really is also part of [00:17:00] what you were describing, because in these complex systems, they’re inherently unpredictable, right? So we can’t even know how they’re going to respond to all of our actions. So we have to do this testing and experimentation and watching how the actions are affecting and making continual adjustments to the plans along the way.

There is this sense of don’t work for perfectionism because perfectionism, if you’re looking for being perfect or for that perfect solution, you’re never going to get anywhere. If you’re going to stick to a really definitive plan then you lose because you’ll lose because If it’s not working, if you still stick with it.

Remember, Maureen, those old oh, strategic plans MBO, I think they used to

Maureen: Yeah, I used to help build this. There you go. And we still plan, but we, at least I still plan, but [00:18:00] I plan with the mindset that these are scenarios we’re likely to face. And, depending on the triggers, we’ll move in one direction or the other, but it still makes sense to know what’s our core business, what are we willing to do and not willing to do, how do we invest our resources, but , it’s a very different than plan the work, work the plan, and stick to the plan, now it’s have a plan and know when to deviate and be thoughtful in the deviations.

Cynthia: Exactly, and I look at I think we’re still in the in this middle of ground where we are still living in kind of what I would call the remnants of the industrial era, right? And now we’re in this knowledge economy, or this global world where, There was this traditional way of doing things. For example, the leader was the leader in New All, and we know in today’s type of organization that’s not necessarily true, right?

[00:19:00] And that you have to look at things I describe it as both the pyramid, the top down hierarchy, which still exists, and the spiderweb that’s there. Overlaid on the pyramid, because you’re in this interconnected world that you also need to work. Yes, you put in place your policies and your procedures.

At the same time, what’s compelling is making sure that there is a very clear vision and the values, and that we continue to talk about the vision and the values and model the values of the organization. And that’s another way that kind of holds as a, if you will, a strange attractor that keeps an organization moving forward in the right direction, even when there’s this experimentation, right?

And that we reward experimentation and that we reward failure because if we’re not failing at times, it means we’re not. Taking risks and it means we’re [00:20:00] not experimenting and we’re not trying to continue to align our goals with the direction in the future of that organization.

Maureen: I love the idea of failing forward fast and then reframed as learning forward.

The idea that we’re failing, I think, terrorizes some executives. And yet, They’re controlled, crafted experiments, right? And just reframing the failing to learning, I think, may be helpful.

Cynthia: Maureen, you remind me of this and when I lived in Princeton, I walked by this statue of Einstein every day and it had a number of his wonderful quotes on it, but one that I thought was so accurate and appropriate for what we’ve been talking about is when he had said that the significant problems that we face today cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that existed when we created them.

Which always helps to, he’s so smart and he says things in such a simple [00:21:00] way. And I would add to that and say that nor can these problems be solved with the same leadership we had when we created them. So we’ve, that’s why I think we’ve Some of the work that you’re doing and that is being done in the ILA is really about exploring leadership in today’s context, right?

And I think part of what, as we’re thinking about this, we still need the traditional skill set. I think we don’t, sometimes people think we’re throwing everything away from the past. It’s not right? We have to, we still need some of those traditional skills. In our backpack, I’d say there are some additional capacities that maybe you and I can talk about.

I would describe it as our GPS to navigate the present and the future about the work that we’re doing on a global level. And I’d say the very first one in a global society that you need is global acumen. If we don’t have a Develop a global perspective and that real [00:22:00] understanding and the experience and insights of working in today’s society, then we’re really not doing a work because we really truly need to be well versed in the diversity of the world.

And we may be flat in terms of technology, but I think we’re still quite bumpy in the sense that people from different organizations in different of the areas, different areas of the world work in very different ways. And we talked about some of those examples earlier. And I know you’ve done some work around this as well.

Maureen: And I think is really relevant that often it is easy to fall into the trap of forgetting that other people are different than we are.

Cynthia: Exactly. There’s a great research study that was done just a few years ago by the Center for Creative Leadership, and they said 86 percent of their senior executives believed it was important to work effectively across culture and geographic boundaries in their roles, but only 7 percent of them believed that they were effective at doing [00:23:00] so.

Only 7%.

Maureen: Wow. So 93 percent of leaders , either don’t think about it at all, which means they’re probably not effective, or they think they’re not effective.

It’s a great other way of saying exactly.

on what other What competencies do global leaders or emerging leaders need to be thinking about to prepare themselves for the reality we’re facing now and will continue to face in a more pressing manner?

Cynthia: I think there’s one, Maureen you talked about that is real important and that’s the sense of ongoing learning or what I would call this immersive integrative learning that we need really to learn how, because connectivity increase, all of this connectivity creates accelerated movement, which continues to speed up, which requires Us to continually learn to continually adapt to the changing environment.

So learning how to learn I think is a [00:24:00] very important thing. And I guess also learning how to unlearn, which is probably harder or letting go of old habits of is a challenge. But I think becoming, learning focused. And there was a wonderful thing that, um. Author Johnson in his book on future leader skills talked about and he said we really need to immerse ourselves in different cultures and put ourselves, place ourselves in uncomfortable situations so that we really engage in the other, in learning the other.

I love that because that’s that sense of really being in and immerse yourself in a different culture. And not everybody can do that, right? But each of us can do that in our own way. Now it can be that we, Go to another culture and we experience it, not as a tourist, but in the work that we do.

And so you and I are fortunate that way. We can immerse ourselves because we work in other cultures. But there are ways of doing [00:25:00] that just in reading and looking at programs that are different than what you normally would. Listening to music that you wouldn’t normally listen to, but broaden your horizon on things that are different or uncomfortable.

Maureen: You have to be intellectually curious and learn things outside of your frame.

Cynthia: Yeah, James McGregor Burns was wonderful , intellectual curiosity was at the core of who he was, right? I can remember him sitting when he was 88 years old with a brand new doctoral student and asking her about her research and being authentically, genuinely curious.

Interested in learning about it,

Maureen: Intellectual curiosity can be hard, right? It’s easy to see it and tie this back to your comment about unlearning. So I’ve been Talking to a family member who has a very different political view than I do, but someone I [00:26:00] respect very highly.

And really trying to understand things like national security and what are my blind spots. I’ve spent my entire life formulating a point of view that I hold pretty strongly to and yet I wonder, so that’s the curiosity, what are my blind spots and where am I making ineffective decisions at this point in time because I have discounted or overlooked or just not wanted to think about some of the things from my family history.

 Sometimes this learning is hard. It forces us to look inside in ways that are unpleasant and really reevaluate the views we hold in some cases. And do I have biases?

Cynthia: That I didn’t realize I had.

Cynthia: When I talk to folks about this, I’ll say sometimes we need to suspend our beliefs in order to deepen our beliefs. [00:27:00] How do we step outside of our own belief structure, which is challenging to do, to really sit, and it comes back to that listening and learning again, but really listening to the other so that we can get that diverse perspective before we jump in with a response.

Do we really understand the difference? I guess the other I’d say in today’s world, which is related, is we need to embrace paradox. If we look at Paradox, we, we’ve grown up often thinking in an either or a black or white dualistic perspective, when in essence what we really need to do is to work with the paradox that exists in today’s global world and understand that they’re really not opposing polarities, right?

It’s not, we think in terms of short term versus long term, or let’s take global versus local. They’re both. As In a leadership role, you really cannot afford to [00:28:00] ignore the local context over the global context. And you, you really need both. Right?

Maureen: I love this part of the conversation, but I want to make sure you get a chance to talk about the ILA and the work it is doing and you’re doing through it

Cynthia: thank you, Maureen, because you know it’s one of my passions. And It ties so directly in with the work that you talked about in terms earlier when we were discussing global acumen and one of the things, the ILA really grew out of a vision that started with a grant of bringing together about 35 leadership scholars who had not worked together and they were in different disciplines.

And so you can. be focused on the same profession and still not work with each other. And so my, one of my wonderful stories I just, is James McGregor Burns, who is a political theorist and leadership expert, and Warren Bennis, who was in the business area of leadership, [00:29:00] hadn’t, they knew of each other, but they had not met.

As a part of the ILA was the first time that they met and introduced each other. And it was wonderful to see these two great thinkers on leadership and different perspectives together at the same table talking about leadership. And what the ILA does is it really creates this space for not only leadership scholars from different disciplines to come together, but also individuals who are passionate Teach about leadership and also the practitioner and it’s the practitioner who is really interested in the scholarly work and putting that work into practice.

And it’s about the scholar who knows that their work can’t be done in a vacuum. And that they need to meet and convene with the individuals who are reading their work and are using their work and so that there can be this exchange. So it’s what I think we call [00:30:00] working at the intersection of leadership, practice, teaching.

And it’s all done because we need to bring people together to think about things in very different ways. And so the ILA brings people together in a space that allows them to make the connections with others, to get feedback, to share ideas, to share research, to really innovate and collaborate together.

And it has created this phenomenal community. Network of 2700 individuals from 76 countries around the world and we pull people and we bring them into different context. So we just had a conference, a small topical forum around leadership in Latin America in Lima, Peru, and we had around 100 individuals coming together from not just Latin America, although from Probably about 15 or [00:31:00] 16 different countries Mexico all over South America and North America and from New Zealand and Australia to talk about the research that’s being done and the innovative practice and work that’s being done in Latin America around leadership.

And those are the types of things we’re doing .

Maureen: Thank you very much for joining us.