Tag: diversity

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You are Your Leadership Superpower!

The world needs bold leadership more than ever.  Yesterday’s solutions have fueled today’s problems. A devastating pandemic. Economic crises. Widespread cynicism. Inequities. Divisions of all kinds. Are you ready to seize the opportunity to make a real difference?  How are you preparing to do your part?

Acquiring the right stuff is developmental and deliberate. Like good wine, leadership skills and savvy mature over time. Experience helps. Seek it out.  Pair it with the skills of reflective practice[1]. You’ll consolidate your strengths; deepen your understandings of human nature and the world; and avoid the same mistakes. Most importantly, harness the leadership superpower that is only yours for the taking – the creative energies of your true self.

Ocean Vuong, professor, MacArthur genius award-winning poet and essayist, and author of the New York Times best-selling novel “On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous”, rings a bell at the beginning of every class.[2]  More accurately, he invites the bell.  The bell, in Vietnamese Buddhist traditions, is always ringing somewhere.  We mute its manifestation – as we do so much of the world – through our tacit, selective screening of the information and experience available to us[3].  

The bell is a prompt for Vuong – a reminder to stop the automatic pilot of life and to call back with honor the first version of ourselves that brought us to this moment.  Long ago and without much clarity of what it would really mean or entail, a more trusting, younger version of each of us took a risk. It made a decision about what we wanted to do with our lives and launched us on the complex journey that has brought us to today. No deep understanding of the sacrifices or steps required. Little appreciation for the full consequences of choices. It stepped out and propelled us forward into the unknown with energy, excitement, and hope.

Western traditions, Vuong reminds, tell us to forget that former self. It was the child that had to be improved upon. Untrained. Immature.  Inexperienced. Unskilled. The long-decomposed acorn ignored in praise of the mighty oak.  

Wrong, says Vuong. That younger self deserves to be appreciated and remembered. It is the pioneer of our present whose “epicentric moment” of choice so long ago brought us here and nowhere else. It is also the direct link to the reservoir of strength, courage, risk-taking, and openness that lies deep within. Honor that self in all its contributions and bravery!  Invite it, advises Vuong, as a fruitful collaborator in our current success.

Few have Vuong’s gift for poetic meditation. But we can all heed the wisdom of his call.  We are our lived experiences. All of them – the successes and failures, moments of pride and shame, the parts of our past that lift us up and those we hide in fear that others might see us as less. Our experiences have forged our unique world view. Understand it! They have given us a set of skills, values, and understandings unlike anyone else. Claim them! Our lived experiences define what we alone can bring to the table – what we must bring to the table – if we are to join effectively with others in search of new paths to lead us from these troubled times.  Our authenticity is our leadership superpower if we are not afraid to use it.   

[1] Donald Schon (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (first edition). New York: Basic Books.

[2] Ocean Vuong spoke on April 8, 2021 at the Radcliffe Institute.  It is available at     https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/event/2021-ocean-vuong-virtual

[3] Joan V. Gallos (2008). Making Sense of Organizations: Leadership, Frames, and Everyday Theories of the Situation. In Joan V. Gallos (ed.). Business Leadership.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

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Leading in a Global World Requires Global Eyes and Heart: Let Theater Be Your Guide

There’s nothing like live theater for learning about ourselves and life’s complexities.

It lets us walk in another’s shoes and immerse ourselves in new ways of thinking and being!  We listen, observe, and witness – and experience one of the few times when we significantly engage with others who speak directly to us that we do not talk or set our minds to work preparing responses to what they say before they even finish speaking. Theater slows life down and encourages us to study our reactions to it.

Quite simply, theater traffics in human understanding – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness. 

The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, seeing situations through another’s eyes or different lenses, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.

Different cultures, ethnicities, upbringings, experiences, and social traditions can separate us. But broadening our perspectives and minds takes us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences. Theater lays out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invites us to watch, reflect, and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by a recent event.

clip_image002I saw “Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True” – Ifeoma Fafunwa’s beautiful, honest, high-energy production about the complex intersections among gender, culture, abuse, and inequity in Nigeria; and had opportunity to engage with the playwright post-performance. What powerful learning for today’s fast-paced, global world!

The show has been a phenomenon in Nigeria, playing to sold-out crowds in theaters, as well as standing-room-only, pop-up performances in markets, city squares, and other public places. It stars ten famous Nigerian stage and screen actresses, and is having its first full run in the U.S. at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

No question, the production is artistically magical, the cast and musicians superb, and the playwright a courageous and visionary leader in bringing cultural secrets to the light of day. This is an experience you won’t want to miss!

clip_image004Given the show’s subject matter and the added wallop of  “Nollywood” stars as messengers – think about the role of Hollywood women in the U.S. #MeToo and #TimesUp movements – it is a major intervention for social justice and women’s empowerment in Nigeria and beyond. 

The subject of women’s abuse and inequity is raw and rings brutally true in the production. The script is based on interviews with women in Nigeria across age, socio-economic class, place, and social circumstances and is a strategic series of song and dance-infused vignettes in the spirit of Anna Deavere Smith’s ethnographically-based work. The production (especially act 1) takes the audience, in the words of WGBH’s Jared Bowen, “right into the heart of abuse." There is pain for sure. But there is also great hope in bearing witness to the enduring spirit, fearlessness, defiance, and authenticity of women claiming voice, power, and personal agency: let change begin with me – a reminder to everyday leaders of their job to make the world a better place in whatever ways they can!

Leading in a global world requires global eyes and heart: the ability to understand and accept diverse cultures, see differences as the springboard to innovation, and work with grace and sensitivities when others hold values and beliefs far different from our own.

In today’s world, management educators and authors do leaders-in-training a disservice when they forget that or convey the illusion of simplicity or control with models and theories that portray work and life as linear, rational, neat, and tidy. Human nature is complicated, and social processes like leadership and management are steeped in ambiguity, confusion, competing values, and choice. Good theater acknowledges that and plays out human nature in its messy fullness. Let our understandings of leadership embrace the same.

Internal struggles, confusion, ambiguity, and doubts of the soul are all par for the course – and recognizing that enables us to summon the courage and persistence to stay the course. Real leadership looks more like the gritty and human process that it is – and less glamorous and heroic – when seen through the difficult choices and challenges of compelling characters, like the women in “Hear Word! Naija Woman Talk True”.

Life is not always fair nor power and resources equally distributed, and there is much work – globally and locally, personally and organizationally – to do. That’s why we need leaders fully prepared for the road ahead and able to embrace an increasingly diverse world without fear of loss!

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Karen Tal: Strangers No More

An amazing leadership story is that of Karen Tal and her work launching the highly successful public school in Tel Aviv, Bialik-Rogozine.

Listen to Karen speak about the school and herself. http://www.tedxtelaviv.com/2010/07/18/karen-tal-thriving-on-turmoil/ 

I had the pleasure of meeting her recently; and Karen’s passion, commitment, and authenticity were palpable. You can also learn more about the school in the Academy Award winning short documentary “Strangers No More.”

Karen set out 7 years ago as a new principal to merge two failing schools in the poorest section. She brought strong belief that it is our duty to help all children to learn. She found within herself the courage to manage her own fears and doubts. She shared a clear vision with the teachers and school staff: in 5 years, the school will become an educational miracle where every student can increase his or her potential. She offered a challenge to the school, government agencies, and diverse partners: “Join me, support us, or I will support the closing of these schools.” 

Statistics show Bialik-Rogozine has more than succeeded by objective educational measures of retention, graduation rates, college admission, etc. Images of the diverse and caring community created for the 800 students from 48 nations and their families tell an even bigger story more.

Efforts are underway, working with successful entrepreneurs from the business community, to find ways to up scale this model of education and community building. Nothing could be more important as we confront the complexities of peace and harmony in an increasingly diverse and global world.        

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Grow Your Brain: Lead Yourself to Increased Leadership Capacities

Research, published in the new book The Emotional Life of your Brain by Richard J. Davidson (with Sharon Begley), has good news. We can change our emotional styles and become more self-aware, attentive to context, and resilient – core skills for surviving and thriving in the rough-and-tumble leadership world. All it takes is systematic mental practice.

I’ll let you read the neurophysiology and brain science and just cut to the chase here. By thinking – and thinking alone – adults can expand areas of the brain to broaden their cognitive and emotional capacities.

This gives us more control than previously believed over what Davidson and Begley call the Six Key Elements of Emotional Style: our resilience in the face of disappointment, outlook on life, self-awareness, social intuition, attention, and sensitivity to context.

To quote the authors: “Mental activity, ranging from meditation to cognitive-behavior therapy, can help you develop a broader awareness of social signals, a deeper sensitivity to your own feelings and bodily sensations, a more consistently positive outlook, and a great capacity for resilience.”

Too negative an outlook on life or situation? Embrace the essentials of “well-being therapy” and focus on ways you can be more grateful, generous, appreciative, and upbeat. You’ll have significant growth in the brain areas used, giving you quicker and more automatic access to these positive responses over time.

Not very self- or other-aware? Slow down and ask yourself to focus on the feelings, discomfort, or concerns of another. It’ll increase activation of the circuitry involved in taking in pain and distress more carefully and broaden your capacities to see life more richly and compassionately.

Too self-aware and filled with the internal chatter and self-evaluations that keep you spinning your wheels? Learn to observe your thoughts or feelings non-judgmentally and choose to put them aside.

Mindfulness and meditation help here. [See the blog archives for past posts of mindfulness and the work of Ellen Langer.] With practice, you’ll develop the hard-wiring and self-control needed to pause, acknowledge a setback or disappointment, have a good laugh at how quickly your mind wants to perseverate and magnify a mere bump in life’s road, and stop yourself from spiraling downward.

The authors claim that locating the base of emotions at least partly in the brain’s seat of reason is a major break from conventional wisdom in psychology and neuroscience.

I’m thrilled their work affirms human capacities to develop the emotional and cultural intelligence needed for effective leadership in an increasingly diverse world. How do you want to lead? Respond? Be? Make it happen. That’s hugely empowering – and productive for us all!

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What we need to learn to succeed

A respected colleague (and my former professor) Richard J. Light (Carl H. Pforzheimer Jr. Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of the book “Making the Most of College”) names five things that successful people say they need to advance their work and careers in today’s global world.

1. the ability to synthesize information

2. the skill of writing extraordinarily well

3. the ability to do research on many different topics

4. the ability to speak at least one foreign language

5. an understanding of other cultures.

I think Light’s got it about right. How do you measure on each?  What are you doing to enhance your capacities in areas where you need to grow? 

In talking with executives recently who wanted to know where to begin in taking their education and executive development to the next level, I made a simple suggestion: read, read, read.

Cognitive development is guaranteed – and you’ll increase your reading speed and comprehension with every page. Seeing your progress on both is satisfying, as our Executive MBA students can attest. You have control over the delivery system and focus of the content – read when you can and what you want.  And continuing to form new neuronal circuits are vital as we age and for responding to an increasingly complex world.

Want a good suggestion for your next good read?  I suggest: America and the Crisis of Global Power by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter. It’s a book you won’t want to put down – and probably shouldn’t.  [Here’s a review to give you a sense of the reasons why.]

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10 Reasons Not to Ignore Malcolm Gladwell’s Mind-Blowing Ideas

I’m a Malcolm Gladwell fan. He has a capacity that educators treasure: the ability to review research on a complex topic and synthesize it into a teachable moment. To add icing on the cake, Gladwell also makes his teaching points usable by putting them in a form others can easily remember. Whether you buy everything Gladwell proposes or not, he gets you thinking.

BusinessInsider.com has a series on Gladwell’s Top 12 Mind-Blowing Ideas. Take a look.

Why is this important to leaders? Here are my Top 10 reasons why you can’t afford to ignore Gladwell’s work.

  1. 1.  Change and influence are complex social processes, difficult under the best of circumstances. You increase the odds of success when you understand Gladwell’s Law of the Few. One person can change the world, but it’s a lot easier and quicker for the right strategic few. Learn how to start a social epidemic.
  1. 2.  Leading is hard, and you don’t want to go it alone. Who can help give voice to your vision? You need allies, especially credible ones. Connectors, mavens, and salespeople add social weight to your message. Make sure you understand the difference among the three roles and have a few of each in your court.
  1. 3.  A sticky idea is a memorable way to frame a message – and if you can’t remember the message, how will you heed it?
  1. 4.  We are all social beings, influenced by the environment in which we live. The tacit and influential Power of Context is huge. Use it to your advantage, and you’ll enhance your influence skills. 
  1. 5.  Strong diagnostic skills involve capacities to form good judgments quickly and from limited data. That’s Gladwell’s blink phenomenon. We all can improve our powers of rapid cognition. Great leaders have it, and it serves them well.
  1. 6.  Data gathering is at the heart of informed decision making, but there can be too much of a good thing. Gladwell’s prod toward information frugality helps avoid information overload and analysis paralysis. Leadership, after all, is about action.
  1. 7.  Authenticity is a characteristic of effective leaders, but it isn’t shooting from the hip – or the mouth. We all make unconscious snap judgments that can get us in trouble if we act on those tacit thoughts before we really think them through. Better to stretch through priming: broadening our experiences and positive interactions with more and different kinds of people so that our first reactions will be more positive than those with a more narrow set of experiences.
  1. 8. It takes 10,000 hours of practice to perfect a skill or talent, according to Gladwell. Practice does make perfect. 
  1. 9. Genius is more about practice (see above), persistence, and a supportive environment and family than natural skill or IQ alone. There’s hope for us all.
  1. 10.  Talent is important. Experience key. Persistence required. But so is luck. May we all have some.
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The Arts Can Teach Us to Lead, Part 1: Embracing Diversity Brings Innovation — The Compelling Case of Sissoko and Segal

I am a firm believer that we can learn much about how to lead from engaging with and in the arts. This post begins a series on the topic.

It’s a set of ideas I’ve been thinking and writing about for a long time. Quite simply, the arts “traffic in understanding,” in the words of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard – and understanding one’s internal and external worlds is at the heart of leadership effectiveness. 

The major challenges in leading – understanding and working with those who are different from us, forging shared interests and common goals, motivating, influencing while remaining open to new learning, understanding the roots of competing interests and conflicts, finding lasting solutions to complex problems – echo life’s larger challenges.

The arts lay out these grand dilemmas in accessible form and invite us to reflect on and learn from them. I’ve been reminded of this by some recent events.

The first was a Ford Foundation conference held May 4, 2011 called "Fresh Angle on the Arts: Reimagining Culture in a Time of Transformation" – a day of discussions and performances exploring the role of art and artistic expression in times of social transformation and revolutionary global change.

Different cultures, ethnicities, and social traditions can separate us. But understanding our own history and heritage and then broadening our perspectives on other cultures through education and collaboration can take us to rich, new heights and toward common ground despite our differences.

Listen to excerpts from the CD called “Chamber Music” as performed by Ballaké Sissoko (an African musician playing a traditional lute-harp from Mali called the kora) and Vincent Segal (a French musician playing the classical cello) at the Ford Foundation conference.

Through the music of Sissoko and Segal, you’ll hear and experience quite simply and enjoyably exactly what I’m talking about – and chances are you’ll understand the importance of leading through and with diversity in today’s global world faster and deeper than you might from a lecture, essay, or class on the topic. 

“Chamber Music” has been reviewed as “one of Europe’s most buzzed-about world music recording.” It is also a clear and powerful illustration of fusion without loss, synergy without dominance, differences as the springboard to innovation, shared leadership through true collaboration, and globalization without fear. 

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Shimomura’s Art: Moving Beyond East-West Stereotypes

I’ve recently discovered Roger Shimomura’s art. It’s gorgeous, engaging, and provocative – and can be found in the permanent collections of over 80 museums. (Thanks, Brian!)

It’s also a powerful vehicle for thinking about the East-West stereotypes we hold and about how they interfere with our capacities to connect with those different from us.

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Shimomura’s paintings, prints, and theatre pieces address sociopolitical issues for Asian America, and many have been inspired by diaries kept by his late immigrant grandmother for 56 years of her life. They also reflect the artist’s own experiences, including as a child in a U.S. internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II.

Oh, the power of art to provide opportunities to discuss the undiscussable!

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It’s human nature to have assumptions and to try and understand others by grouping and evaluating them against the standards and culture that we know. When that process anchors us in bias and fear, we and the world are in trouble.

Take a look at Shimomura’s art. It’ll enable you to appreciate more deeply what that really means.

His pieces speak about the pain in being objectified, misunderstood, excluded, and dehumanized. Equally important, they remind us of all the everyday missed opportunities to connect with others whose differences can make our world richer, brighter, and deeper. 

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Enhancing Global Leadership: Studying China III – Generational Diversity within Diversity

The layers of diversity in China are deep and broad.  There are, of course, ethnic differences. The government of the People’s Republic officially recognizes 56 ethnic groups – up by one since my trip to China last year. 

I am fascinated by the faces in crowds at the Forbidden City and other places popular with Chinese tourists – folks from the provinces who now have the freedom and affluence to travel internally.  For our students who carry stereotypic beliefs that Chinese people look alike, asking them to study faces is a life broadening experience.       

There are language differences, too. The Chinese  have a common written language but dialects so different that those who speak Mandarin from different cities or provinces can have trouble communicating with one another.  Imagine if English speakers in New York couldn’t communicate with English speakers in Chicago or LA.    

There are growing economic differences that often reflect urban vs. rural distinctions.  

But the differences that are most striking for me are in the mindsets of the generations who live together in China today.  

In the United States, we’ve talked about generation gaps for, well, generations.  Howe and Strauss in the Atlantic Monthly have a good piece on the topic. The origin of generation gap in the U.S. is the flower-power, trust no one over thirty period of the last 1960’s.  And we now speak about the generational differences between the digital natives and those born and raised pre-computer and Internet.  My colleague John Palfrey and his co-author Urs Gasser capture that divide well in their book, Born Digital. 

But to understand the meaning of generation gap in China today, you need to imagine a nation with a digital divide of its own: where cell phones, computers, social media, and digital music are standards for urban young. Add to that the reality that the experiences of those born every decade in China since the 1930’s has been informed by a markedly different political, ethical, and economic reality. 

A young entrepreneur with her BMW and bank account may have parents who enthusiastically sacrificed all to participate in the Long March and grandparents who lost much so as to be “reeducated” during the Cultural Revolution.  Continue back through Chinese history is great grandparents are still on the scene.  

We take for granted in the United States consistent political, economic, and educational systems.  Higher education has been a part of our national profile since colonial days.  Expanded access to it has consistently grown over the course of our nation’s history, with huge participation jumps fueled by the GI Bill post-World War II and the Woman’s Movement in the 1960s and 1970’s.  Underpinning all this is morality of freedom, choice, and opportunity.

The advent of Communism, the Cultural Revolution, the Great Leap Forward, the re-education of academics and professionals, the evolution of Socialism post-Mao, the introduction of socialist capitalism, and more have taken the concept of generation gap to new heights.

Those looking for a simple definition of China today – its values, ethics, expectations, beliefs, practices, policies — need only remember that the Chinese cannot even answer that question.  The markedly different life experiences and opportunities of those now in their 20’s, their 40’s, their 60’s, their 80’s have created generational divides and multiple lenses on life. 

China’s generational diversity within its diversity is another good reason for us to enhance our tolerance for ambiguity and our cultural intelligence.

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Educating global leaders, global citizens–learning to see through cultural lenses

Business leadership today is global. There’s no debate on that. Not everyone will become a player in a multi-national company – and some may never do any business outside the United States. However, we are all global citizens in an increasingly flat world who need to appreciate that our leadership decisions and choices may be local in operation, but they are always global in impact.

How do we teach people to be productive global citizens? Do we even know what being a good global citizen today means?

The questions have been on my mind all week as I prepare for the first class in Global Management, the course surrounding our international residency. I’m taking our second year Executive MBAs to three cities in China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin) this spring, and the course is designed to enable them to make the most of that learning experience.

The syllabus and mechanics are in order. My scholarly area is management education; and I’ve got enough experience, pedagogical savvy and developmental theory under my belt to design a pretty integrated and nifty course.

China is a rapidly changing nation of great accomplishment, influence, mystery, and paradox to the Western eye. I’m no China scholar, so I’ve asked distinguished professionals with on-going, hands-on experiences in China to join me in helping students unravel the paradoxes  and mystery as they learn about China’s history, culture, economy, law, and business environments.

I’m sure students will enjoy and learn from this. But I have bigger goals for them – and figuring out how to accomplish those is what’s kept me on edge.

I want our students to learn to see China through Eastern and Western eyes. More important, I want them to understand why that’s so important, so difficult, and so vital to their professional development in an increasingly diverse work world.  All that is not going to come simply from reading cases and articles,  interacting with our distinguished guests, or even travelling abroad.  It’s going to require time, a new level of openness to experience, self-reflection, and some deep digging to identify their own lenses and cultural blinders.  Oy! And I only have five class sessions in KC and eleven days in China to accomplish this.

I know only too well these are high expectations. Some twenty plus years ago, Jean Ramsey and I joined with colleagues to explore how to create educational experiences that broaden others’ understanding of and comfort with diversity and differences, as well as how to deconstruct the dynamics in the learning. We wrote about that in Teaching Diversity: Listening to the Soul, Speaking from the Heart; and we concluded that exploring differences, working to build emotional and cultural intelligence, and getting people to a place where they can name differences without triggering the human urge to evaluate (or devalue) them is complex and emotion-laden teaching.  And developmental growth of this kind takes time.

Activities, for example, can seem touchy-feely for those who live in their heads and are anchored in their local worlds, threatening to those with quick evaluative and ethno-centric lenses, or simplistic to people who just don’t get it. In those cases, primitive displacement can get triggered – along with some nasty comments come course evaluation time!

But hey, every professor knows if you’re looking for love in the classroom, you’re looking in the wrong place.  Good teaching challenges like nothing else, and sometimes it takes years for students to realize what they really learned from their work with you. 

So, wish me luck. Class is Friday, 8 am.  I’ll keep you posted.