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Why rethinking leadership is critical in a complex world

In the final Innovation Realized episode, Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger, CEO, Cultivating Leadership, discusses the need for leaders to rethink old assumptions and adapt to increasing complexity.

Key takeaways:

Create environments that allow people the time to develop wisdom and grow.
Our emotions are contagious – embody how you want others to be.
Embrace diverse perspectives and give people the freedom to act.
Younger generations were born into a world that’s in trouble – work with them to prioritize what matters.
We must all work together – evolution is now way too slow, we need to speed it up to keep up.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Narrator

Hello and welcome to the EY Innovation Realized podcast series by Elevation Barn.
Our world is characterized by more forceful changes that appear quicker, trigger more interconnected and widespread impacts, and often strike all at once. Some call this the poly crisis or perma crisis. Whatever you choose to call it, the bottom line is a business climate that has become far more complex. This environment requires leaders to rethink core assumptions, challenge to establish assumptions, and rethink best practices that no longer work.
This Elevate series will bring you inside the 2024 EY Innovation Realized Global Summit to hear the new ways of thinking our complex world requires. Each episode is a provocative one-on-one conversation between a leader exploring these vital topics and impact leader, Will Travis, founder and CEO of Elevation Barn.
Elevation Barn is an international community of world leaders and experts focused on unlocking a purpose-driven legacy for sustainable personal and business growth. To learn more, visit elevationbarn.com.
And now to your host, Will Travis.

Will Travis

Dr. Jennifer Garvey Berger is the CEO of Cultivating Leadership, a global consulting firm that supports leaders, teams and organizations to handle the massive rise in complexity. An acclaimed author, Jennifer builds on deep theoretical knowledge to offer practical ways to make leaders’ organizations more successful, their work more meaningful, and their lives more gratifying. She coaches executives and executive teams, designs and teaches leadership programs, and teaches transformational coaching approaches in her Growth Edge Coaching certification program. She has a master’s and a doctorate from Harvard University. Jennifer is an American by birth, and now lives in France.
Jennifer, welcome.

Jennifer Garvey Berger

Thanks for having me. It's lovely to be here.

Travis

Excellent. So, we're going go straight into digging in. We're here at the Innovation Realized event, and there's so much disruption going on in the world. Many of the business environments seem so complex, and there's so much change driving the shift. How do you see all this disruption?

Garvey Berger

Oh, my goodness, I believe that we have created contexts that are well beyond our current capacity to handle them. And so, figuring out how do we slow down so much of that disruption-creation engine we've got going, and at the same time, how do we become better at handling complexity. Those seem to me like two rather helpful avenues to pursue at the same time.

Travis

But they seem so heavy and so big. How do you break those down?

Garvey Berger

Well, I really don't know very much about the first one. So, I leave that to other experts. The second one is kind of my wheelhouse, like, how do we grow ourselves to be better able to handle complexity, it's heavy in that it's important, but it's kind of a beautiful story of, you know, how do grownups grow and change over time? How do we become more connected to one another? How do we take in more of the world and take off more of our own filters and biases?

Travis

It seems that so much of the business world is based on this hero's journey, versus this kindred quest that we could all embrace. Why is that? And why is that still going [on]?

Garvey Berger

I think, you know, the current business model springs still out of organization-as-factory, trying to standardize and drive efficiency, and be the best machines we could possibly be. You know, it all comes with this fascination for how machines go. And the thing that you're talking about is a fascination for how humans go. And I believe we're just waking up to that, is an interesting question.

Travis

Do you think things like automation and AI, that is taking the automation part of how humans operate, will free us up to be more celebratory of each other?

Garvey Berger

It's certainly my dream, right? When I look at the possibility, we've thought for decades that machines would liberate us to be better with each other? So far that promise has not really arrived. But my big hope is, as machines get better at doing all these things that we didn't imagine machines would do, the thing that's left, the corner that we still have is, what are humans great at? And if we could lean into our humanity, I feel like there are spectacular possibilities for us.

Travis

Sounds so rich, right? And just even you talking about it makes me warm to the [thought], I can get me back.

Garvey Berger

Yeah, it's a beautiful idea. And we can get us back too, because it's not a hero's journey. We are not competing against each other for who's the last one standing on the planet, right? We have to go together. I think the urgency might actually deliver us new ways of thinking and working.

Travis

I feel the same. You talk about mind traps and the psychological stickiness. Can you unpack that a little bit for me?

Garvey Berger

So, basically for my whole career, I've been teaching leaders to handle complexity. And I worked with really brilliant, motivated, fabulous humans around the globe. And I was finding that they were kind of falling into the same mistakes again and again, like we would have a conversation, they would totally know what to do. And then we would walk together into a board meeting and they would not only not do the thing that they said they were going to do, they would do 100% the opposite of the thing that they said they were going to do. And I got really interested, like, why is that? And as I studied it, I found that there's a kind of psycho-biological reason for these mind traps that our brain is trying to protect us from complexity. Because complexity is very costly. It's very destabilizing. And for most of human history, we didn't really need to worry about it that much, because the berry that was poisonous yesterday would be poisonous tomorrow, and the enemy that was the enemy yesterday would be the enemy tomorrow, like things weren't changing that fast. Things change fast now, and we have to actually wake up to that. And so, I call these mind traps because it's like your brain is saying, “Sweetie, just don't look there.” And we have to, we have to look.

Travis

How much is it the self-belief because when you're working with a leader, it's great that they can change the perspective of how they should show up, be themselves. But to your point, when you walk into that board meeting, those people haven't changed, they had the honor of working with you. So, how do they prep that room so that that's more acceptable, that they're going to come into it with a different dimension of thought?

Garvey Berger

Well, it's really interesting. Each of us has the power to change the context we're in by the way we change ourselves. So, I was working with one leader who is wrestling with her board. And she was the chief executive, and she found herself in a kind of a scrabble with particularly one board member, but also kind of the whole board. And she would enter the board kind of primed to duke it out to defend her position to win. And as we worked on that together, and they would like respond, right? They were like, “Okay, sweetheart, let's have it out”. So, as she started to work on not having that relationship with them, she would go in different and try and understand their perspectives, try and understand that between them they had a lot to offer to the organization. It was a big not-for-profit, but between them, they were really trying to make the world a better place. And when she could hold that in her, they changed. They didn't need like a notification, they didn't need a memo, they didn't need coaching. They just needed her not to be protecting her patch, and then they didn't have to protect their patch.

Travis

So, she didn't have to prepare that outside the boardroom. Just our natural energy transmission made them more receptive.

Garvey Berger

That's exactly right. When she was receptive to them, they suddenly found themselves being receptive to her.

Travis

It's often when you have to look in the mirror you realize that you're the one that's the agitator.

Garvey Berger

That's exactly right. And if we can change the way we show up... One of the things, you know, neuroscience teaches us is that our emotions are really contagious. And our anxiety, our anger, these things are very contagious. If I walk into a room angry, and you don't even know me, you might not even notice that I'm angry, but you will find yourself…

Travis

start to feel it.

Garvey Berger

Right? And if I walk into the room really open and curious, you might not know me, but you might find yourself leaning into those emotions.

Travis

I love that. And you're a big advocate with diversity as well, the diversity of thought, not just of your experiences in life, but how you're presenting yourself. How are you helping leaders acknowledge and respect that diversity of thought, the cognitive element of acceptance?

Garvey Berger

Well, once you understand complexity, you move from this idea, you know, if only I were big enough, smart enough, I could handle things. And my job as a leader is to get people to fall in line behind me. You realize that is a fool's errand. That is like having an ant lead an elephant, right? You just can't see enough from that perspective. In complexity, you need as many different perspectives as possible to have any hope. And so, once you give that up, then suddenly, other people's differences become treasures. If you think, “Oh, my job is to get all these people to follow me and to believe what I believe”, their perspectives are liabilities. But if you think, oh, I wonder what I can learn from her and him and her and them? Well, suddenly, that's a different thing, right? That means you need them. They need you. You need them. It's a whole different set of relationships.

Travis

And how do you control the ego that may bubble up with that, so that, oh, suddenly, I've been given some leash. I'm now going to [say] this is my show, and how do you ensure that that's controlled in a way that people go okay, she's given me the freedom or he's given me the freedom. Now, I'm going to respect the situation differently.

Garvey Berger

I spend a lot of time helping people just kind of get in a relationship with their egos, and decide how much do I want this thing at the wheel? And how much is it a helpful kind of sensor for me, but I don't want it, in fact, driving the car. I think most of us don't really want our egos to be driving the car. They're useful. They warn us about danger, and they help keep us kind of whole and safe. And at the same time, they're too static, they're too defensive, they're too protective. And we want that to be one part of our resources, but not like the main resource.

Travis

You live in France now, but you're American. When I first came to America, I found the style very different than England. Do you think certain cultures have got this right? Or certain ways of operating have realized that it was unproductive, or certain cultures kind of dismiss it and actually thrive by the more bullish approaches?

Garvey Berger

Yeah, I haven't wandered into a culture that I think, oh, they nailed it. And I, you know, I've lived for a long time in New Zealand, and I lived in England, and now in France. So, it's sort of like each of us, each culture, has a puzzle piece, that if we could put them on the table together, we could create something fantastic. And this is also [like] indigenous cultures, you know, more traditional cultures, that we, if we can hold them together and learn from them, like, oh, Americans do the kind of individual story super duper well. Okay, that's an important thing, but we don't want to get rid of it. It's important, but we don't want that to be everything. You know, some countries or cultures do the collective thing super, super well, that's important. How do we put those together?

Travis

Yeah, because you also warn of the danger of oversimplifying some of these complex things. And some of them, you do need to address it, you do need to sit down and say, let's dig a little bit deeper. How do you prevent that? Because people want things to be simple.

Garvey Berger

Well, the funny thing is complexity, actually, is quite simple, right? I make the distinction in my work between what's complicated and what's complex, and complicated things have lots of processes and procedures and have a lot of expert requirements and all those kinds of things, those are not simple. But complexity tends to be run by a few super simple rules. It's very elegant. If you can touch into that, and go with the elegance of it, and trust that, there's a lot of fun, a lot of liberation in complexity.

Travis

Who's the best? I mean, leaders by psychological traits are often a bit more the spear, the tip of the attack, the triangle model. But the people that we’re needing are a little bit more sympathetic, in the circle shape, a bit more rounded [and] actually do care about people versus the pressures often as a leader, it's just bottom line, everybody is an element in this. How do you ensure an organization that's coming from the different diversity of skills and styles can embrace this and all agree to it when some of it may be a bit foreign to certain styles of leadership?

Garvey Berger

Yeah, for sure. Here's where I think adult development ideas, how do we grow better able to handle complexity? So, a leader who has been kind of the master of his craft, and the sort of pointy end, the achiever type, that leader can become, over time, somebody who's much more relational, interdynamic, interdependent, instead of like the strong independent type. That's a path we can walk. And the leaders who walk that path, actually, they lead change better. They have diverse teams more effortlessly, and they find their own lives are kind of more pleasant, more meaningful, more useful than when they're trying to like, double down and nail it themselves.

Travis

They often say that it's like a leopard can't change his spots. And we sometimes see that in relationships, right? We try and change each other. Is this working because you're actually allowing leaders to go back to who they naturally are versus cornered in certain styles? Or how do you see it and how long does it take to help a leader change their habits of process so they can be actually more productive?

Garvey Berger

I believe we can change our spots. I believe that the way we think about and relate to the world is actually quite malleable. We see it in little kids, we watch little kids change their relationship to the world. And then we have a kind of fallacy in our minds that we reach some age and that thing shuts down and something else happens. And yet we all know people will have like a sense of wisdom or gravitas, something that they've clearly grown into over time. And so, the question is, how do we amplify and support that kind of growth? Basically, all ancient traditions have this idea of this growth toward wisdom and generally the growth looks like from dependence through independence to interdependence in some way. And the science of adult development lays out, how do we walk that path, and how can organizations help people walk that path. We know a lot about it, it's just how do we begin to care enough to actually put it in place?

Travis

Do you think leaders are born or made?

Garvey Berger

I believe leadership grows.

Travis

Beautiful. And how do you find new leadership, like we have this whole move now where AI is coming in. There's concerns, there's threats, but we also have this new wave. I'll come back to the AI but, we have this new wave of young people that seem to have different bars on what's important. How do you find that, versus us? I'm the old guard, as a leader. But I'm actually now starting to work with one [of] my oldest daughters, she's 25, you know, studied psychology and different ways. How do you feel about this new wave of younger people, and the opportunity it brings?

Garvey Berger

I'm so excited about it. And I'm so excited because these people are natives to a world that's in trouble. They were born in a world that's in trouble. So were we, but our eyes were closed for a lot longer. Their eyes have always been open. And I think they're really on to something extraordinary about how do we work together? How do we prioritize what matters? How do we give up the sort of substitution of stuff and status for meaning? How do we just not do that and have meaning instead, and not do the very costly, interpersonally costly, environmentally costly substitution that our generation has been drawn to?

Travis

And they're going to be, their understanding of technology is going to [be]…

Garvey Berger

totally different.

Travis

They're born with an iPhone. And how do you think this works hand in hand with the threats and the challenges and the opportunities of AI?

Garvey Berger

I certainly hope that we are kind of evolving our capacities, though, at a quick enough pace, to also be evolving alongside our challenges. This is the thing, evolution itself, which has helped us create societies, helped us have these very fine-tuned nervous systems to be able to pick up on things, helped us have language, and culture, evolution is now way too slow. Eventually, if we let it run another million years, we would have these very sophisticated nervous systems that would be able to handle the complexity of today. But we're not going to be here in a million years unless we amplify this evolutionary path for ourselves. But humans, we can do that, we are able to take the path that evolution has laid for us and then create our own evolutionary path that we power. And we have to do that, we actually don't have a choice about that in this moment. We have to learn to work together better, we have to be able to take better, bigger, more inclusive perspectives, we have to.

Travis

And you've just finished the second edition of your book. Having that time to think about it and reflect, what are you excited about? And what are you scared of?

Garvey Berger

Yeah, it was really interesting going back. So, this is my first book. It's called Changing on the job. It's the first book I ever wrote. And it's about this sort of human evolutionary path. And I was a little bit dismayed to see that 15 years ago I was writing about all of the things that face us now, like we knew, we knew that it was... I write about the climate crisis and about polarization and about all these sorts of things. So, we knew. And it's really exciting to me that organizations are starting to get much more invested in these questions, much more interested in not just teaching leaders to, you know, find their own true north and follow it, but actually helping leaders transform in order to create human cultures in organizations that bring out not just the smarts of people, but the fullness of our humanity. Computers can do smarts, right? Smarts are still important, but I think they are not ever again going to be the most important thing.

Travis

Yeah, that connection to our humanity. As we started out this conversation, it just seems like it could be such a great opportunity. It's a choice, right?

Garvey Berger

That's exactly right. It's everything we have.

Travis

So, what are you looking forward to?

Garvey Berger

I think this is the best time to be alive that has ever been, right? It's scary. We are standing at a precipice. But we have so much capacity, we have so much capability as humans, we have so many tools, we know so much. And we have, I think, just unprecedented possibilities. And so, I love being alive right now. And I am deeply hopeful that we're going to be able to work it out.

Travis

Well, thank you for your work, because you're helping so many people reimagine themselves and feel that confidence and belief of where the future is going.

Garvey Berger

I'm certainly hoping to and that's what I get up every day to try and do.

Travis

Well. You’re certainly doing it. And I love your work. And it's an honor meeting you. And enjoy the rest of the conference.

Garvey Berger

Thank you. I will. I'm excited.

Travis

Jennifer, thank you so much. And I look forward to keeping in touch.

Garvey Berger

Fantastic.

Narrator

We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of the EY Innovation Realized Podcast Series by Elevation Barn. If you would like to learn more about Jennifer Garvey Berger, please visit cultivatingleadership.com.
To learn more about Elevation Barn, please visit us at elevationbarn.com.
To find out how EY leaders are helping clients rethink their business approach to unlock value for their organizations, visit ey.com.
To report accessibility issues with this podcast, email connect@elevationbarn.com.

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Will Travis
Founder and CEO, Elevation Barn

Podcast

Episode 7

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24m 17s

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Why rethinking leadership is critical in a complex world

Key takeaways:

In this series

Presenters