Year of Discovery (Week 31: Acknowledging Loss and Authority)

What a whirlwind of a week! Even though I’m publishing this blog post a day late for the first time on my YoD, I’m filled with so much gratitude. This week was one that will be hard to forget for a long time. It’s easy to go through life without confronting the way that we show up in the world, the kind of roles we occupy, and to be brave to step into new ways of thinking. This last week, I’ve been in Ghana, engaging with other Legatum Fellows through adaptive leadership courses and a ecosystem tour (using MIT’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem framework) and my mind has been expanded.

This week I’m sharing reflections on acknowledging loss and authority.

Acknowledging Loss

Last weekend, we went through a unique learning experience on adaptive leadership that forced the group to confront the reality of messy and complex problems battered with unknowns. As part of adaptive leadership model, one of the steps (after defining the problem, stating values of different stakeholders and describing their loyalties) is addressing loss.

This in particular stood out to me because of an awareness of how little I’ve acknowledged loss previously in adaptive leadership situations (both in my personal and professional lives). My reaction to loss is swift and to those external to me, it seems I process loss quickly. As I pondered this more, it made me think about how so much of the way we show up and respond to life events is linked to our childhood experiences and the work it takes to rewire ourselves for the broader good.

In my earlier days at Moringa, we had a colleague pass away from a random act of violence and I distinctly remember feeling numb and frozen. At that time, another colleague stepped up to organize a vigil and the logistics for the team to attend his funeral. After the initial shock, I was able to hold space for the team to grieve the loss, fighting against my instinct to move on as quickly as possible.

Processing loss is essential because going through the grief of loss is a critical step before helping people see the opportunity beyond the loss. While it may feel heavy, addressing loss helps those in our community or in our workplaces face reality.

In Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’ grief cycle on death and dying, she outlines the 5 stages that people generally go through when faced with grief. Over time, these concepts were adapted to fit all types of losses.

Reflecting more on loss made me realize how critical it is to slow down during periods of change. Loss occurs not just in the loss of a life, but can occur as a loss in an identity. In companies, when a pivot happens or a shift of direction occurs, there is always a loss in a previous belief or identity. I’m learning how critical it is to hold space for the team and key stakeholders to grieve the loss before we have the ability to think about possibilities. In the past, I would often feel frustrated and wonder why it was so hard to shift minds and move hearts in a different direction, and I’m learning now that I’ve skipped a few steps critical in the process.

While the instinct is to speed up so that we don’t need to experience the discomfort and ungroundedness of loss, learning to hold space for the discomfort allows us to process and know when we are ready to create space for possibility. It seems simple in theory, but so difficult in practice.

How do you think about loss in your world?

Authority

‘Leadership is dysfunctional’, our professor said. ‘You’ll leave this weekend not wanting or desiring to be a leader’.

Exercising leadership is difficult and this week helped me better understand why. He distinguished between authority and leadership as:

• Authority is given to provide order, direction and protection
• Leadership centers on creating distress and disturbing the status quo

The trick is to discern when to assert authority and when to lead, and that’s not as simple as it sounds. The role of those who lead is ever-evolving. Their job is to “help people face reality and mobilize them to make change.”

Exercising leadership generates resistance — and pain. People are afraid they will lose something worthwhile. They’re afraid they’re going to have to give up something they’re comfortable with. — Harvard University’s Ronald Heifetz (co-creator of the Adaptive Leadership model)

In a world that’s quickly evolving, exercising leadership (at all levels) is becoming a necessity. The definitions of problems among stakeholders are becoming increasingly misaligned and knowing how to align different stakeholders to complex and ambiguous problems is critical. Because problems today are bigger than one person, one company and one government, adaptive leaders need to think systemically to bring in key stakeholders in and hold space to allow for changing beliefs, values and approaches to accomplish goals.

But being in authority positions (like heads of companies, countires, families, communities) doesn’t mean one exercises leadership. Numerous ‘leaders’ default to taking on ownership of the complex problems they are trying to solve. Because they believe that their role is to provide order, direction and protection, they don’t share the creation, testing and adaption of solutions with those around them.

“People own what they help create.” — Hugh O’Doherty, Harvard Professor in Adaptive Leadership

Learning about adaptive leadership made me reflect on key moments in my leadership journey. When our team grew above 100 people, colleagues who weren’t as comfortable with the unknown pushed me to provide clearer direction despite our more experimental culture — learning and adjusting our strategy as we saw what works versus what doesn’t. In those moments, I panicked. I thought that when the team threw the work back at me, I needed to take responsibility and solve the problem on my own. In adaptive work, learning to hold spaces of discomfort (instead of focusing on putting myself and the team out of the discomfort of the unknown as soon as possible) is a practiced skill. Working with the team to actively use mistakes to identify shared learning opportunities and normalize group collaboration to create experiments (and not crisply defined goals that we hold ourselves to no matter what) is critical to increase the probability of solving a problem in a meaningful way in an increasingly complex world. It’s a huge mindset shift.

It takes courage to grapple with the unknown and to build collective understanding across multiple stakeholders with different incentives, creating support for action.

So what challenges in your life require an adaptive approach? Are you willing to hold space for yourself and others in the face of discomfort?

What I’m reading this week: Leadership on the Line