Michael Koehler: Welcome to Episode 3 of On the Balcony. Today, we'll begin our exploration of the theme of authority. The focus of the next few chapters of Ron Heifetz’s groundbreaking book Leadership Without Easy Answers. One of the core lessons I learned from Heifetz is that in order to understand the practice of leadership, we also need to understand the work of authority and how they're both related and different. Most leadership theories conflate leadership with authority. So here's my take on the distinction.

Authority is a role given to you or earned. It's a function in a social system that provides services, direction, protection, order, coordination, representation. Authorities often provide expertise and management.

Leadership, on the other hand, is a practice - the activity of mobilizing people to address adaptive work, help people learn new ways or unlearn old ways, and integrate the past into the future, all of that, while dealing with loss. And while leadership can happen from positions of authority, it often also happens from folks who don't have much authority: climate change activists, for example, or organizers.

So today we'll talk about authority with a wonderful guest who brings a lot of authority to this topic. Kim Leary is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School, an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, and lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Among her many roles as a leadership practitioner are her two postings as an advisor at both the Obama and the Biden White House, and her current role is Senior Vice President at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC.

Professor Leary will talk about how she and Ron Heifetz collaborated on a new class on authority - not leadership - and in particular, what to do about all of these reactions that people have to the concept of authority, from admiration to allergy. As with all our guests, Kim will bring a piece of the text from Chapter 3, and together we’ll chew on it deeply for more insight and application. And as always, I invite you to read along with the book.

In the second half of the show, you can continue to join me on my own developmental journey. This time, I invited a new coach to the table, Judit Teichert from our German office in Berlin. She will help me examine my own patterns around authority, particularly around cisgender men. But for now, let's begin with my conversation with Kim.

Welcome, Kim.

Professor Leary: Hello, Michael.

Michael Koehler: So good to see you. I'm so glad and honored that you're here with us on the show.

Professor Leary: Thank you for inviting me to be in conversation with you.

Michael Koehler: We usually start by informally summarizing a few core ideas of the chapter, and I'm curious to hear what one or two ideas stood out for you. And I'll throw in my ideas as well, but what's been coming up for you as you've been thinking about this chapter.

Professor Leary: Well, you know, in our prior conversation, we were talking about the book, which has played such a critical role in the development of a new way of thinking about leadership, a new way of teaching leadership. It's also a book that is literally in a different century when it was written, before the internet, before the kind of connectivity, sometimes too much connectivity that we have often, too much connectivity leading to less connectivity than we optimally need. When I think about the book, I think about it in that context as being a foundation for so much of Ronnie's future work and future teaching, but also a book that tells us where we were, now a number of decades back.

So when I think about the book, and when I think about this chapter in particular, of course, the most critical part of it is clearly differentiating authority from leadership, clearly talking about authority as having value to it. In too many treatises on leadership, management, which might be the analog to authority, is juxtaposed against leadership and always leadership comes up as the better thing to do and practice.

But in this chapter, authority described in very particular ways, of course, it has value to it. It's about survival. It's about protection, it's about the human need to be empathically seen and recognized, and the power that we attribute to authority figures in which they have in this model, at least, by virtue of their size and strength, to see us. It's a very important value weight of authority and power that we typically don't see in most considerations of leadership.

Michael Koehler: And I think the connection to what we talked about in the two earlier chapters, that distinction that you're talking to - leadership and authority - is very simple terms. Authority is a role in social system. Leadership is defined as an activity here. And when I reread the chapter, I was realizing like how often we conflate leadership and authority, how that is kind of one of Ron’s core contributions, to talk about leadership as a practice, leadership as a verb, something that you may do from role of authority, but you may also not do, and it may come with resources, but also with constraints.

Professor Leary: True enough. And yet, I've had the pleasure of teaching with Ron, teaching a course on authority with him side by side. It was a wonderful experience, certainly one of the highlights of my career. But what's interesting, when you're teaching with a founder, if you will, when you're teaching with the author is that you also are watching how their own ideas have evolved, and you're watching how your own thoughts evolve in real time as you work with them and listen to them. So even just as you were speaking about leadership as a practice and authority as a role, of course, in our teaching together, we talked about the activities of authority, we talked about what it means to coordinate, what it means to create a platform by which people can aggregate expertise and problem solve. These aren’t just roles that you have; those roles come along with activities.

So you see, even in that way of the model potentially evolving to be able to address the activities of authority, not only the role designations that we clearly can see when we're talking about those who hold authority.

Michael Koehler: That's so profound. So you basically, if I can play that back and see if I understood it correctly, basically saying, it's not only that an authority figure, may or may not practice leadership, but they also may or may not deliver good authority services.

Professor Leary: Absolutely, and that, I think, is the other part of the authority equation that is so important. It's so elegantly outlined by Ronnie, and then enabling one to teach it in a variety of contexts, of course, but the idea that authority is a contract, that power and resources are conferred on the authority by the authorizers, by the community, by a given employee, even, in a certain kind of organization. But it’s an exchange for something. And it's in exchange for services that, again, could be defined in terms of activities.

The service, the activity of providing direction, vision, protection, and then some kind of order that enables people to do the problem solving that usually authorities are directing people to do in one context or another. So it's a very nuanced thing, authority, even though we tend to think of it as with the capital A. And as we discover in teaching and in thinking about authority together, in the course of teaching together, it's something that people have an allergic reaction to. They have a much less allergic reaction when you can begin to break authority down into this compact, this relationship, this choice that people have to confer their resources and power to another in exchange for services. It changes that a bit, I think, in the eyes of people who are afraid of authority with their good reason because they've been mistreated by authorities.

Michael Koehler: Yeah, I would love to go back to that piece a little bit later, that analogy that you're naming. It feels like we're going deeper and deeper and deeper. And I want to make sure that we just get to know you a little bit more. So one of our practices is that I invite our guests here to share a little bit about their own roles, maybe share with us about your own authority roles as well that you are holding, that you're bringing as external roles, but also pieces of identity that inform the way - we've already heard a little bit from your role as a teacher, as a professor - but you bring multiple roles, both in the world of practitioner and in academia, moving back and forth between those worlds. This was a long way of saying, who are you?

Professor Leary: That's right. The question that we often ask, right? So when I think about who I am, obviously, it depends in a certain way on which context I'm occupying. But in most contexts, what people will immediately read is that I am a woman, and they will read that I am of color. In fact, I'm African-American. Sometimes people will assume I'm Latina, or they will assume I'm Middle Eastern, but in fact, I'm African-American. So those two experiences of identity have been with me from birth on, which isn't always the case. People acquire a different lived experience of gender sometimes in the course of their lives. But for me from birth on, that's who I’ve been, someone who identifies as a female, someone who identifies as cisgender, and someone who identifies as African-American.

I'm also older now. So I'm not at the beginning of my career, and not the end of my career either. But I'm at a place right now where I get honored more often than earlier in my career, which is both appreciated, but it also can set you up for having to deliver certain kinds of wisdom or certain kinds of expectations that one may or may not be able to or willing or interested in delivering, but nonetheless, that comes to you. I would also say that in terms of my, I’m a clinical psychologist, which is a role I acquired, and the first part of my career was spent practicing as a clinical psychologist in the usual ways, working one-on-one with people or with small groups, largely towards traditional ends, to help people to feel better and to reduce their pain and to have more agentic lives.

I am a teacher, but I also have been a chief psychologist at running a division of Psychology at one of the Harvard hospitals. I'm currently a Senior Vice President at a DC-based think tank, the Urban Institute. I'm a professor at 2 Harvard schools and a lecturer at another, and I did two turns of public service, one in the Obama administration as an Advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls, and most recently, as a Senior Policy Adviser to the Domestic Policy Council, also in the White House, but this time, the Biden White House.

So I've had an opportunity to put my Kennedy School education to good use as a practitioner, but also as a practitioner, where my practice has sometimes been a clinical practice, and sometimes it's been a practice of trying to lead change.

Michael Koehler: Wow. So with those multiplicities of roles that you're bringing to this, what has drawn you to this framework, and particularly what has drawn you to the authority part of this framework up to the point where you’re even teaching a class on authority?

Professor Leary: Actually, the full title of the class was power, voice, strategy, and authority, or some combination of those words. And it was really important to me. I think Ronnie wanted three words instead of four, but I really wanted strategy in there. We both agreed on power and voice. We also agreed it was important, but the strategic exercise power and the ability- when I'm describing the course or when I would describe the course, the shorthand way I would describe it is how to use power wisely and well.

I do think, ultimately, that's what we're asking of authority figures - to use power and resources wisely and well. And that means in the service of both the expectations of your authorizers, but where you can, and I think there are many degrees of freedom here, of being able to work with them to give you a different warrant of authority than maybe than you started out with. In other words, I do think that leadership of a kind is very possible and often practiced through roles of authority. You're not coming in as an advocate, necessarily. You're not coming in to say and focus exclusively on the gaps that exist. But you are, certainly anyone who's worked in in that system knows that there are plenty of gaps, and you are trying as best you can to address what those gaps need, what are they telling you about the real work your organization is or isn't doing.

But also you can't coordinate well across gaps. And so if a primary activity of authority is to coordinate expertise, those gaps stand in the way of you being able to exercise your authority well.

Michael Koehler: Well, I'm curious, what piece of this chapter drew your attention?

Professor Leary: Well, in looking over it again—of course, I've read it multiple times beginning when I was a student at the Kennedy School, of course—there is a sentence that I think captures a critical part of both the opportunity and the dangers of authority, the misuse of authority. Ronnie writes, “We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.” And that sentence, I think, to me, speaks to both the opportunity to use power and resources wisely and well, but also the danger when we equate our role with ourselves, when we see the desperation in other people's eyes, and we watch them bring themselves to us in an effort to find what they hope will be some relief. That's what you feel as a clinician all the time; people come to you in a state of intense need. And they are looking to you hoping that you might be able to bring them relief.

It's quite a thing to help them realize that relief will come from the two of you, but not from you alone. And if it were that easy, it would have happened in some other way than this one. I think what I find about that sentence is that it reminds us that people and their pain is fundamentally what leadership and authority, they're resonant with pain, different approaches to it. We've extracted a promise from authority figures. I'll give you this, you give me that. With leaders, when people are practicing leadership, there are implicit promises. And there's the frustration of those promises that goes to the heart of what I think is still the most powerful line of all in Ronnie's work, which is the importance of being able to disappoint people at a rate they can stand.

Michael Koehler: Kim, would you read that sentence to us again?

Professor Leary: Sure. 'We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.'

Michael Koehler: What images come up for you?

Professor Leary: You know, it's interesting. There's a number of studies out there that show that people, mainly men, who reach the rank of President in companies or in government tend to be tall, taller than your average person. So when I think about this idea of charisma, voicing pains and providing us with promise, I think about the differential, when you're looking up to someone, literally, and hoping that in their eyes, you will find some version of yourself or at least your hurt or your need. And from that height will flow some remedy, some promise, some hope.

Michael Koehler: Yeah, there is almost a parental energy around it.

Professor Leary: Yeah, I think there is. And I think what we know and what comes up when you had the privileges you have in your consulting and teaching work yourself to work with people very closely and in a holding environment where there are presumptions of safety and of confidentiality, that they will tell you about parental authority that has inspired them and parental authority that has injured them, where instead of a promise delivered, there was violence rendered, and where people were not seen ultimately and injured.

So I think when we teach we about these topics, it's not uncommon that we ask people as a reflection question, what are their images of parental authority? What do they remember, experience now, if they’re parents themselves, what images do they imagine their children have of them? These, I think, are really important ways of bringing this home, literally, to people that are typically in situations of authority, because we couldn't survive otherwise as infants and as young children.

Michael Koehler: Yeah. From your lens both as a leadership educator, as a practitioner, as a psychologist, what kind of developmental moments are you seeing in people doing that successfully, sifting through their own history in order to deploy themselves productively?

Professor Leary: What Ronnie had realized and what we operationalized together in the class was, there's often this binary with authority: You're for it or you're 'agin' it. You're seeking power or you're allergic to power. And we created a kind of gradient for our students to work with, that there's submitting to authority on the one hand, and there's toppling authority on the other. But if you think about it as a gradient and as you can kind of stretch that out, you can see that there are many ways that you might react to authority like question it. You might partner with authority. You might question authority, skeptically or lovingly, different ways that one could respond apart from the binary. And that was really eye-opening for students literally, because we drew the gradient on the board. And we'd ask them to fill it in. If you're not going to just attack authority, if you're not willing to just submit to it, what else are you going to do?

And as they became more creative about identifying those places on the gradient, they could experience different relationships they have with authority in the course of their lives, and sometimes even at the Kennedy School of when they had negotiated with the professor around a deadline for a paper. And that might be pretty straightforward for people who come from certain cultures. But of course, the Kennedy School draws students from around the world, including students who would never imagine that you could do anything other than submit to the will of an authority figure, to learn that you could try out a negotiation. Typically, if you take a negotiation class, was inspiring to them. And they saw the world a little differently.

Another interesting thing that happened in the class is that midway through the semester, because we taught in second semester, many of the mid-career students in particular and at the Kennedy School, there are students who come for a year as a kind of sabbatical, if you will, from their jobs to make a pivot from one career to another. They're usually people who were a little bit older. I think in my mid-career class, we had an age range from 29 to 65. So you know, people who have many different kinds of authority roles, but midway through the semester, especially with mid-career students and students in the MPP program, the Master in Public Policy Program, who were going to be leaving school, people start to get jobs. And they've got jobs that came with authority roles. And all of a sudden, they realize someone's going to be expecting me to lead this team because it says in my job description, 'lead team'. This is apparently what I signed up for.

What does that mean if I'm allergic to authority? What does it mean if others who I will now have to manage through these teams are allergic to me. And so all of this became much less academic, as they say, as students were grappling with taking on new roles and thinking about what the ethics of power and the wise use of resources would be for them ahead next month, next fall, and so forth.

Michael Koehler: It sounds like there's really a space to explore options, more optionality from the one default mode into, like, different versions of relating to authority.

Professor Leary: Right. And the experimental mode, that's a part of the adaptive leadership framework, that's so important. If you decide you're going to negotiate with authority on one day, on one issue, it does not commit you for eternity to do that. And in fact, at different times, it may make sense to respond to different authorities and different authority platforms with a broad range of skills. So to have the ability to, at times - the word 'submit' is rarely used in the affirmative - but there are, in fact, times when to accept authority without question is wise. Think of it if you've ever been in a situation of danger, specifically in an airplane, when the authority figures tell you 'brace' or they tell you 'leave the aircraft now', that's the time to do it. It's not a time to raise questions about 'Where did they get their expertise?' And other times, it very much makes sense, to question or even to reject, essentially to reclaim that authorization - 'I no longer give you that power. I recall the resources, because I don't see the kind of return that I expected for my investment.'

Michael Koehler: Yeah. You were earlier, referring to you know, this is a book from a different century. If you were the editor of the 2023 version of this chapter, where would you put your red pen to?

Professor Leary: I think that if this were the only book that Ronnie had written, maybe we would take a red pen to it. But he's written other books, including a marvelous book that can function, what is the title of it, the blue book, The Practice of Adaptive Leadership is a fantastic resource because it includes a set of exercises in almost every chapter that allow people to practice for themselves. So it embodies the very spirit of the work. It's not 'Here is the theory, here is the treatise. Absorb it.' It is, 'Here are a set of ideas. And here's a technology, these exercises, that allow you to utilize them.'

So I, instead of taking a red pen, I think it's worth just looking at the evolution of the way in which even the books had been written. And people probably listening to this podcast know that there's, I think it's a Coursera or not, Coursera. It's a HarvardX or whatever is the online course, but it's, it's marvelous. It's a beautiful course that uses the best of online teaching to deliver these ideas now to a vast audience.

So the chief difference, I would say, from a book that’s written in the ‘90s to where we are right now is, of course, the internet and connectivity, and the fact that it's now possible to learn this framework and to practice it anywhere on the globe.

Michael Koehler: We've heard so much wonderful insights from the teacher. And for the last few minutes we have together here, I want to circle to your practice because you also have a rich experience as a practitioner. And if you're open to it, I would love to circle back to that sentence, to that quote one more time, and take a look at those themes of charisma, of promise, of pain, and be curious as we're reading the sentence together one more time, just to hear in your own experience as a practitioner how do these concepts come to life? So would you be so kind and read that sentence one more time for us?

Professor Leary: 'We attribute charisma to people who voice our pains and provide us with promise.'

Michael Koehler: Where does this come to life in your world as a practitioner?

Professor Leary: Well, I'll speak a little bit to my work in the Biden administration, where my job was to be a member of two teams, one at the DPC, the Domestic Policy Council, and before that, at the Office of Management Budget to help implement the President's executive order on equity. Now an executive order is an authority vehicle. It is the force of law. It also is a document that specifies a vision for what people are to do and why. But most executive orders as this one don't lay it out. It's not an operations manual. It doesn't say, on the 30th of March, do this and do it this way. It gives people a vision, it tells them what deliverables they're responsible for. But there's a vast space in between, from how you get from the vision to the deliverable.

So we had to operationalize that, or rather the Office of Management Budget had to operationalize that and the equity team in particular. And then you give federal agencies in this instance a set of tools about how to put together an equity team. You create vehicles for them to learn what equity means, what leadership for equity might entail, what kind of data you need, what administrative burden is, and why it's a good idea to mitigate it if you're looking for equity and so forth. But you also are working with people who had different lived experiences, different identities, who are on teams. They're on those teams because they have differentiated expertise. They're using data to drive their decision making. But data alone tells you maybe where you shouldn't go; it doesn't always tell you where you should go. So people still have to make decisions as a team about what we will do when they don't all agree.

Coming in as someone who has the academic titles I have and the roles I have, I think sometimes people would look at me as, 'Oh, good. The expert has arrived to help us and tell us what we should do in order to meet the terms of this executive order.' And of course, yes, that's why I was there, to tell them what they needed to do in order to meet the terms of the executive order. But I think that my experience with the framework also helped me to step back and to recognize that even those terms that they had to meet required their engagement, their input, their struggle, not endlessly, because there was a timetable that needed to take place. And so it was a way of finding those places to support the leadership of those teams, creating ways that they could experience their teams as a holding environment, but also trying to coordinate their activity, and to try to help them to find the expertise they needed in order to make good on what the President, our President in the United States, had asked of us, of them in particular.

And I have to say it was deeply satisfying, when 92 federal agencies submitted agency equity plans, and some were extremely creative. Some were maybe as creative as that team could do. But they all represented a coordinated action to do something together on behalf of the collective community. And that was a very powerful experience. I've seen how coordinated expertise could deliver outcomes and use both the tools of authority and the tools of leadership towards trying to make the world a better place.

Michael Koehler: I really got in touch in that story with that promise, with that hope in the end, with that joy from that progress that was made, but also got a sense as you were talking about that arc, the moments when you hit on the struggle and you shared something around allowing some of that struggle, like maybe not too much, but some version of that struggle to be with those people involved. So there was a reaction in your voice that made me curious to hear a little bit more. Because my sense is that must have been hard. Would you share a little bit more? What does it mean to keep people in that struggle, to not fully as an expert to come in and take the work off of people's shoulders, but leave it with them?

Professor Leary: Well, in a way, I think the important part of the framework is that it's not as though you could take the work off their shoulders. It's not as though you're withholding something that you would be able to give them. I think that's really important. But it's also the case that if people are not progressing in a conversation and you could help them to re-orient themselves, then I do think that's the kind of intervention that makes sense. As a clinician, you want people to grapple with their own truths. You want them to see the options before them. But you’ve also worked with lots of people over the course of your life as a clinician. And you do have some expertise, not on this person's life, but on other lives that you've worked with.

As a teacher, you've worked with a bunch of classes and students. So you have some ideas that you can share about how people can get options for how they might be able to move themselves forward. At that's where I ended up as a practitioner. I tend to be inclined to take a more measured approach to how much disorientation is actually helpful in various context, because disoriented people can't think. They can't. And yet, if you rush in too quickly, one, you're rushing in with what? You don't have the expertise anyway, and you're giving them something trite, something that is mechanical that they could have thought of on their own or Googled, for that matter. So you want to think about what, at least as I do, what can you uniquely offer? And how can you, in your offering, be willing to show people that you, too, are struggling, and you're trying to learn in real time. That I think is the most important part.

And when people get a whiff of that, 'Oh, we are struggling with something that everybody is struggling with', the nature of this, talk about equity, the nature of different kinds of lived experience at different kinds of privilege means that this conversation will always be fraught. But if we have to still produce something together, how can we manage the fraught moment in the service of work we have agreed and in fact are obliged to do together.

Michael Koehler: Thank you. Kim, it was such a joy to have you here, to listen to your reflections from your various roles. Really appreciate the time together.

Professor Leary: Thank you, Michael. And thank you for creating such a platform for people to listen. And as they listen, no doubt, have different conversations with one another. So thank you.

Michael Koehler: Coming up: What happens if I change my lens from talking about leadership to actually practicing it? I'll continue to explore that with my coach Judit. This time, we'll talk about my own patterns around relating to authorities, especially when emotions show up like fear and anger. That's after the break.

Welcome back to On the Balcony. For the second part of today's episode will shift the gear towards application. In a moment, you will join a live coaching session with me as the client and my colleague Judit as the coach. But before that, let's catch up.

You might recall that in the first two episodes, I've been on a journey to explore how I can practice more leadership and bringing more of my German identity to the DEIJ conversation and insights, experiences around dealing with difficult pasts. We begin to discover some of the ways that I get in my own way: my worries around not belonging, my fear about being reprimanded. This episode will go a little deeper into that fear part, especially when dealing with people in authority roles.

If you're new to coaching, here's the thing you need to know for today's episode. You might notice an almost circular nature in the conversation, topics and patterns, themes come up again and again, like anger and fear this time. And sometimes it feels like we're almost circling around them. As we do that, I invite you to pay attention to how Judit, my coach, helps me begin to get a handle on the pattern and the assumptions that drive my behavior, inviting me to see and hold it as object for deeper examination. That's often the work of early sessions in a coaching journey. It can feel tedious, but it's the foundation for groundbreaking insights that may unleash new actions later in the process. I really hope that's worth all of the sweat. So off we go. Here's my colleague, Judit Teichert.

Hey, Judit. Good to see you.

Judit Teichert: Hi, Michael. Good seeing you. Great to be with you.

Michael Koehler: In a minute, I'll give the mic to you to guide us through a coaching session. But I'm just curious, before we get started, is there anything you want to share with our listeners, with me, around how you think about coaching, about coaching practice, anything we need to know?

Judit Teichert: There's only one thing I think that I would like to briefly name and that is, I think you have all that it takes, and I am here to help you access all that you have so that you can use that.

Michael Koehler: That's great. I love that. Should we dive in?

Judit Teichert: Yes. Let's do it. So Michael, what would be valuable for you right now, today, in this coaching session?

Michael Koehler: I would love to do two things. One is to catch you up a little bit on what I've learned from Andy and what has happened between that last session that I did with him and where we are now. And then as I'm engaging with this theme of authority, I think I have a real edge that I want to explore there. So would it be okay if I summarize a little bit just my latest thinking of that journey?

Judit Teichert: Absolutely. That would be excellent.

Michael Koehler: So Andy and I in our first sessions really honed in on the coaching objective of me practicing more leadership by bringing in more of myself, more of my German identity into my own practice of teaching leadership, talking about leadership by pulling in the connections between topics of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and what it means to confront difficult histories, difficult past, German past, fragility, family past, like all of these topics. And as we've been exploring that in our two coaching conversations, I think I've been encountering some of my own edges around why I haven't done this so far, like worries around belonging, some fears and anxiety came up, what I called fragility in the last session.

After the last session with Andy, I went back to Germany. I kind of formed the intention in that session to have a bunch of conversations with my family of origin around difficult history in my own family. And I didn't do it.

Judit Teichert: What a wonderful start for this coaching session. I love it.

Michael Koehler: [Laughs] Exactly, right? So I think I want to debrief a little bit like what's been going on there, why I didn't do it. And I think there is a connection to the topic for today, which is the fear, the anxiety that has come up in that coaching last time with Andy was also really present when I was back in Germany. There was also a lot of other things going on in my life that kind of really distracted me and at the same time, it just felt too overwhelming. It just felt too much to engage with my parents around these really difficult questions and like it wasn't safe. It didn't feel safe.

In a way it felt like the right move to not be - it felt too dangerous. I still have that curiosity, but it was just like I couldn't.

Judit Teichert: What I'm hearing is that you're maybe just developing a better sense of where exactly is that edge? What is too dangerous and what is just the right amount of risk that feels right for this point in time for you. And is that that edge that you mentioned?

Michael Koehler: So I had a second insight that I wanted to share, which was as I was engaging with the book, and those chapters on authority, and especially in the conversation I just had with Kim Leary, I realized that some of that pattern that felt like huge and big in my own family that relates to me feeling afraid around a parent, that some of those parents are also showing up in other parts of my life, maybe and are maybe not as big, but like present. And the pattern, I think - so Kim was talking a lot about the spectrum about how we all relate to authority. Some are between deference and rebellion and all of these middle points - and I'm noticing in myself a pattern, and I've known this, but I think there's more to examine there, of I think I’m more in the deference camp. And I particularly feel like some fear and some nervousness around people in very senior roles of authority, especially if they're kind of cisgender, pale, white, and like a little bit in that dominant, slightly even aggressive stance. That is where it's really, really hard to find a nuanced way to engage with people in those roles. And where my default is basically a version of what I just experienced in Germany, which is like, avoid. Get me out of here.

And I was wondering, I was like - as I'm sort of tying the threads together between those two experiences - I'm like, I think that would be a great coaching topic today.

Judit Teichert: Wonderful. That sounds really exciting to talk about. And I also just want to say I really appreciate your openness and sharing this with me. And what I've heard is, you're noticing a pattern. First of all, you noticed you went to Germany, had an intention, and you ended up not doing it. And then you notice there are other things going on in my life. And what came up in Germany was not not doing it because you forgot, but because it felt too dangerous. Because it felt, as you mentioned, fear and anxiety being present around talking, especially to your parents.

And then in that conversation with Kim, you noticed there might be a pattern, and Kim spoke around different parents in our lives and other fields and authority figures and how sort of reactive patterns might be around deference or rebellion. And then the way I understood you, is that got you thinking like where am I on that scale? And there's this pattern of when there are white cisgender male, more dominant people in senior authority roles, that triggers a pattern in you. And you said the pattern is avoid. What are you avoiding?

Michael Koehler: Engagement. Interaction. Partnership feels like a big word, like relationship. Collaboration.

Judit Teichert: Can you share a bit more about that? Just tell me a bit more about, what about partnership, collaboration, maybe engagement, feels unpleasant or risky? What exactly is it about that, that you don't want to experience or feel?

Michael Koehler: So the words that come into my head, the feeling that comes into my body is small, belittling, devaluing, being brushed off, like versions of that.

Judit Teichert: And where in your body? Can you sense that right now in your body?

Michael Koehler: I sense the fear. I sense the sweat, the nervousness around that.

Judit Teichert: It's funny how just thinking about it gets our gets our body going. And when you sense into those somatic reactions, and maybe if you want to, you could close your eyes and just breathe into that. Is there like an image coming up for you?

Michael Koehler: The image that comes up for me is like an angry landlord I once had that... It's exactly that pattern. [Laughs]

Judit Teichert: And how did you deal with that landlord?

Michael Koehler: Oh my god, I felt so helpless. He was just like so nitty-gritty about everything and it felt like every single thing, like when I moved out like went through the list of all of the things that were not left in good state at that place. And I actually think I probably left the home in a better state than I got it. It's just a tiny thing, but it felt unfair. I felt like not seen. Like those typical authority functions that we talked about, like protection, direction, order, like the holding, none of this was there. It was just like yelling. This is an angry man.

Judit Teichert: Just an angry man yelling. And even though you left the place in a better shape than it was before, it still wasn't enough. It still wasn't good enough. And I'm sure you've encountered in different episodes, people in senior authority roles that triggered you in that sense? Can you think of an episode that, when you look back and think, 'I did a good job in dealing with that anger?'

Michael Koehler: Two or three images come up, but it's always the same pattern. That's what mostly in a coaching conversation. Coaching client shows up and is so upset about something in the organization. And like 'I can't believe they did that to me and this department and they're just not getting it', and they're venting the first 10 minutes, just like yelling. They're not yelling at me. They're not angry with me. They're just like, here they are, they see their coach, and they’re just like, 'Waahh!' And what I most of the time do is I listen to it and I try to listen for the sense of, I validate the anger, and I just try to listen for the sense of injustice they are feeling in their own story, in their own world.

And I try to connect that and uplift that and say, 'It makes a lot of sense that in your experience of that injustice that you are angry.' And usually, that helps them get a little bit on the balcony, and see a little bit their own anger, and that usually releases their tension. I think those moments when they managed to connect - first, I think there's two components here: the anger is not directed at me directly, and B, if I can find the story behind the anger and understand the logic, even if that's not my story, even if I don't feel the injustice, but if I find their version of that, I think then that I can empathize and see like, 'Ah, okay, that makes sense.' So those moments I feel like I can deal with well.

Judit Teichert: So you just said when you’re in situations where you engaged successfully, productively with others who were angry, what you do is you provide room to vent and use that space to listen for a sense of injustice and validate that. And my first question is, to what extent do you use that as a strategy for yourself?

Michael Koehler: The first answer I have for this is, I don't express my anger that much.

Judit Teichert: How interesting.

Michael Koehler: That is interesting. Anger is a scary emotion for me, probably for understandable reasons. Like I'm scared of other people's anger. I think I'm also scared of my own anger. I'm really scared I think of expressing anger in ways that hurts others and destroys or threatens the relationship. That's a big worry of mine. So I went with that landlord, I would not be angry back at him. I would be deferential, appeasing, pleasing, trying to like jump through all the hoops that he puts up, and I think I even may have kind of taken off some of my deposit back then just because I couldn't handle that anger.

Judit Teichert: So in a way, when you get angry, you don't want to jeopardize the relationship? And in a sense, that's true when you sense other people get angry, too. Is that correct?

Michael Koehler: Yeah. It feels existential.

Judith Teichert: In a sense, it is very important for all of us to belong and to feel that there's a connection to other people. I would say it's one of the basic human needs that we have. So in a sense, it's not that surprising. All of us have that. But there might be a big insight around how do you connect to anger, to your own anger, and to other people's anger? I was also getting the impression that anger and anxiety are closely related for you. I just wanted to offer that we could explore that a little, too.

Michael Koehler: I have no clue where this is going, but I'm interested.

Judit Teichert: What would you say? What is the connection between anger and anxiety for you?

Michael Koehler: The fear trumps the anger. The appeasing, avoiding or deferring whatever pattern, that brings down the heat in a way is the response to the fear or the anxiety of like something big might happen. And at the expense of whatever injustice that is also happening, that may produce some anger. So the anger gets bottled up. And instead I'm attending to the relationship and trying to be nice.

Judit Teichert: And there's great value in that. I know, personally, that you're very good at relationships. And I wonder what is the gift that's in anger?

Michael Koehler: There’s a gift in anger?

Judit Teichert: Funny question, huh?

Michael Koehler: Yeah.

Judit Teichert: I don't know. Maybe there's none.

Michael Koehler: I have an intellectual answer for that. I'm not sure it matches my experience. My intellectual answer is the function of anger—here comes my coach training, right?—the function of anger is to you give you the power to stand up for yourself, to protect yourself in face of some kind of injustice, danger, some version of something has happened to me. It strengthens me to stand up and literally stand up on my feet and go out and stand up for myself. That's how I'm understanding anger.

Judit Teichert: And now you said that's your intellectual answer. That's your cognitive answer. Can you think of a time when you stood up for yourself or maybe for others? What made you stand up?

Michael Koehler: I can come up with small examples, but the fact that they all feel so little and small that I’m almost ashamed. Like when you ask the question, it's embarrassing.

Judit Teichert: I'm just chewing on that experience, that it's hard for you to come up with an example that feels not embarrassing, but big enough to be worth mentioning. And I wonder how that makes you feel to realize it's hard for me to find an example in that sense.

Michael Koehler: Well, a part of me is like, I think I found the right coaching objective here. There’s some work to be done and there’s a lot of room to cover. But I’m also getting in touch with the pressures. When I think about my own practice of leadership, what is really realistic? Like what outputs can I generate? I feel like I'm often part of a social environment like that where the standards are really high, or the big aspirations, big ambitions. Maybe that's also where the embarrassment comes from. So as I search my heart a little bit more for moments where I stood up, I think I may find things. But they're mostly in like individual, one-on-ones, they’re maybe in a conversation, a dinner conversation where I'm like, 'wait a moment, that doesn't feel right', moments like that?

Judit Teichert: And what is your own aspiration? What are you looking for? What would you like to find?

Michael Koehler: Courage is the term here. I think I would love to find more courage to engage in moments when I may fall silent, when I may fall into that pleasing pattern to at least be more in touch with that sense of injustice, that sense of my own anger, that sense of - and including that sense that Andy and I surfaced so beautifully last time around, like, safety. I'm no longer dependent on these authority figures that are around me in the same way as I may have been dependent on them when I was a kid.

When it gets unsafe, I can literally walk away. It's okay. It is not an existential threat if somebody yells at me. So finding a little bit more of that safety, a little bit more courage to stomach also the heat that comes in these spaces.

Judit Teichert: And in a way, that is a beautiful link back to the beginning of this session where you said, 'I went to Germany and I had this intention, and it felt too dangerous.' And then from there, we've looked at different patterns of deference or rebellion. And we've not touched so much on rebellion, but we've looked a bit closer at deference and how anger and anxiety relate to that and how they trigger that and maybe trigger each other in a way. And it also feels like we've been circling that topic to not come up with action options at the end of the session today, but maybe with a better understanding of what's going on in the background that we can then use, you can then use in a next session to think about how can you use that to find that courage within you to stand up and speak, even if there is a threat that feels existential. And as you said, which is not actually existential, not anymore at least. So what are you taking away from this circling around the topic of deference, anger, fear?

Michael Koehler: What was really new for me was that if both the anger and fear are present at a moment that I always choose, like acting on the fear rather than on the anger. And that gives me a default towards protection and restoring rather than towards addressing injustice and addressing friction, tension, and the fear that is related to that anger itself, the fear that the use of anger or the receiving of anger is generating in me.

Judit Teichert: How do you want to use the time between now and next time to make progress on either getting to know yourself in that sense a bit better or finding a new place?

Michael Koehler: So I have a hunch. I think a few years ago, I would have said, 'I'm just not a very angry person. I'm very nice, mellow', and I don't think that's true. I think I have some anger in me as well. It's just hidden. It's just deep. And I think I would like to commit, Judit, until we talk again, to pay a little bit more attention to the weak signals of anger that are showing up in me. That may not mean that I act on them, but just notice them and notice the choices that I make around them. I have the hunch that it will help me move forward on the journey that I'm on.

Judit Teichert: Wonderful. I'm curious to hear what you find out and how often and how that shows up. So I'm really looking forward to our next conversation. Thank you.

Michael Koehler: Thank you so much, Judit.

Judit Teichert: Have a great rest of your day.

Michael Koehler: On the Balcony will be back with Episode 4. We'll be joined by Lauren Lyons, Adaptive Leadership Practitioner and Engineer with a lot of experience in the space industry, in places like NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. We'll talk about managing teams and finding the right balance between new ways of work, innovating, and on the other side, 'This is how we've always done it, right. I mean, it got us to the moon after all.' Here's a preview:

“There's so much energy around disrupting things and breaking things down and throwing off the old ways that when you can go to the organization and bring some of those more traditional ways, acknowledge them for how good they are, and instead of going, let's throw them out, maybe all we do is, we adjust them a little bit. We put a little twist on them, make it a little bit faster, but keep the core of what it was trying to accomplish there. And that's always really fun.”

I'll invite you to read the chapter yourself. That's Chapter Four on 'Mobilizing Adaptive Work' in Leadership Without Easy Answers. If you liked the show, press the subscribe button and leave a review. That helps others connect to this really powerful framework.

On the Balcony is brought to you by KONU - Growing and Provoking Leadership. We’re produced by Podigy: Editing – Riley Byrne and Daniel link. Cover art by Kenneth Amoyo and Rosi Greenberg. Our music is called ‘Change in Blue’ by Hannah Gill and the Hours.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you for Episode 4, On the Balcony.